YOU MAY HAVE got used to it, but urban life is today bewildering — in all corners of the world, a small or a big city. Imagine how would you be impacted if you took a couple of years break in a village or some remote place on the planet that has nothing of the things called urban and returned after remaining cut off from city life for that long a period. You would sure be balled up in your revisit, with your stress immunities having dipped in your remoteness from the city. The roar of the overhead jet, the rattle of the passing train, the ambiguous melee in the streets, the blares on the roads, the jostlings at the train stations and the bus stops, the heat-radiating concrete structures — all would overwhelm and split your soothed senses. Back in the chaos, you would realize what a mess the urban life is. You would sense the degradation in the air you breathe and the contrastingly brackish water that flows through the river. Once pristine, they are now poisoning.

 

No matter how strong the urge to escape the rut, the urban trap is inevitable — primarily for economic reasons. The opportunities of livelihood have kept sucking people from the hinterlands and tilted the balance of rural-urban population in favour of the cities on a worldwide scale. For the first time, the world urban population is set to overtake the rural population. Such a huge aggregation of masses was not anticipated and if the old city provisions are cracking and crumbling, it is owing to this never-ending stream of newcomers. So, now you can only live with nostalgia for the bygone golden days, when you see a buggy pass by drawn by a majestic white horse while sitting on a parapet fencing the sea near the Gateway of India.

 

Decades back, after those buggy days, when masterplans of cities were drawn, this exponential surge in urban population was not envisioned and the requisite infrastructure in terms of roads, housing, drainage, commercial centers, public transport, water and power provisions, sanitation and waste disposal system were not provided. Those at the drawing board then simply did not visualize the boom that would come with technology and the mass movement from the rural to the urban areas. Result: Chaos and mess. Be it Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, London or New York. It’s the same, but the urban management has ensured the differential of the good and the bad city.

 

In India, the urban problems are being more acutely felt on account of resource crunch, poor city planning, and late remedial measures. Metros, for instance, have now come in New Delhi, which should have ideally come at least 10 years back, if not 20. Had it not been the Commonwealth Games, the government may not have had the spending justification and may have been hamstrung in investing on the capital’s spruce-up. Many of the infrastructures New Delhi would have post-games, would not have been there without the public-convincing games reason. Expressways, mono-rails and metros all have been announced when the commuting problems have touched the flash-point. And, now the Delhi model is being belatedly pursued in other Indian metro cities, where the commuting situations are even grimmer.

 

The late planning realizations and the resource paucity in India are most painfully visible in the offset of power demand and supply.  Few-hour outages have now become perpetual and most commercial centers in the summers are powered by back-up facilities than the grid supplies. Homes rely more on inverters and the society generators to switch on appliances. Despite the governmental waking-up to narrow the demand-supply gap through sanctions of new power projects, the situation is unlikely to change in the coming years — not till the long-way-off nuclear power Manmohan Singh is pushing for materializes.

 
The problems of traffic, water and power supply, unavoidable concretization, growing slums, unauthorized constructions, degradation of air quality from growing number of vehicles and industrial pockets have combined to create a bewildering mess from which there is no salvation — with all the monies raining in the cities and masses rushing to grab what they can.

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