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The other day I received this
letter through E mail from Mr. Xerxes Desai, ex Chief Executive of Messrs Titan
Industry who now has made Bangalore Beautiful his home. He is a member of Tata Administrative
Service. His experience in urban affairs
is vast. He was with us in CIDCO (City
and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra) as a member of the
planning team which drafted the master plan for New Bombay, Aurangabad and
other cities of Maharashtra. He was a
member of First National commission for Urban Affairs. Besides he has vast experience of creating many
factory townships for Tatas. He has
first hand knowledge of administration of Jamshedpur, Town ship of Tata
chemicals in Gujarat. I have pleasure to
present it to the learned readers of Real Estate Reporter as it raises many
issues which require serious consideration.
The revised CDP, even though it set out with lofty ideal of “keeping the
city compact and not encourage urban sprawl and dedensification of crowded
areas like chickpet” some where seems to have been derailed by politician,
bureaucrats, real estate and other vested interests. Some of the observations like reduction of
green areas, creating a vast transformation zone around present Pettah area and
increase in FAR have been commented already by my esteemed colleagues like Mr.
Kodandapani, Ex Deputy Chief Planner, BDA.
Mr. Desai has rightly pointed out the emerging overbearing importance
the city is getting at the expense of other cities and towns of the state. If this trend grows one would agree with Mr.
Desai that “ Bangalore will grow into a hideous megapolis and the rest of the
state will be bereft of the stimulus of urbanisation”. Expressing the same view I wrote an article a
few months ago in the same magazine an article “To congest or decongest”.
When I went on an official visit to Gulbarga,
when I spoke of dilapidated roads, drains, and lack of development to an
learned academician of that space, he threw up his hand and sighed, “What can we do” There are 5 ministers from this
district. But once they go to Bangalore,
they indulge in land grabbing and proxy real estate and forget Gulbarga. They are for all practical purpose are
Bangaloreans.” Another time when I was
in Dharwad, friends complained about once in four day’s water supply and six
hours in a day interruption of electricity.
In Mangalore it was about narrow roads, bad roads and lack of interest in
completion of Hassan-Mangalore BG.
There is a lot of sense in what
Mr. Deve Gowda, ex PM speaks. But
unfortunately his statements are given a negative slant drawn into controversy
between ex CM and him. In Bangalore IT
czars, Bureaucrats, Policemen and Real Estate Developers have become town
planners, road designers, traffic movement experts, etc. And now French Experts! Technical people are no where in picture. Not that Bangalore lacks such people. We have people like Mr. Wagale, Mr. Rame
Gowda who have specialised in the subject, have practical experience, and have
also been UN advisers. But…………….please
read on.
Dear Chief Minister,
I am taking the liberty of
writing this letter to you regarding the Draft Comprehensive Development Plan
(CDP) for Bangalore through these columns.
I am writing to you in this manner for the simple reason that I believe
it improves the chances of it being read and, hopefully, of being taken
seriously by you and the members of your administration. I may be forgiven if I have erred in making
this assumption.
As you well know, Chief
Minister, everyone who has enjoyed a degree of prominence in public life wants
to leave behind a legacy for which he will always be fondly remembered. No one wants to be remembered for doing wrong
things. Unfortunately, Chief Minister,
you are currently running that risk by being tempted to accord your approval to
the Draft CDP – which is why I am writing to you.
Moreover, you are running the
risk of being remembered for not just presiding over the continuing decline of
the quality of urban life in Bangalore but of stimulating it. While your predecessor in office is also to
blame for the present state of affairs, more blame will attach to you because
you have been given an unique opportunity to reverse that decline and your
administration may well end up doing just the opposite.
That opportunity has been
presented by the mandatory and once-in-a-decade revision of the Comprehensive
Development Plan for Bangalore. Here is an opportunity to be remembered ever after as
the person who set Bangalore’s development on the right course, not just by
resisting the pressures of a few business heavyweights who have created jobs
but failed to create homes or by resisting the demands of rapacious builders
but by espousing the correct policies for urban development and prioritisingimplementation in an equitable manner for all of Bangalore’s citizens.
