Category Archives: India

Infrastructure in India: Infrastruggles

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For the past half decade India’s infrastructure industry has enjoyed a Sea Link moment; a blast of growth when one could imagine that the private sector could deliver all the new roads, bridges, power stations and airports that the country needs so badly. The government says the boom will continue. Over the next five years it predicts that infrastructure investment will reach a new high relative to GDP, with some $1 trillion spent, half of it by the private sector. The trouble with this rosy prediction is that the balance-sheets of many Indian infrastructure firms are as potholed as the roads they resurface.

[Source: The Economist]

After the tremendous growth India enjoyed in the past decade, hope it has something more than malls to show for.

How should India urbanise?

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Focus on urban centers and focus less on far-flung regions in terms of infrastructure development (even providing reliable high-speed Internet access can open up numerous business opportunities). Instead divert those resources on making our metropolitan regions more productive and efficient. Foster an entrepreneurial climate by creating knowledge corridors around institutions of higher learning. Do not fight the natural trend of clustering by trying to spread economic growth around. Some regions will always be more productive than the others. We can instead focus on making them stronger by playing to its strengths.

If there is anything we can learn from the urban development of Silicon Valley or Research Triangle in the U.S., it is the underlying importance of the feedback loops of higher education institutions and the talent they attract. The trick in making the graduates stick around by offering them a climate of entrepreneurship through social & professional networking and heavy investment in infrastructure that focuses on quality of life. Urban areas with great weather already have an upper hand and India seems to be blessed with such regions.

Obviously, this is just a big-picture comment and specific details will be subject to debate.

My answer to “How should India urbanize?” asked here Big Ideas for India Contest: Question 8: How should India urbanise? was selected as one of the 11 winners in the Big Ideas for India contest. Rajesh Jain and Atanu Dey have been exploring solutions on India’s future developmental challenges and they rightly believe in the strength of the cities as an important factor.

Indian Megacities

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As the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most-populous state, Lucknow has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural areas, swelling the city’s population. Yet the city hasn’t completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don’t have sewage service, leaving much of the waste to flow directly into the main river, the Gomti, which has become a stinking cesspool.

Wall Street Journal has an article on India’s megacities with the tagline that they are choking India. But is that really what is happening in India? There is an inherent understanding that there is a conflicting dichotomy between urban and rural regions. But even if it does exist, quotes in the WSJ article itself contradict its byline:

Shami Shafi, a 35-year-old laborer in Lucknow, has seen his daily income drop by half in recent months to 50 rupees, or about $1, for carrying bags of potatoes and other goods in a local market. But “I’m not going back to my village,” he says. If work gets harder to find, “I’ll just go to another city.”

Atanu Dey, noted economist and widely-respected proponent of urban India points at the real culprits of urban problems.

Providing Affordable Housing in Mumbai

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Quick calculations showed that, given construction costs in the 1990s, profits made from the market-rate sale of 560 apartments would finance 1,000 free homes for slum-dwellers. So, to give away 160,000 homes, developers would have to sell almost 90,000 full-price homes. In total, they would have to build 250,000 each year.

In an insightful article, Dilip D’Souza, writing for the Outlook section in the Washington Post explains the futility of the current slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai.

I will always welcome the transfer of public property into private hands, and even the most left-liberal activist will agree that it is more preferable to hand over property rights to the “little guy” transparently than to big evil builders after intense backroom dealings.

Gaurav Sabnis, an Indian blogger takes the argument further and advocates transferring property rights to slum dwellers thus giving them a better say in negotiations with the builders.

My uncle, a builder and developer in the Mumbai suburbs runs his construction business through the model that Dilip suggests i.e. by redeveloping properties which have surplus FSI (Floor Space Index) and effectively giving free homes to the original residents while making the profit off the additional housing units that he sells at market rate. More on the impact of that strategy for the housing condition in Mumbai later.

Mukesh Ambani's Antilia Residence

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Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person is building a monstrous residence in the heart of densely-populated Mumbai. The structure is 490 feet tall and includes a corporate meeting facility along with his 35,000 square feet of private residence. Arzan however is impressed by the architectural aspects of the structure which might change the way high rises are built in dense Indian cities.

Mumbai's Popular Waterfront Locations

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Mumbai is where I spent most of my life before heading west. Technically, it is the land of my ancestors although it is an immigrant city which incidentally is also the best thing about it. But the geography of the city i.e. the long peninsula stretching out along the mainland into the Arabian sea has a reassuring effect on the stressed life of its inhabitants.

Mumbai Waterfronts

The Mumbai Metroblogging Blog lists the seven most popular waterfront public locations that brings back memories. Professionally, waterfronts have been close to me since my design dissertation during my undergraduate years was based on waterfront revitalization.

Rejuvenating Urban India

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co-authored by Rohit Pradhan

Back in the days when Doordarshan (Indian state television) ruled the airwaves, if you tuned in during the weather forecast, you wouldn’t be completely off the mark if you thought that India’s urban regions comprised solely of Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras – conveniently located in four corners of India. It was the natural corollary of India’s development since independence that has always been centered on its millions of villages. The idea of making villages self-sufficient drew its sustenance from the rather utopian Gandhian ideals. India’s early leaders also believed in heavy industrialization which led to development of cities like Jamshedpur–modeled primarily along industrial cities like Detroit in the developed world. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ (in stark contrast to its Chinese counterpart), came only after the post-1991 liberalization when India embarked on a path of economic reforms and globalization. The impact of rapid liberalization and expansion of opportunities were profound especially on the morphology of Indian cities.

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