Jagran Opinion: India’s Cities Are Choking — It’s Time To Build New Ones

A couple of weeks back, I landed in Bangalore late in the evening at Terminal 2. Even though peak traffic hours were long past, it took more than an hour and a half to reach the center of the town, Richmond Circle. While sharing the frustration of the elongated journey, the driver narrated his woes of daily struggle and opined that IT companies have started relocating and, in any case, have started building new campuses in other cities and towns.

Recently, national media reported a public spat between a business chieftain and a senior political executive of Karnataka Government over the cracking infrastructure of Bangalore. The October 9th, 25 issue of Economist, a respected global newspaper in an article reported, “The city ranks third worst in a traffic index compiled by TomTom, a navigation service.”

The city of booming information technology industry of India is choking on its own success. The gloom has begun. Several states are courting and laying red carpets for entrepreneurs to locate their next facility in one of their cities. Cities of Northern and Eastern India, though significant supplier of IT talent, are not in the prospecting list of entrepreneurs. According to ‘Blind’, the anonymous community app for verified professionals, over one third of employees of leading firms such as Zoho, SAP, PayPal, Nvidia etc. come from tier 3 colleges.

UP Chief Minster Yogi Adityanath has announced allocating land for nine industrial and commercial clusters, including for IT and data centers. But that may not be enough. Technology-driven industrial and commercial hubs blossom on the availability of human resources.

This is the era of generation Z (beginning with 1997 to 2012) and will be a feeder canal of talent pool for the decade and more to fill up positions.

Generation Z seeks a working environment defined by flexibility, purpose and a strong emphasis on mental health and well-being. Generation Z prioritises a work-life balance and rejects the “hustle and bustle culture” of previous generations. This generation values community and connection in their living spaces, preferring walkable urban neighborhoods with vibrant social ethos. Bangalore and for that matter, none of the metropolises of India offer that setting. Migration is inevitable.

Silicon Valley, the most admired IT hub globally, is housed in over a dozen small towns called county. Major global IT giants’ HQ are located there; Apple in Cupertino, Google in Mount View, Meta in Menlo Park and Cisco in San Jose et el. Except for San Jose none of these towns have a population exceeding a million. It is possible for a working executive to pick up the child from the school and enjoy a lunch at home within the permitted break.

The key ingredients of an IT hub ecosystem inter alia are a deep talent pool, strong university-industry ties, supportive infrastructure and confidence in the safety and security of life, living and property.

The journey of building such an ecosystem begins with physical infrastructure. The location is important. Let’s take the case of UP. UP’s success in building expressways is admirable. All expressways pass through the important cities of the state, which house some of the well-known Universities. Hence, creating physical infrastructure along those express ways within a radius of 150 KMs of big cities and international airport makes an eminent sense. However, the proposed clusters should not be too near the city lest it become part of an agglomerate and will not meet the expectations of the talent.

Creation of a new cluster town should include industrial and commercial complexes and a residential township. Building a modern township warrants patient capital, risk taking mindset, first rate country and town planners, modernized auctioning and facilitating governance. The success should be measured by the speed and quality of the town built.

The concept of ‘build, operate and transfer’ is the most workable option. The lease must be for at least 99 years and extendable for another 99 years so that the return on capital is exciting. The invitation to bid should be global.

Indian cities are choking. Urban renewal and smart city programme have had a very marginal impact, and the ease of living has hardly improved. The challenge of fast-growing urbanisation can be met only by creating thousands of new small and medium-sized towns.

The development of new towns offers a strategic approach to managing urban growth, building organised infrastructure, reduce overcrowding, eliminate long commute and promote better living standard at lower costs. Economically, new towns create job opportunities, attract investments and build supplementary and complimentary business and service enterprises. It boosts GDP growth significantly.

It is estimated that in the last 40 years alone, China has built 3800 new towns accommodating over 150 million people. The national resolve to be a developed nation by 2047 cannot be achieved without the creation of thousands of new small and medium sized towns.

(The writer is former chairman of SEBI and LIC, and an author and columnist. The views expressed in this article are his own.)