How Livable Are Our Cities in India?

As most of India was celebrating the festive season last year, Cyclone Michaung hit South India and wreaked havoc in parts of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh inundating the city of Chennai once again. TV news reports were full of the levels of flooding in the city, where streets had turned into rivers and the NDRF had once again been pressed into force to rescue people from their own homes. As you would expect, it brought back scenes and memories from the 2015 flooding in the city and everyone, including the media, wondered why Chennai had not improved its civic infrastructure since then. Even until the last weeks of December 2023, parts of southern Tamil Nadu continued to be flooded.

This isn’t an isolated incident in India. There are several such extreme weather events that we face from time to time. Each one of them reveals just how ill-prepared our cities are for natural disasters and extreme weather conditions, not to mention how ill-equipped they are for millions of citizens who make their homes in them. The same sorry situation prevails in the countryside as well, especially all along our coastlines and the hilly regions of northern India.

Whether it is flooding in cities such as Chennai and Mumbai, or entire states such as Kerala and Assam (where flooding in every monsoon is common), or earthquakes in places like Latur in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Himachal and Kashmir, or the smog-filled toxic air around Delhi and the National Capital Region, it is obvious that our cities are increasingly becoming unfit for human habitation.

The question is not merely how we tolerate this every year, but if we can continue to ignore the flashing warning signs for much longer. Especially, when we know that India is on a fast-growth path economically, and urbanization is only going to increase in the years and decades to come. With populations of scores of millions in our metropolitan cities, many of them are already crumbling under pressure and bursting at the seams. Most of this is to do with infrastructure, be it power supply, water, housing, roads, sanitation and the like. On top of this, we have the pressure of climate change and extreme weather conditions to cope with, and these are also only likely to increase with every passing year.

We don’t seem to be estimating the economic cost of these disasters either, which ought to include loss of lives and livelihoods, damage to homes and infrastructure, loss in business and economic activity due to the calamity, etc. For example, it is being estimated that the total loss and damage in the 2018 Kerala floods was around Rs. 200 billion according to this article in The Economic Times. I could not find a single news report estimating what the economic loss and damage of the Chennai 2023 floods could be, but the Chennai 2015 floods were also estimated to have caused an economic loss of around Rs. 200 billion. Our state governments need to get better at estimating these losses and communicating them better to media and to citizens.

Of course, we need to distinguish between what is a natural calamity or weather-related event and what is a man-made catastrophe. Increasingly, though, it is becoming clear that most climate-change related disasters too are man-made, and the science clearly suggests that we need to take remedial action immediately. This means that even adequately good infrastructure will not suffice; it has to be of an order that is good for every-day life and can also withstand an extreme weather event. For example, when cities like Chennai or Mumbai receive excessive and intense rainfall in a matter of a couple of hours, ordinary storm water drains will not do; it needs a drainage system of a higher capacity. This is, of course, ex-post. If one were to look at why so much flooding, we find that it’s because much of the construction in our cities is taking place in areas that are not meant to be constructed upon, in the first place.

Clearly these are failings of city planning and urban authorities and can be avoided. Most of us who live in cities and towns know what ails our cities, and yet it is our apathy that is to blame for the sorry state they are in. We are proud of the fact that India is the fastest-growing major economy in the world and we also have our sights firmly set on becoming the world’s third-largest economy in this decade. Are our cities and towns reflective of this? Indeed, are they even fit to live in?

I began thinking about why our cities are in this sad and dilapidated condition. I wondered if our city authorities aren’t accountable to their citizens, and also to the state legislature. Then again, one reads of irregularities in the way these are managed and of state politicians’ interference in large construction projects and the awarding of contracts. PWD departments particularly are said to be notorious for corruption and help contractors make money hand over fist. How does one put an end to all this and help cities govern themselves in a clean, efficient and effective way?

I think there must be a way to first make city municipal corporations and other local civic bodies more transparent and accountable to their citizens. And make citizens proud of the city they live in. This can best be done by better communication between local civic authorities and the people. In the digital age where there is a portal for everything, city municipal authorities ought to have a well-designed portal that communicates with citizens. The website ought to go beyond the transactional listing of services, and actually share important information that is of concern to citizens.

City municipal corporations ought to start with first creating a masterplan for their cities, and sticking with it. Such a plan ought to evolve from wide consultations with experts in urban planning and in administration. The masterplan should clearly demarcate areas where construction can be permitted and those where it is prohibited due to environmental concerns. This masterplan once approved, ought to be shared with the public on the municipal corporation website, informing citizens of the construction restrictions and more. This will inform and empower citizens to alert authorities or file complaints against unauthorized and illegal construction in their neighbourhoods whenever the case arises.

The idea is to improve the dialogue between a city administration and its citizens, leading to a healthy and well-functioning relationship between them. At the moment, there is no mechanism for ensuring or even facilitating such a dialogue or forum, causing apathy and indifference on all sides.

