From
the other side of the wall
Fifteen
years ago, looking out of my study-room window was not as daunting as
it is now. like a pedestrian drawing in a school textbook, the facade
of the Usha factory loomed large. The factory's quarters come with
their own intrigue. You go to the end of what is a middle-class urban
residential block, thinking you've come to a dead-end, and then,
suddenly, there is this whole other world— single-storey houses,
rundown shanties, a school—of whose existence there was no
indicator until you turned that corner. I often wondered who these
people were, living on my street but so very invisible, with their
dwellings so vastly different from my own.
by
Rohini Chaki, The Telegraph, 21/02/2008
When
will we ever learn?
.
Indian
cities are routinely chopping down mature trees, which still have a
long life ahead of them, to make way for road expansion. Some of the
bigger ones have already built or are planning elevated expressways
to ease traffic flow. These are being contemplated after flyovers or
over bridges, often financed by the central urban renewal mission and
which any Indian city worth its salt now has by the dozen, failed to
reduce the traffic jams. It should be as clear as the bright daylight
that the creator has blessed most of India with that flyovers,
expressways, ground level or elevated, and widened roads not only do
not solve traffic problems but make them worse.
by
Subir Roy, The Business Standard, 13/02/2008
The
urban bomb is ticking away
.
The
most important policy response to the urban crisis is the Jawaharlal
Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, under which the Centre, states
and urban bodies are on course to invest thousands of crores in
correctly identified urban renewal projects, sometimes in the
public-private partnership mode. There is also an attempt to make
central funding conditional on carrying out certain policy and
structural reforms, these being divided between "mandatory" and
"optional". But money has begun to flow even as reform has been
slow to take off. Most of the funds sanctioned so far have gone to
the western region but Maharashtra, its flagship, has had to be
threatened and cajoled into carrying out the most elementary reform,
getting rid of the urban land ceiling law.
by
Subir Roy, The Business Standard, 06/02/2008
