Recently I was in Beijing and was both awestruck and appalled at the way the city has changed, I think for the worse. Glitzy Shanghai-style modern buildings have taken over the beautiful monuments that highlighted the city's uniqueness. True to the Chinese schemes of mega development, multi-layer fly-overs and wide roads have been constructed.
But, alas, they do not seem to lead anywhere. Persistent traffic jams have considerably slowed down road speed to what they were a few years ago, with commensurate increase in air pollution. What struck me most about Beijing was it looked to me depressingly like Mumbai 2015.
The urban conundrum in big countries like India and China is different from other metropolises. These two countries are located in developing economies with a huge population that is economically backward. There clearly are more wage-earning opportunities in cities like Mumbai and Shanghai than in rural areas.
The opportunity to earn a better living in these cities and the apparent better living conditions they offer are too attractive for people to resist.
In China, at least, many more centres of manufacturing have been or are being created and that begins to take some load off the traditional big cities. In India this problem is going to get accentuated as it is depending more on services than on manufacturing; and services are more concentrated around cities.
And to further compound the problems, agriculture is being completely ignored, further dampening wage-earning prospects in rural India. The traditional solution of creating more infrastructure to debottleneck the cities' transport woes, using CNG as fuel to reduce air pollution, and making congestion zones with restricted entries or indeed evolving prudential vehicle usages norms such as minimum occupancy rules will have little impact on the oncoming tsunami of urban migration; it is almost like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!
They do help at the margin and we must adopt all these best practices. However, we must look for alternatives that fundamentally change the way we live.
I do not think we will get readymade solutions from other countries. No other country has the massive population that China and India have, and this introduces a completely different genre of problems that no urban planner has dealt with so far.
While we can admiringly review the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia with their massive roads and beautiful cities, many of them are mere suburbs as compared to our cities even now, and certainly as our cities grow bigger.
They also do not have to contend with such contrasting disparities that India and China have between urban and rural per-capita incomes.
It is not the socio-economics that worries me as much as urbanisation. There are about 400 million people below the age of 20 in India now, and they will become employable over the next 25 years, at 10-15 million each year.
Assuming all the right things are done, and jobs are created to support this increase, we are likely to witness an economic boom of unprecedented dimensions, rivalling China's, for pretty protracted periods.
But most of these jobs are likely to be created around the cities, increasing the pressure to house them in the urban locale. Then, the problem is where and how to house them.
China has taken the lead and is a decade or two ahead of us. We have some very instructive lessons to learn from them. They have adopted the same approach that the Americans and others had before them, except that China is doing their city developments on an unprecedented large scale.
But the whiplash of the conundrum, I think, is raring its head now, and perhaps China may be forced to rethink its strategy soon, as it realises that the city of Beijing cannot house a massive portion of the Chinese population.
We, as a country, are proceeding along the same pattern. Of course, we have had to really overcome a lot of odds to get the governments at the central, state, and city levels to make policies and mobilise resources.
There is evidence that we are beginning to see some concerted action across most cities in India. But, it is clear to me that we have lost the battle even before we began it. For instance, we now produce a million cars in our country as against a mere 600,000 cars three years ago. We will produce at least 2 million cars by 2010. We will need more roads to let these cars ply by then, providing for the present shortcomings and the future growth.
If you take a 25-year perspective, the present Mumbai will be 2030's Borivali, a struggling and bustling suburb in North Mumbai, home to about 5 per cent of Mumbai's current population!
I know this sounds retrograde when we consider the emergence of some governmental action on the urban infrastructure front at long last. By all means these efforts should continue at great speed.
What I am calling the attention of policy makers and city planners to is a national integrated human settlement policy that will seek to disperse this massive influx sensibly into pockets of decent size that can be managed and administered effectively.
Clearly most European cities with a population of around 5 million seem to be most efficiently run. For our country maybe we cannot wish for anything less than 15 million. Thereafter, I think we need to sound an alarm bell, and put in place several direct and indirect measures that disincentivise population growth and encourage financial contribution from its population to support the city development effort.
There must also be bigger emphasis on creating alternative employment hubs, which the SEZs are promising to be. This must be encouraged. Both for guarding against food shortages and to boost rural wage-earning capacity, bold new steps should be taken to encourage investments in agriculture.
External policies must actively seek to look for employee export schemes with its trading partner countries, not only to solve our population problem, but also to address the dwindling working age population in many of those countries.
CRISIL estimates that over the next 25 years, India will contribute over 250 million to the global work force, while China will be able to add only 50 million and in Europe there will actually be a decline of about 40 million.
A systematic programme of workforce migration to these destinations will also be an integrated part of the solution not only to the urban congestion problem but also for many other strategic issues that we need to address as a country.
Undoubtedly, a lot of it will happen by the course of serendipity. A little by way of government POLICY will certainly help in creating better liveable cities for the future.