What is the issue?
- The recent stampede tragedy in Mumbai has drawn attention to the flaws in urban planning.
- India's urban development and planning requires a course correction to prevent such incidents in future.
What is the case with Mumbai?
- The area around the railway station where stampede occurred was home to several of the city’s mills a few decades ago.
- Naturally, workers settled around the mills, in chawls and colonies.
- As the textile and manufacturing industry declined, services and commercial activity and so the construction for offices and residences increased.
- However, these went on without any adaptive response from the public authorities to address the transportation challenges.
- Consequently, it led to the pressure on the existing transport infrastructure.
- The footfalls in surrounding railway stations increased manifold irrespective of the inadequate carrying capacity of bridges and stairways.
What are the drawbacks in urban planning?
- A major drawback is the absence of coordination among the many public organisations.
- As a result, various civic and infrastructure-related functions remain dissociated.
- Also, planning authorities prepare land use plans for a 20-year horizon.
- On the other hand, transformation is happening in the land use pattern in relation to the ongoing changes in economic activity at a faster pace.
- Resultantly, the planning process is not adaptive and flexible enough to respond to the changing land use and economic forces.
- Further, overlapping of functions and the jurisdictional confusion among metropolitan bodies undermine responsibility and accountability.
What are the possible solutions?
- The urban planning authorities have to be more responsive to the dynamics of the cities.
- Coordination and cooperation among all public authorities must become a regular feature of the governance set-up.
- The ultimate requirement thus is a single coordinating agency.
- The Metropolitan Planning Committees (MPCs) as provided in 74th Constitutional Amendment Act is one such entity.
- However, the functioning of MPCs has been disappointing because of lack of autonomy, executive power, finances and functionaries.
- Another alternative is the metropolitan councils that are appointed democratically and entrusted with specific powers.
- Some of its features could be -
- having a clear functional mandate.
- having adequate autonomous power for planning and decision making.
- defined comprehensive jurisdiction for the entire metropolitan region over certain functions such as transport.
- taking up other functions that require provisioning at a regional level.
- having representatives from other public organisations and domain experts from outside the public sphere.
- In all, accountable public authorities who respond to the dynamics of cities can bring out the much needed reformed urban planning.
Source: The Hindu
