India’s big cities face big challenges of toxic air, broken roads and unpicked rubbish

“You want the royal charm of Jaipur? Don’t come here, just buy a postcard,” said a local taxi driver during my recent visit to the northwestern Indian city.

I had asked him why the amber-coloured capital of Rajasthan – swarming with tourists drawn to ostentatious palaces and majestic forts – looked so dilapidated.

His answer reflected a resigned despair about the urban decay that plagues not just Jaipur but many Indian cities: choked with traffic, shrouded in filthy air, littered with piles of uncleaned garbage, and indifferent to the remnants of their glorious heritage.

In Jaipur, you’ll find the most magnificent examples of centuries-old architecture defaced with tobacco stains and a car mechanic’s workshop jockeying for space.

This raises the question: Why are Indian cities becoming increasingly uninhabitable despite hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on a national renewal?

India’s rapid growth, despite high tariffs, weak private spending and stagnant output, has been largely driven by the Modi government’s focus on state-supported infrastructure improvements.

Over the past few years, India has built sparkling airports, multi-lane national highways and metro train networks. However, many of its cities still rank at the bottom of livability indexes. Last year, frustrations reached boiling point.

There was backlash from citizens and the public in Bengaluru, which is often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley due to its many IT companies and start-up hubs. billionaire entrepreneurs Tired of traffic jams and piles of garbage.

Citizens in the financial capital Mumbai staged a rare protest against a worsening pothole problem during prolonged monsoon rains as clogged sewer lines dumped garbage onto flooded roads.

In Delhi’s annual winter of discontent, toxic smoke left children and the elderly gasping for breath while doctors advised some to leave the city. Even footballer Lionel Messi’s visit this month was overshadowed by fans chanting against the capital’s poor air quality.

So why, unlike China in its boom years, isn’t India’s dramatic GDP growth leading to the renewal of its worn-out cities?

Why, for example, has Mumbai, which openly harbored dreams of becoming another Shanghai in the 1990s, failed to realize this ambition?

“The real reason is historical; our cities do not have a reliable management model,” senior infrastructure expert Vinayak Chatterjee told the BBC.

“When the Indian constitution was written, it talked about devolution of power to the central government and state governments, but it did not imagine that our cities would grow so large that they would need a separate governing structure,” he says.

World Bank It is estimated that more than half a billion Indians, almost 40% of the country’s population, live in urban areas; this is a staggering increase from 1960, when only 70 million Indians lived in cities.

In 1992, an attempt was made to “allow cities to determine their own destiny” with Article 74 of the Constitution. Mr. Chatterjee says local bodies were given constitutional status and urban administration was not centralised, but most of the provisions were never fully implemented.

“Vested interests do not allow bureaucrats and higher levels of government to delegate power and empower local bodies.”

This is quite different from China, where city mayors have significant executive powers controlling urban planning, infrastructure and even investment approvals.

Ramanath Jha, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, says China follows a highly centralized planning model, but local governments have freedom to implement and are monitored centrally with rewards and penalties.

“There are strong national imperatives in terms of the direction and physical goals that cities are charged with achieving,” Mr. Jha said. writes.

Mayors of China’s major cities have powerful bosses in the Communist Party’s top committee and strong performance incentives, making these posts “important stepping stones for future promotions.” Brookings Institution.

“How many names of mayors of India’s major cities do we know?” asks Mr. Chatterjee.

Ankur Bisen, author of the book Wasted, which is about the history of India’s sanitation problems, says that mayors and local councils that govern Indian cities are “the weakest organs of the state, closest to the citizens, but they are tasked with the most difficult problems to solve.”

“They are absolutely emaciated and have limited powers to raise revenue, appoint people, allocate funds. Instead, it is the chief ministers of the provinces who act as super mayors and call the shots.”

There have been exceptional cases, such as the city of Surat after the plague epidemic in the 1990s or Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where bureaucrats empowered by the political class have made transformative changes.

“But these were exceptions to the rule, relying on individual intelligence rather than a system that would work long after the bureaucrats were gone,” Mr. Bisen says.

India faces deeper challenges beyond fragmented governance. In the last census conducted 15 years ago, it was recorded that the urban population was 30%. Unofficially, almost half of the country is now thought to be urban in character, and the next census has been postponed until 2026.

“So how do you even begin to solve a problem if you don’t have data on the extent and nature of urbanization?” asks Mr. Bisen.

Experts say the data gap and failure to implement frameworks to transform India’s cities spelled out in the 74th amendment reflect the weakening of India’s grassroots democracy.

“It is strange that there are no protests about our cities like there were against corruption a few years ago,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

Mr. Bisen says India will have to go through a natural “cycle of realization” and gives the following example: Big Smell An event in London in 1858 that led to the government building a new sewage system for the city and marked the end of major cholera epidemics.

“Generally [during] “When events like these reach a boiling point, issues take on political significance.”

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