Indian cities need to get back their village architecture in urban spaces, stitched together with smart technology and community wisdom
Do you remember the first month of the nationwide lockdown? Besides hoarding rations and essentials and in between endless Ludo sessions, cooking, cleaning and web series, there was a moment most families looked forward to in the evenings. And that was stepping out on the balcony/terrace and being under an open sky. Meanwhile, a constant train of humanity could be seen traversing on foot by the side of the road, carrying most of their belongings. Starkly different though these two scenarios may be, the one factor uniting them was the need to find comfort in a space called home. Remember, the migrant labourers and everyone else in the city occupied the same commercial and public space, walked the same neighbourhood lanes and perhaps rested a bit under the same trees, before the lockdown. Yet, struck by a pandemic, the only prevention for which is social distancing, both longed for their share of comfortable spaces. One chose to find it under an open sky, the other by moving out of the concrete jungle to a destination that would offer them their own open space. If humans love to look up (literally and metaphorically) during a crisis, isn’t it time to reimagine/redesign our cities and make them more liveable?
Indian cities are home to nearly 500 million people, out of which half are densely packed in unorganised, shabby, semi-permanent structures called slums. The stories of their lives captured in films and documentaries reveal the unhygienic conditions of common toilets, bathrooms, overflowing sewage and safe drinking water issues. It is these visuals of dirty/dingy slums which prevented many of us from getting back our house helps, even after the lockdown was lifted. In our hearts we know that no matter how high our fences or purified the air in our homes, a city resident’s life is hopelessly enmeshed with that of a slum dweller living in the underbelly.
Therefore, we need to redesign cities beginning from the slums. The Narendra Modi Government has created a new Jal Shakti Ministry with the stated aim of providing tap water to 18 lakh rural households. While this is commendable and is generating employment for many, including many migrant labourers who returned to their villages, yet the urban drinking water supply remains mostly out of the purview of this scheme. In a city like Delhi, it is disheartening to see thousands queue up daily on the main roads with containers to collect drinking water from tankers (even though the Delhi Government’s tanker scheme has ensured free water for slum dwellers). A similar sight can be seen outside common taps in Mumbai or Chennai slums.
Linked to water is the issue of treating urban sewage. Most estimates suggest that roughly 50,000 million litres per day (MLD), out of the nearly 62,000 MLD of sewage generated in urban India, lands untreated in rivers, lakes and other water bodies. It means nearly 80 per cent of sewage generated in urban India ends up without any disinfection or filtration, polluting 75 per cent of our water bodies! Even if we forget about the pandemic and need for cleanliness and infection-free surroundings, think about the life-threatening substances we have been consuming through the fish caught from these waters and the food grown in fields irrigated from these water sources.
It would be good to be reminded at this stage that the Government’s commendable efforts since 2014 to make India Open Defecation Free (ODF) under the Swachh Bharat Mission have yielded results. An estimated 60 per cent of India’s population is now ODF and follows basic hand washing hygiene through smart campaigns and monetary rewards. To an extent, this has checked the spread of the pandemic. However, the challenge of untreated sewage is urgent and needs to be brought under the same umbrella scheme for clean, healthy cities.
The third aspect of urban planning, which needs to be redesigned, is that related to our work, exercise and recreational spaces. Many of the readers (now sheltering at home for five months) are craving for access to an office infrastructure, with trustworthy bars, restaurants and gyms near their houses. Clearly, the commercial spaces or office blocks of tomorrow are unlikely to be pockets of dense energy and vehicular traffic congregation. Urban India’s place to work (as also reflected in global trends of work from home approvals by major companies) will and should shift closer to home. This would be a key to deciding which are the next smart cities as the residents would seek world-class office spaces, healthcare facilities, reputed elementary and secondary-level educational institutions and most of all, a healthy and clean underbelly within four kilometres of their dwelling spaces. This is likely to have a major impact on vehicular pollution and urban mobility along with public transport and real estate prices. This shift in city spaces is also likely to be the biggest push for the ‘vocal for local’ campaign by Modi as people would like to employ locals and buy many services generated from households in the locality. Indian cities need to get back their village architecture in urban spaces, stitched together with smart technology and community wisdom for a new Bharat.
(The writer is a policy analyst)
