Rather than grandiose plans, smart cities should focus on just three things: transportation, e-governance and easy land titling
There is no one definition for India’s proposed smart cities.
The Ministry of Urban Development provides benchmarks for various
services — maximum commute time should be 30 minutes in medium-sized
cities and 45 minutes in metros; water availability must be 135 litres
per capita per day; 95 per cent of homes should have shops, parks,
primary schools and recreational areas within 400 metres, and so on. The
proposed cities range from Varanasi to Dholera to Amravati, covering
brownfield and greenfield areas. Benchmarks would be different for both;
given lack of significant Internet penetration, brownfield smart cities
cannot, for instance, focus on skyscrapers or lavish promenades first.
City planning has undergone several changes since Independence. In the
1950s, regional planning and the city master plan grew in importance,
but stayed divorced from the complex realities of a poor, independent,
post-colonial country. While urban poverty rose, master plans fetishised
about leisurely, low-density, spread-out cities, and obsessed over
removing slums. This “high modernism” resulted in plans for newer
cities. The National Commission on Urbanisation identified 329 cities
called GEMs (Generators of Economic Momentum), which were further
divided into National Priority Centres and State Priority Centres.
Urbanisation was expected to grow along those corridors.
Bhubaneswar and Chandigarh were especially planned to represent modern
India, emblems of “a new town, a symbol of India’s freedom, unfettered
by traditions of the past” (Nehru, 1948). A ‘garden city’ with no
high-rise buildings, Chandigarh’s wide boulevards broke the city into
self-sufficient sectors, promoting liveability and exclusion.
However, the structure had its failures. Chandigarh’s urban planning was
defined by an “absence of local authority, a lack of understanding of
the local culture and values on the part of the planners, and the
history of the region.” (Kalia, 1985, 135). In a survey of 21 cities in
the Annual Survey of India’s City Systems (2014, Janaagraha Centre),
Bhubaneswar and Chandigarh came close to the bottom in quality of life.
Bhubaneswar scored low in urban capacities and resources as well as in
transparency, accountability and participation.
Over time, national plans grew more reactive, and stuck to managing
things as they were. A desire for better, cleaner, inclusive cities
remained unfulfilled. We renamed more cities than building new ones.
The idea of a smart city, for most of the 20th century, was science
fiction. But cities can now integrate critical infrastructure such as
roads, rails, subways and airports; optimise resources better; and plan
preventive maintenance. Given India’s finance crunch, any smart city we
plan should focus first on three things: urban transportation,
e-governance and land titling.
Urban transportation
For a sustainable city, public transport has to be the main artery. With
metro systems viable only in large cities, integrated bus services will
be primary. While the National Urban Transport Policy, 2006, pushed for
public transport to rise from 22 per cent to 60 per cent, only 30 major
Indian cities out of 90 have an in-place bus system. Even Delhi, with
its extensive metro, faces significant gaps in its efforts to provide
cross-sectional connectivity, with just 6,500 buses instead of 20,000.
India’s bus services continue to be hamstrung by limited or declining
fleet sizes, loss-making services, inadequate resources, poor service
quality and ignorance about modern vehicle technology.
Cities should design bus routes to ensure multi-modal integration. A
city-level Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority, backed by
legislation, should facilitate coordinated planning and implementation
of transport projects. We need an intelligent software to improve
systems for vehicle location, collecting online fares, priority
signalling for buses, and real-time bus information. Cities should also
set up Traffic Information Management Control Centres for effective
enforcement and monitoring of traffic rules.
Financing this will require significant restructuring. A dedicated Urban
Transport Fund, as seen in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Jaipur, should seek
to generate inflows through advertisement revenue, additional vehicle
registration fees and congestion taxes to fund new projects. A special
purpose vehicle (set up in collaboration with the municipal corporation,
city and private players), as seen in Indore and Jabalpur, could manage
bus operations.
Better e-governance
The Indian government has experimented with various e-governance
initiatives, most of which have failed to materialise, given poor cyber
security and significant privacy and data protection risk. But the
implementation of a secure ICT Infrastructure, comprising wireless
hotspots, wi-fi networks, and fibre optic Internet delivery at home,
remains fundamental.
E-governance could learn from these examples. The U.K.’s “Tell us Once”
service allows citizens to inform public authorities about birth, death
or significant life events just once. San Francisco’s DataSF.org
displays public transportation arrival and departure times, recycle
zones, crime patterns and more. Service requests for pothole repairs can
be tweeted. Sweden has verksamt.se, both for entrepreneurs and for
citizens to use theme-based portals on healthcare, taxation, etc. All
procurement and invoicing is conducted electronically, restricting
corruption.
Land titling
Providing affordable housing remains a critical challenge. The has been
exacerbated artificially by poorly conceived Central, State and
municipal regulations, leading to land prices that are much higher than
intrinsic levels. Urban development projects still have to undergo a
lengthy approval process — developers have to spend two-three years
getting permissions from nearly 40 departments.
Titling issues and the lack of property rights information make this
worse. While the law requires compulsory registration of the sale of
land, it does not ask the registration authority to verify land history
or ownership from the seller, weakening buyer protection and acting more
as a fiscal instrument for the state, instead of a statutory support of
certainty to title. Cities recognise presumed ownership to land, a
questionable claim, which can be challenged on many fronts.
A smart city would provide formal digitised recognition of property
titles, along with increasing transparency and registered brokers,
cutting down long search times and high costs of acquiring real estate. A
less cumbersome process of accessing land records through the
Department of Registration would increase its use, while helping to show
actual transaction prices. Further, land inventory needs to be mapped
comprehensively, and be accessible to buyers.
Globally, many countries offer streamlined online processes and
incentives to facilitate affordable housing — these can include tax
deductions, density bonuses, direct subsidies, land grants, land use
changes etc. Many countries such as Malaysia and Canada have revamped
their administrative requirements through fee waivers and fast-tracking
procedures.
Smart cities can make daily life easier for residents simply by
automating routine functions, and providing a basic transportation and
housing network. Grandiose visions can be kept for later.
