The Urban Civil War

We hear about recent trends in urbanisation.  The rate of growth of people in major Indian cities has been more than what the administration had predicted.  This brings huge challenges to the existing infrastructure & resources in these cities.  The pushes & pulls finally starts to show in different ways, most of them are not very pleasing.  Take the incidents in Mumbai - people turning against north Indians.  These and other 'sons of soil' policies in other cities are not very pleasant & has the potential to bring India to a near civil war kind of situation.  And by that the growth stories of one of the most promising Asian economy is going to come to a stand still.  There may be a few countries in our immediate neighborhood who would be happy to see such a turn of events.  However it will be a serious blow to us & for the world at large.  With the kind of politics & administration that we have in the country now, it will be next to impossible to recover in a generation or two from such a position.


This may seem like an exaggeration or a movie film story.  And I wish that this never becomes a realty & would only remain a hypothetical situation.  But is there a possibility, even a remote one in the near or distant future?  Is there a lesson that we can learn from the situation now & possibly use it to our advantage?  Some of these problems are new to us alone.  There are other countries & cities who are finding themselves in similar situations.  So how one understands this & what kind of action one takes now, will determine who will come out of this stronger & ready to face the world of tomorrow.

Lets take a few points & examine how we could do things differently to avert any worsening of the situation.

Take transportation first.  Why do people in large numbers move from villages to the heart of the city.  Not even the suburbs but to the city itself.  In most cases they move to living conditions far worse than one could imagine?  When traveling from one part of the city to another takes a good portion of ones time, imagine the situation if one is living in the suburbs.  So when one is faced with such a situation one is 'forced' to take up a dwelling in the city.  I'm sure given an opportunity to reach ones home inn the suburb in the same or faster time as it would take to reach one in the city many would opt to live in the suburb.  So lesson to take from here is to take proactive steps to start building the infrastructure to enable this in the near future.  Then see how the people takes to the suburbs & thereby reducing the pressure on the over-crowded cities.

Another huge challenge is power & water.  When there is power shortages, it is not brought about by the villagers more or by the city dwellers more.  Both may be equally responsible or may be one group is more responsible than the other.  However it is the villages that take the most brunt.  For example when the government departments declare power cuts (or load shedding) in Karnataka, Bangalore city is hit with a 1 -2 hour power cut whereas the villages see no power for almost half a day!  Now is this an incentive to stay in villages & suburbs?  Now there would be genuine reasons to justify such a move to have such a skewed policy in favour of the cities.  However in such situations we need to innovate.  Similar woes are there for water as well.  The government is going to run out of ways to provide drinking water to the growing population in cities.  There is no way any government will be able to provide good, clean water to the millions of people in cities.  Here to a move to suburbs & villages should provide the government and finally the people to have a good living.

When we are lagging behind in infrastructure development, the government will find it difficult to explain it to the people the rationale for such investment.  There would be complaints of corruption & no short term results to the politicians and political part to boast about.  True leaders should have the foresight & the guts to make decisions that many may not be able to comprehend "now".
Why not use time-of-use billing of electricity in cities?  I'm sure there are many more ideas that will help in this shift.