NEW DELHI: Reforms of existing restrictive land-use provisions and doing away with some of the other regulations that limit economic progress, will be the tipping point leading to a surge in entrepreneurship and productivity in Indian cities, urban planning scholar Alain Bertaud said on Tuesday.
Bertaud, who among his many roles, worked as a resident urban planner of Chandigarh and principal urban planner at the World Bank, said: “The idea is to audit regulation and to get rid of the regulation, which cannot be justified…. I compare it to pruning a tree. When you have a fruit tree, you have to cut some branches. The idea is not just to cut branches, it’s to improve the productivity of the tree.”
Bertaud was speaking at a webinar organised by Artha Global, a policy think-tank headquartered in Mumbai, at the launch of their new report ‘A New Imagination for Indian Cities’.
Retired civil servant and former CEO of World Resources Institute OP Agarwal noted that a shift in thinking that identifies cities as engines of growth and identification of the key economic drivers, which will thrive the city, would be a moment of change.
“The big change will come when the economic provisioning exercise will be done as a consultative process,” said Agarwal, who was the principal author of India’s national urban transport policy in 2006.
He also underlined that while there had been some focus on building capacity of the bigger cities, a lot must be done in smaller cities that are not covered by central schemes.
Shashi Verma, chief technology officer at Transport for London, said the spark that will catalyse the growth of Indian cities will come from either thought leaders who are invested in their own cities and are invested in the success of that city, or from local (city)-level politicians who will realise the latent economic potential of the city.
Verma, however, said for either of these to happen, civil society must be encouraging. “It is what has happened in city after city around the world. It is the way that cities in India will get reformed as well. Looking for administrative solutions to these things is falling back on the mistakes of the past.”
Bimal Patel, noted architect and designer of the new Parliament and much of the entire Central Vista project, said the true tipping point would come when the governments of the day act just as facilitators and go out of the way to make changes happen. He conceded that it’s a very liberal idea currently alien to the Indian context. “It’s still to grip the imagination. But I’m very hopeful because I was part of a time when people did not believe that cities were important, and all of that suddenly changed. So, at some point, we are going to learn a liberal notion of how to think of governance.”
Amrita Agarwal, a public health practitioner, said the global experience both in the global east and the west shows that community action, in addition to individual efforts and those of families, are influential in bringing positive change. “The community as a force that wants liveability, a better city, needs to be mobilised. There are some public goods which the government will have to provide but the community must be the driving force,” she said.