A key consideration in developing such a city masterplan is to also regularize and redevelop slums into proper city localities. This will also help clean up the system, for slums thrive only through political patronage. And while city slums are reported to be vibrant units of economic activity, they are also a huge drain on the city’s resources. For example, it is a well-known fact that most of the losses of discoms are due to power theft, and slums account for most of this. Free power and free water, combined with poor sanitation and hygiene make urban slums dens of squalor, disease and poverty.

In recent years, the hype around Smart Cities in India has struck me as so ridiculous, especially when I see what passes off as smart city amenities/benefits. Mostly they include city beautification projects, cosmetic changes to how certain parts of the city appear, and I wonder if they aren’t the local politician’s vanity project. Instead, smart cities are those that leverage technology to improve the quality and standard of delivery of public services to their citizens, as this article from McKinsey explains. Therefore, city municipal corporations and various government departments ought to increase their technology adoption to speed up their services.

Eventually, smart city and municipal authorities ought to engage better with their citizens through the adoption of technology. And one day soon, it ought to be possible to interact with city authorities through an app. ??????

Another way for city municipal authorities to raise the level of their services and be better prepared for future challenges is to take the help of an external advisory body comprising urban planning and management experts as well as eminent and committed citizens. Such a concept has been around in Bangalore for a decade, in the form of BPAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee, which I think ought to have been Policy Action Committee) headed by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Biocon. Their website says it began as a pressure group to get the Bangalore city administration to improve its governance and service delivery, but I find that now they work in tandem with the Bangalore Municipal Corporation, even helping to train new Municipal councillors. An expert advisory body of the kind I am suggesting will add expertise, good sense and judgement as well as ideas to help the city cope, manage, flourish and eventually thrive. It ought to comprise urban planning experts, management experts, finance and legal professionals and eminent corporate citizens.

In India, we have had municipal corporations for decades, but not the sophisticated management system that one finds in countries overseas, with their system of city mayors, with whom the final city civic responsibilities rest. As our cities grow and so do their populations, it is imperative that we plan for the future, for growth and prosperity as well as for all the challenges they bring, including climate-related ones. The media too needs to do its job of holding state governments and local civic bodies accountable for the terrible state that our cities are in. They must report regular lapses in civic infrastructure, breakdown in law and order, crime, and the woeful state of civic amenities, including the way departments function, how funds are spent or not spent, etc. and take them to task for not performing their duties.

Decades ago, I remember The Pioneer newspaper began a Better Delhi initiative, with special sections in the main newspaper devoted to addressing Delhi’s many woes. Citizens too were encouraged to write in with the problems they faced. All this was to alert the city administration of its job of addressing these problems. Alongside, they also introduced a Better Delhi award for advertising agencies to suggest campaign ideas for improving the conditions in Delhi, and I am happy to say that we at Ogilvy Delhi happened to win the award the year it was introduced. All daily newspapers – which are the best medium for local city/town news – devote a couple of pages at least to local city-based news, but what The Pioneer newspaper did was to go beyond this and invite citizens to write in as well.

Along with all the requirements of greater accountability and responsibility from our city administrators and municipal corporations, we must also find a way to reward the best-performing ones. Usually, cities that attract more people, especially of the skilled and well-paid kind would be said to have found their own rewards, but I think public recognition too might be important in a country like ours where cities are only now discovering their real potential and power.

As an advertising and brand communications professional in India, I also think that cities can be built into brands, provided the fundamentals are in place. With good quality of public services, good governance, a responsive civic administration, and improved communication and dialogue, all cities can rediscover their core strengths and values and create brands around them. Most of all, it takes the love of citizens to make cities what they are, and with fundamentals in place as well as the citizen interface, they become brands.

In this context, I am reminded of what New York City did to renew itself as a city sometime in the 1970s, when they finally launched the much-copied I Love NY slogan with the big red heart. It took a lot of hard work before branding came into the picture, with massive corporate donations, ideas, and an entire city administration machinery pressed into service to make it happen. I happened to read a little of what went on behind the scenes in Lee Iacocca’s memoir decades ago, since Chrysler Corporation did its share in the reinvention of NYC. ???????

With millions of Indians moving to cities in India, and with new cities and towns supposedly being built along the new industrial corridors, there is every need to build our cities up as vibrant centres of ideas, innovation and economic growth. The sad but true fact about cities in India is that they cannot even accommodate the thousands who flock to work as daily wage menial labourers and skilled workers. Which is why when demonetization was announced, migrant labour was seen rushing for the exits first, as they lost their jobs and probably couldn’t afford the next month’s rent. When Covid struck and the 3-month strict lockdown was announced in India, migrant labour was left stranded with nowhere to go, but back to their villages.

Clearly India’s cities must work for everyone who lives and works in them. And most of all, they must be able to protect themselves and their citizens against crime, poverty, disease, squalor, homelessness, as well as the ravages of nature. Our towns and cities need to gear up to be able to do all this well, before we have the bragging rights as the world’s third largest economy.

The featured image at the start of this post is of Chennai during the 2015 flooding, by Veethika CC by SA 4.0 on Wikimedia Commons

This article first appeared on my blog on January 5, 2024.