Unfortunately for the millions
who have made, and will make, Bangalore their home and unfortunately also for
your government as a consequence, the draft Comprehensive Development Plan that
has been placed before the public makes a mockery of urban planning.
I dare to say this because I
have some experience of urban planning.
I worked with the team that prepared the original planning concepts for
New Bombay in the 70s and was a member
of the National Commission on Urbanisation that Rajiv Gandhi appointed while he
was Prime Minister in the 80s. I hope,
therefore, that this letter will not be
dismissed as the ranting of a senior citizen miffed by unaccustomed new
developments around him.
Let me start with the
overarching view that your government and its political constituents need to
take of urbanisation. In a country where
most people live precariously off the land and its inadequate agricultural
produce, economic development and the escape from poverty is almost synonymous
with urbanisation and the creation of jobs in the industrial and commercial
sectors. Urbanisation must therefore be
looked upon as an instrument of economic development of the country, as the
engine of GDP growth. That requires both
a national policy on urbanisation and a host of regional policies initiated by
the States.
Two of the key elements of that policy
are a balanced spread of urbanisation and a careful planning of the urban-rural
interaction. Quite unfortunately,
Bangalore’s urban plan is based on the assumption that it must grow as fast as
it possibly can without caring a whit about the impact of such a policy on the
rest of the State. In this way, Chief
Minister, you will lose friends both in the city of Bangalore and outside
it. For Bangalore will grow into a
hideous megapolis and the rest of the state will be bereft of the economic
stimulus of urbanisation.
Just consider the facts. Bangalore has been witnessing a phenomenal
population growth rate: nearly 40% per
decade which is more than double the population growth rate for the whole of
Karnataka. The Comprehensive Development
Plan joyfully assumes that this sort of urban growth will and should
continue. The planners project 10
million people living in Bangalore by 2020.
But the next biggest city in Karnataka today is less than 1
million. One-third of Karnataka’s urban
population lives in Bangalore and this ratio is sought to be increased. That kind of lopsided development maximises
poverty in the State and minimises votes for those who pursue such policies.
Planning a city, Chief
Minister, is rather more than producing colourful land use maps and removing
constraints on the building lobby as the Draft Development Plan has effectively
done. It is meant to be a major exercise
in providing for work places and living spaces and in ensuring the quality of
life for those who will people them. It
normally takes many years and involves multiple disciplines: not just a handful
of town planners, but a whole host of them and, more importantly, an army of
project managers, demographers, sociologists, social workers, economists,
financial analysts, health professionals, educationists, transportation
specialists, experts on water, power, sanitation, waste management, welfare,
recreation, aesthetic design, law, communications, and so on.
The group that put together
what is euphemistically called a Comprehensive Development Plan had none of
these professional inputs. In fact, the
plan was prepared without the full involvement of even the municipal
corporation, the transport authorities and the police, to name just a few – in
fact, none of the agencies concerned with the delivery of goods and services to
the people of Bangalore.
Incidentally, there is no
reference to the Millennium Development Goals and the word “slum”, believe it
or not, is prominent by its absence from the document. Even the much touted Metro Rapid Rail System
finds no place in it except as an afterthought: it appears in two maps while
the text says “the metro rail does not concern the present period of
study”. Transportation planning and the
planning of the physical and social infrastructure, especially for the most
needy, form the core of urban planning.
They are not by-products. As
though these sins of omission were not enough, the plan has no cost estimates and
no financial planning. All this makes it
a Comprehensive Fraud, Chief Minister, not a Comprehensive Development Plan.
Not only has the Planning Group
ignored those who are most able to contribute to developing an urban plan (and
there are many of international standing in Bangalore and in India) but the
principles of town planning adopted by it fly in the face of everything that is
currently recommended by experts as the best prescriptions for urban
development. Consider the following.
Experts typically recommend
against the deliberate creation of monolithic megapolises, whereas Bangalore’s
planners wish to pursue such an objective with megalomania. Experts recommend satellite towns and
polynucleated cities with multiple work nodes easily accessed by surrounding
residential communities, whereas Bangalore’s planners are wise to create a
large and dense central business district, gobbling up adjacent residential
tracts. Experts wish to minimise soul
destroying urban crowding, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to double the
existing built form and population densities, in places even quadrupling
it. Climate has been a great advantage
of Bangalore. But we have seen the
city’s micro climate deteriorate in the last three decades. The radical increase in built forms, people
and private transport will result in degradation of the micro climate to levels
where Bangalore’s climate will cease to be an attraction.
