As countries recover from the aftereffects of the pandemic, some of the pressing challenges which were earlier sidelined due to the pandemic came to the forefront. The pandemic showed the importance of a joint and integrated plan of action that is the need of the hour to tackle many challenges faced by the world in the form of growing inequality, water crisis, food security and the omnipresent climate crisis
Urban Update, joined hands with various organisations such as the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), Action Alliance for Recycling Beverage Cartons (AARC), Institute For Spatial Planning And Environment Research, India (KSS-ISPER), InfoComm India and 3R Foundation, in 2022, to discuss some of these pressing challenges. These webinars recorded the participation of some of the renowned experts from the field, local government officials and members of civil society.
E-Dialogues
Urban Update, AIILSG organised the 24th edition of E-Dialogue on December 22. The E-Dialogue titled, ‘Deliberation on 74th Constitutional Amendment Act – Decentralisation of Democratic Governance’ discussed how decentralised governance gives more power to the people, the fundamental base of any democracy.
The panel of speakers included Sheel Dhabhai, Mayor, Jaipur Municipal Corporation (Greater); Tikender Singh Panwar, Former Deputy Mayor, Shimla; Manoj Kumar Teotia, Assistant Professor, CRRID, Chandigarh and Sunil Kumar Singh, IAS (Retd.), Member Administrative/Technical Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, Bihar.
On June 6, AIILSG organised the 32nd edition of ‘E-Dialogue’ – a pre-event of UNCRD’s Regional 3R Circular Economy Forum 2022, on the topic ‘Recycling Beverage Cartons and Plastic packaging in Circular Economy’. During the webinar, Dr Kulwant Singh said that 50 per cent of the total plastic consists of single-use plastic only and 90 per cent of the single-use plastic goes straight to landfill sites. S N Umakanth, Chief Manager (WOW Programme), ITC, said that dry waste could be sold to local kabbadiwala to be reused in
other processes.
It will help the country reduce its import budget by at least 2 billion as India imports 6 million tonnes of waste paper even though we produce a large quantity of dry waste.
Accessibility of People with Disability
The first webinar of 2022 took place in January, and it discussed how cities in India are not inclusive towards the needs of differently able people or divyangs. The panel discussion highlighted that around 6.5 billion people would be living in cities by 2050, and 900 million would be living in Indian cities. Therefore, ensuring inclusivity is an essential but hard-to-address issue, especially when it comes to the differently-abled people, even though 15 per cent of the people in cities are differently abled.
The panel included Hitesh Vaidya, Director, NIUA; Harpreet Arora, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO); Dr Vasudevan, Chief General Manager, Varanasi Smart City; Divya Pillai, Consultant, Bhopal Smart City; Prateek Khandelwal, Founder, RampMyCity; Subhash Chandra Vashishth, Co-founder and Director, Centre for Accessibility in Built Environment Foundation; Utsav Chaudhary, Team Leader (BASIIC), NIUA and Ravi Ranjan Guru, Deputy Director General, AIILSG.
Webinar on Beverage Cartons
In February, Urban Update held a webinar in collaboration with UNCRD, AARC and 3R Foundation that discussed the issue of food packaging waste management in general and beverage cartons or tetrapack
in particular.
An argument often given about tetrapack is that it could be reused several times. Tetrapcak consists of 75 per cent long fibre paper, 21 per cent plastic and 4 per cent aluminium, and each time the packaging has been used, the strength of the long fibre diminishes, leaving the food product vulnerable to contamination, as highlighted by N B Mazumdar, an international waste expert.
Circular Economy
The third webinar, titled ‘Role of 3R Circular Economy in Water Security in India,’ took place on March 10. It was hosted by UNCRD and 3R Foundation, along with Urban Update. Addressing the webinar, Dr Kulwant Singh, CEO of 3R Foundation, informed that India treats only 22 per cent of the wastewater and CRC Mohanty quoted that with every one degree Celsius increase in global temperature additional 500 million people will face water scarcity.
Similarly, Avinash Mishra, Advisor, National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), who spoke on ‘The Reuse Opportunity’ informed that in India, over 70 per cent of the generated sewage waste remains untreated, and the same is dumped in rivers, lakes and other water bodies that further degrades the quality of freshwater.
India@75
While in August, when India was gearing up to celebrate 75 years of its independence, AIILSG in collaboration with InfoComm India, held a webinar where participants discussed how India has evolved during this period of 75 years and what India would look like in 2047. During the panel discussion, Abhishek Pandey, Editor of Urban Update, highlighted that at the time of independence, only 17 per cent of the population resided in cities, but that number has soared to 35 per cent today. The World Population Prospect (WPP) also says that 675 million people will be living in cities in India by 2035. Therefore, it is essential to make our cities resilient towards the impact of climate change-induced disasters and extreme weather events.
World Habitat Day
Institute for Spatial Planning and Environment Research (ISPER), in association with AIILSG, organised a webinar in line with the theme of World Habitat Day, “Mind the Gap; Leave No One and Place Behind” in October. Experts discussed how the cities could best address the issues of rising inequality between the haves and have-nots. Jaswant Singh, Secretary General, KSS-ISPER, speaking over the issue of housing, highlighted that there is huge a gap between affordable housing and their availability in India, that too when 16-17 per cent of the population still resides in slums. The experts presenting in the webinar shed light on some of the solutions which are being implemented in India since the 2000s to address the issue of rising inequality, like the Right to Education, the Right to Food and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA).