India@75: Reminiscing past for a hopeful future

To reminisce the journey of Indian cities in the post-Independent era and chalk out a plan for the next 25 years, AIILSG organised a session ‘India@75-Imagining the Next 25 Years’ during the Infocomm India 2022 Show. The exhibition-cum-conference was organised between September 5-7 at the Bombay Exhibition Centre in Mumbai. All India Institute of Local Self-Government (AILLSG) hosted the session to celebrate 75 years of Independence and also launched the book cover of its upcoming coffee table book-Urban75. A host of participants from various local governments joined this session to discuss the journey of our nation and put forward their vision of how they see India after 100 years of self-rule, which is only 25 years from now. Ravi Ranjan Guru, Deputy Director General, AIILSG, delivered the welcome address and talked about how AIILSG has been working closely with the local bodies since 1926. Dr Jairaj Phatak, IAS (Retd), Director General, AIILSG, delivered the keynote address and also unveiled the book cover of the coffee table book-Urban75. Hitesh Vaidya, Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs; Dr Jairaj Phatak, IAS (Retd), Director General, AIILSG; Anshul Gupta, Commissioner, Ujjain Municipal Corporation; Tikender Singh Panwar, Former Deputy Mayor, Shimla among many other were present during the ceremony.
The book is a collection of articles from eminent urban experts from India. The authors writing for the book have not just illustrated the successes in the past but also provided solutions to pressing urban challenges for paving a path for a bright urban future. Authors of the book include Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Government of India; OP Mathur, eminent urban expert and former director of NIUA; Dr Amitabh Kundu, Distinguished Fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries; Chetan Vaidya, former director, SPA; Ashwini Bhide, Additional Commissioner, Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation (GMMC); Vikas Kharage, Principal Secretary to Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and Kunal Kumar, Joint Secretary & Mission Director, Smart Cities Mission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India. Dr Phatak in his address said that local governments are key to India’s success in the next 25 years because urban expansion is imminent and urban local bodies can steer urban development in the right direction.
The launch of the book cover was followed by a panel discussion which was moderated by Abhishek Pandey, Editor of Urban Update. Hitesh Vaidya, Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA); Tikender Singh Panwar, Former Deputy Mayor, Shimla; Anshul Gupta, Commissioner, Ujjain Municipal Corporation; and Ranjan Panda, Convener, Combat Climate Change Network, India participated in the panel discussion.
The moderator began with talking about the adverse impacts of climatic changes that our cities are facing and asked Vaidya to address the gathering on how to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Vaidya pointed out that many cities in India did not have any proper master plans and raised concerns over the proper planning of Indian cities. He said that to have a paradise land, one must have five components. The first one is well-planned cities, and the second is the standardization and process to follow protocols. The third is the delegation of financial powers to ULBs. The fourth is having skilled manpower, and the fifth is monitoring and evaluation of work that has been going on. And for the next 25 years, a pollution-free environment, proper housing facilities, and a better life are what we should focus on. India has currently 3000 census towns and that is where for the next 25 years one should focus. Vaidya ended his initial remarks on the note, “Move incrementally to do things better. We have achieved quite a bit but let’s not be harsh on ourselves also that we have not done it because the complexity and the scale of India are much more different than the western and European cities.”
The next guest speaker, Tikender Singh Panwar, Former Deputy Mayor of Shimla, started by highlighting that the present Indian cities are a convergence of both the medieval and the modern world. Post-1947, the change in the political-economy can be divided into three phases: the Nehruvian phase in the 1990s, post-Manmohan Singh, also called the new liberal capitalism and post-2014, which is the continuation of the 1990s. Panwar walked the audience through the transition that happened and how India comprehended the development of cities from the perspective of city governance. “50 per cent of the investment in the cities still happens from the state, 16 per cent happens from indigenous private capital and the capital that we imagine that have come to eliminate our problems was not more than 15 per cent that too in the Bangalore corridor alone and today you can see Bangalore is still flooded. Even with high-end technology, you can see where we are ending up”.
The moderator asked Anshul Gupta, Municipal Commissioner of Ujjain to shed light on how data collection is changing urban management in his city and how in the coming future cities will change with data management and integration of technology in operation and management. Gupta talked about the multiple challenges in data collection and how technology can be the best solution. Earlier the process of collecting data used to be done manually which has changed to online and easily accessible.
Ranjan Panda of Water Initiative Odisha was next on the panel to share his views on why cities need rivers. “We are a credit card generation in so far as water use is concerned and we are at the moment using the resources of 1.7 Earths. So when we are planning for cities and the future ahead of us, we must think that we have lived our life more than we should have and now we are taking out of our children and grandchildren’s share of resources”.
“Cities, no matter how small a geographical area they may occupy, utilize all the other resources from all around”. Being a water activist, Panda highlighted the fact that although Indians consider rivers very sacred, the most sacred river of our nation is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. He also points out that we are losing our wetland almost three and a half times faster than the forests and with that, we are losing our capacity to sponge the extreme weather events we are facing at the moment.
In concluding remarks on what should be done to plan our cities, the panelists spoke about managing the challenges of urbanization and migration, promoting the institution of governance, finding ways to equip cities with knowledge, standards, SOPs, improving the financial decentralization, and solving urban problems with the help of urban diagnosis.

Cluster Meet
A Cluster Meet of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy followed the Panel Discussion. Mayank Meena, Programme Officer, moderated the meeting. The meeting was attended by over 10 municipal commissioners and senior officials from the potential and signatory cities in India. These officials were from the local governments of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Haryana.
It is to be noted that All India Institute of Local Self-Government is the Networking and Governance Coordinator South Asia for the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. The project is funded by the European Union.
The agenda of the cluster meeting was to brief the potential cities about the benefits of signing the GCoM commitment letter and hear the experiences of the already signed cities. Ashish Verma, National Coordinator GCoM Asia, presented the details of the project, joining process and benefits offered by GCoM to cities for making cities more climate change resilient and climate-friendly. Director NIUA shed some light on the various capacity-building programs organized by NIUA under the GCoM project for assisting cities for their GHG emission inventory mapping and preparation of climate action plans. Tikender Panwar, former deputy mayor of Shimla, shared the experience of working with the GCoM during his tenure and taking climate actions in the mountain city.