Again, experts wish to minimise
private vehicle traffic, whereas Bangalore’s planners choose to provide for
what they believe is an inevitable explosion of cars. Vehicle pollution is already unacceptably
high and the Plan proposals will make a bad situation much worse. Experts seek to make commercial enterprises
provide for parking by visitors and employees on their own premises, whereas
Bangalore’s planners have not only retained the wholly unrealistic provision of
one car park for every 50 square meters but sought to reduce the provision for
restaurants from one car park for every 25 square meters to one car park for
every 75 square meters. This has been
done despite the fact that the actual need in the more expensive areas of the
city, based on ownership data, is one vehicle parking facility for every 5
square meters, half for cars and half for two-wheelers!
Experts seek to avoid lining
arterial roads with shops and offices on either side since that impedes traffic
flow, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to make every arterial radial road a
commercial corridor, grandiosely referred to as “transformation zones” and
“mutation corridors” and “commercial axes”.
The result will be nightmarish traffic jams, greater fuel consumption
and even more pollution.
Experts seek to increase the
green areas, whereas the planners of Bangalore, the garden city now only of our
dreams, are savagely reducing the areas under parks, playgrounds and open
spaces in virtually each and every planning district of Bangalore. Experts seek to create distinct work and
living environments juxtaposed to minimise motorised transport, whereas
Bangalore’s planners wish to create mixed uses where work places can
metastasise like cancers just about anywhere in residential neighbourhoods –
and which have already so mushroomed even before changes could be made to land
use laws.
Experts see the need to provide
for the urban poor who constitute a majority of the residents of cities and who
provide a host of essential services to the middle and upper classes, whereas
Bangalore’s planners have provided for an unaffordable minimum plot size of 54
square meters (or about 600 square feet) that translates into a pukka building
of 1200 square feet assuming a floor area ratio of 2. What are the poor supposed to do? Grab land and create slums in the absence of
any real alternative? Cities fail when
they fail to deliver land to the poorest sections of society on terms that they
can afford. On the other hand,
residential area planning has been done on the basis of 100 persons per hectare
or 20 families per 10,000 square meters.
Even assuming that only 50% is net residential plots (the rest being
devoted to roads, green spaces and utilities)
that works out to 250 square meters of land or 500 square meters of
built space per family with a floor area of 2.
Bangalore’s planners must have assumed that the IT companies, who will
be bringing in most of the migrants, will be paying their employees
sumptuously. Alternatively, the
additional 135 square kilometres of residential land provided by the plan will
accommodate vastly more people than has actually been projected. Possibly by a factor of several times.
Experts wish to learn lessons
from their past mistakes, whereas Bangalore wishes to accept what they call
“ground realities” and have invented expressions like “flexibility” and
‘structured continuity’ for a process where de facto becomes de jure, where the
law sanctions what the lawless have chosen to do, where a fait accompli is the
citizen’s fate.
Experts also seek to learn from
common citizens and from public and private institutions who are users or
providers of civic services, establish popular acceptance and financial feasibility,
build in performance metrics for the implementation process and devise measures
for effective enforcement. There is no
trace of any of these in the document that your planners have prepared.
In short, Chief Minister, the
Development Plan proposed to us represents the height of folly and a
prescription for unmitigated disaster.
You must put a stop to it. And
now. There is no way to improve this
plan. It needs to be scrapped. Please let us start all over again. And with the right people and the right
attitudes, Bangalore, Karnataka and India will ever be grateful to you for
that. Bangalore has locational, climatic
and cultural advantages which it would be a shame to sacrifice at the altar of
commercial greed.
Believe me, Chief
Minister, India has brilliant urban
planners, architects, engineers, sociologists, economists, project managers and
other professionals – in fact, all the ingredients needed for outstanding city
planning. What is waiting is political
will. Rajiv Gandhi understood all this
when he constituted the National Commission on Urbanisation. I cannot believe that Sonia Gandhi’s or
Manmohan Singh’s thinking can be very different.
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