INDIA, it's Cities and The Future

India is the now the country with most number of people living in where most of it's population lives in the rural parts of the country, there's a chunk of population which are being forced live in spaces which are overcrowded due to overpopulation, paying insanely high rents, with not so great public infrastructure and the funniest thing is nobody care's or doesn't understand the ticking time. In this article we will see what's the deal with those.

What are Mega Cities

Mega Cities are those urban conglomerations with population >= 10 million (1 Cr.). They are a different world with unique cultures and food habits. Cities like Shanghai, NY, Mumbai are some of the examples. In India we Have namely 7 as on today whereas China the second largest country (by population) has 17. And these are the only places where the most of the Indian Upper middle and rich reside and most of the white-collar workers.

    why have they become such large cities

Prior Independence, there were some cities which were the focal points of administration often built because of them being trade posts like Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. After India Achieving independence up until the 90's due to the strict economic policies their population has grown at a linear rate, post liberalization of Indian economy which incidentally coincided with the rise of Internet. India became a hub of outsourcing creating employment at a larger scale towards the end of 90's and the early 2000's, and the Indian immigration to the US also went up. Majorly cities like Mumbai,Hyderabad,Chennai have attracted a larger portion of that job pool leading to a sudden population surge in those cities. This has been well used by the realtors , many lakes have been encroached for the construction of Residential units and points of Employment. Bengaluru is a good example right in front of us which has reached a stage of stagnation due to it being the silicon valley of the east, but it's no match when it comes to infra. People some every part of the country has been coming there because it being a primary hotspot contributing to 40% of IT sector jobs.

 THE NORTH vs SOUTH

We divide India geographically into these two entities but here we're not talking about the divide rather the problems within the northern part of the country where there is high population density and because of Hyderabad-Bengaluru being the major IT importing cities people go down south in large numbers, even though the NCR has been growing quiet rapidly people are still preferring which becomes an issue because there are just a few cities with large no.of IT companies. We need to understand that India is culturally very diverse with different food habits and it gets difficult to feed such a diverse population as per their requirements and also not a great idea.

Post COVID one thing I have observed is the that there have been a large influx of blue colored migrant workers even in the smaller towns in the southern states these people travel in worst conditions to faraway places from their homes and these migrant workers are often paid peanuts?

 How do I know .... I have enquired with local carpenters, building contractors they were losing jobs because these people would do any kind of job even for 90-100 INR a day which their employers are taking into advantage as they've nowhere to go. I found that sad not just for these migrant workers but also the local people who are losing jobs. These problems could've been avoided when the northern part of the country seriously put in some efforts to solve these issues which will pose a great problem if they're being ignored for any time longer, as I said in the beginning the clock is ticking

The problems associated with them

Since these cities have been developed long back, due to the sudden increase in population the problems associated with those have not been identified at a very early stage which is why we see traffic being a major issue, water logging and improper drain management which could not predicted so that the respective governing authorities take time to understand at the dawn of every new problem. Forest lands are getting encroached , water bodies are being filled to benefit the interests of realestate giants who are often the friends of the politicians or sometimes it's their family members.  From the past 10 yrs most cities have been facing uncontrolled flooding which is a man made problem, because of giving permits to construct housing so dense in the low lying areas and around the water bodies without taking proper measures, Almost all problems are some how related to the coldblooded realtors with the support of those in power. Overall it is a collective mistake of everyone. And we can debate about them for hours and days discussing the reasons and the problems with poor urban planning. 

Sustainability and How to tackle the issues concerning

The only viable solution which helps is to build more cities and let the white-collar job providers office space so that there won't be new crowd to the already overly populated concrete jungles. It might sound harsh but Infrastructure in India actually sucks, after the independence only Chandigarh was the planned city which was built in all these years. Not a proposal has been made by any government which has ruled the country, meanwhile our Neighbour China (2nd most populous country) spends a significant capital on infrastructure management, they have more than 10 mega cities considering our population and these cities being the hotspots of employment we need to understand how densely populated our cities are. Instead of merging the outgrowths into the cities to benefit the realtors the respective authorities of the corresponding states should invest in building smaller cities and upgrading the infra of already existing ones especially in the northern part of the country. With the population growth rate for the next 25 years and the ecological changes across the globe is pushing humans in every country to include sustainable lifestyle due to the rate of change of climate at different parts of the world especially in the Bigger cities, especially in the most populous country on the planet it is very important to ensure and plan our cities to handle the environmental changes and make lesser harmful impact on the environment. 

Why do we need to include sustainability aspect in building New Planned cities

As mentioned above with the current population and rate of change of global warming sets us new challenges to make sure we build cities which can stand still for at least 60-70 years, remember there are structures across the world which are more than 2000 yrs. old, every new problem gives us an opportunity to look at nature in. It's still not late we as a country can still start working with such a large engineering talent pool in this country, It is time we move on from being JUST A FACTORY WHICH PUMPS IT ENGINEERS and do some hard engineering which the high skilled Indian immigrants are already doing in the west.

AMARAVATI CAPITAL CITY

             Amaravati was the proposed capital of the residual state of Andhra Pradesh state post bifurcation in 2014, whose journey has took quite a lot of cinematic turns before it got anywhere. Right now it's the only proposed city which is being built from the scratch. The only hope is that they ( the govt of AP) instead of being greedy real estate agents they make sure it's built so much so that doesn't create any new problems to the climate of that region.