Budget 2022: Urban planning in India cannot be free of either political or economic ideology

Budget 2022: Urban planning in India cannot be free of either political or economic ideology

Smruti KoppikarUpdated: Friday, February 04, 2022, 08:44 AM IST
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Representative Image | PTI

This is a week of budgets, the Union Budget unveiled earlier this week and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation budget for the city presented on Thursday.

Budgets are important for allocations but there’s another reason that budget statements are significant too. They spell out the intentions of governments and offer us a keyhole view of the thought process that informs government decisions.

The BMC budget is indeed about the city of Mumbai but this year’s Union Budget surprisingly has substantive bits on cities and urbanisation. It got one fact right on urbanisation: nearly half of India’s population is likely to live in urban areas in the next 25 years or so.

To enable this, and sensing an opportunity to influence city-making in the political philosophy of the Narendra Modi government, it proposed the setting up of a highlevel committee of reputed urban planners, urban economists and institutions, which will make recommendations for new India’s urbanisation.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s words are expressive, not so much for their elegance but intent. Emphasising the need for “orderly urban development”, she stated, “on one hand we need to nurture the megacities and their hinterlands to become current centres of economic growth…on the other hand, we need to facilitate tier 2 and 3 cities to take on the mantle in the future.

This would require us to reimagine our cities into centres of sustainable living with opportunities for all, including women and youth”. Urban planning cannot continue with a business-as-usual approach, she seemed to chide people in her trademark haughtiness. Urban planning or city-making is, ultimately, about the exercise of power and the powerful deciding who lives in what way in created or manufactured spaces. Cities are ideological in that their spatial arrangement and expansion is driven by the capitalist impulse and worldview.

They are made – unmade and remade too – by those who wield political power at a given point in history. Remember how many times the current ruling dispensation pejoratively dismissed Lutyens Delhi before becoming the new Lutyens itself ? Urban planning cannot be free of either political or economic ideology. It would be naïve to believe that the Modi government approaches this in a political-agnostic manner. As soon as the finance minister spoke of a high-level committee, there were whispers that some of the most favoured architect-urban planners would be on it such as he who presides over most of the big-ticket projects of the Modi government such as the Central Vista and Kashi Vishwanath Corridor or he who advises state administrations on urban planning, including in Jammu & Kashmir.

These men lauded the Budget initiative and were cited in interviews deriding India’s urban planning as informed by the philosophies of the socialist era and upholding Gujarat as a model. Urban planning by experts aligned with the government of the day does not constitute as major a paradigm shift as a few of the darbar courtiers make it out to be. It would be ahistorical to even suggest this.

India’s cities were not strictly planned down to the last corner shop detail, many of them or most of them grew organically around their best natural resource, as it usually happens, but within a broad structural plan imagined by those in power. There was a broad plan by the British to develop Bombay as the urbs prima in indis but several other aspects of it came about in response to prevailing circumstances.

The Bombay Improvement Trust, for example, was set up to improve the city for its commerce by providing affordable and sanitary accommodation for its working classes in the wake of the plague in 1896-97 because the city’s economy needed this social arrangement. Independent India’s tryst with planned urbanisation began when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru saw the city as the place of the newly imagined India and, according to experts, the five-year plans promoted urban development as a state project in which individual architect-urban planners had a role to play. New Bombay or Navi Mumbai, for that matter Chandigarh, to cite only two, are cities born out of urban planning paradigms that were spearheaded or encouraged by the government of the day.

There were reasons why central Bombay in colonial era was a haven of the wealthy but transformed into a working-class region in the 19th-20th centuries, only to become the playground of the super-wealthy in India’s post-liberalisation years so much so that it’s now among the most posh pin codes in the country – neither turn in history could have happened without planning.

Similarly, the development of large urban agglomerations such the Mumbai Metropolitan Region or the National Capital Region – with cities from the neighbouring states linked to the national capital – which today count as India’s economic drivers originated in plans. India’s urbanisation challenge has not really been to make cities but to build cities that are sustainable and equitable for every citizen who lives in them. Cities represent stark inequality everywhere. India’s cities showcase glittering billionaires and grinding poverty often on the same street.

To make equitable cities, also ecologically sustainable cities, does not necessarily call for urban planners and urban economists – the usual suspects – but to expand the table to include health and education professionals, ecological experts, gender studies experts, housing professionals, designers and artists, and the like. For too long and in too many ways, men with tunnel vision of architecture have presided over urban planning and city-making. Modi-Sitharaman’s urbanisation thrust, far from being a paradigm shift, is actually giving us more of the same.

In fact, Sitharaman’s words of “orderly urban development” are enough to evoke apprehensions of an authoritarian regime structuring its cities in a certain way with a top-down approach where order – rather than human interaction and creativity – reign supreme. Cities need structural frameworks, not necessarily order, which limits possibilities for people. In any case, given the architecture of India’s federalism, this top-down approach can at best be recommendatory or persuasive with state governments, which in turn exercise control over urban local bodies.

This is a classic reason why the BMC is unable to be the sole or lead planner for Mumbai, for example. Its role is limited to granular level planning, which too is necessary but not as impactful as macro urban planning, and impacts citizens’ lives directly. The BMC budget then becomes more of a financial exercise than a political one. There are a number of issues one can focus on in the city’s budget but the most important one is the utilisation of funds allocated.

The administration presented a budget estimate of nearly Rs 45,950 crore for the financial year 2022-23, up 17.7 per cent from last year, and allocated almost half of it to capital expenditure for large infrastructure projects. Of the nearly Rs 18,750 crore allocated to capital expenditure in the last year’s budget, only half was used. Back to the Modi-Sitharaman budget plans, there is nothing to show that the cities they envisage will be more equal and sustainable.

Remember that the poor were hidden away in Ahmedabad when Prime Minister Modi hosted the then US President Donald Trump in February 2020 – hardly a model of urbanisation that India should follow.

(Smruti Koppikar, journalist, urban chronicler and media educator, writes on politics, cities, gender and development. She tweets @smrutibombay and surfs Insta on @bombayfiles)

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