Look for pictures in newspapers and magazines that depict the urban civic problems discussed in the text. Cut them out and pin them to the text at appropriate places.
Answers
Answer:
Many cities in India accurately
mirror Friedrich Engels’
description of urban centres in
nineteenth century England even
today. “Streets that are generally
unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with
vegetable and animal refuse, without
sewers or gutters but supplied with
foul, stagnant pools instead,” wrote
Engels on the living conditions of the
working class in that country.
Urban Decay
The depths of urban decay in India
came to global notice during the
pneumonic plague of 1994 in Surat; it
epitomised the failure of governments
in the post-Independence era and
exposed development policies that
ignored fundamental public health
issues inherited from colonial rule.
There is little evidence to show that
policymakers assimilated the lessons
from the Surat public health
disaster. State and municipal
governments did not pursue reform
in waste management, though civic
conditions in Surat itself underwent
change in the plague aftermath.
During the past decade, many cities
pursued development agendas—often
with the help of massive international
loans—to project ‘modernisation’ at
the cost of basic civic reform.
There is thus a continuing
challenge before the current mission
to enable and also compel local
governments to abide by the
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100 HORNBILL
provisions of the Municipal Solid
Waste Management Rules by which
they are legally bound.
Post-liberalisation policies have
tended to largely disregard other key
factors that affect the quality of life
in cities and towns: poverty, lack of
sanitation, water shortages, gross
undersupply of affordable housing,
and traffic chaos generated by
automobile dependence, in turn
created by neglect of public transport.
In the absence of a hygienic
environment and safe water supply,
chronic water-borne diseases such
as cholera and other communicable
diseases continue to stalk the poor
in the biggest cities.
It must be sobering to the affluent
layers of the population that nearly
14 million Indian households
(forming 26 per cent of the total) in
the urban areas do not have a latrine
within the house, as per the Census
of India 2001; some 14 per cent have
only rudimentary ‘pit’ facilities. The
number of households without a
drainage connection stands at 11.8
million (representing 22.1 per cent
of households). Migration to cities
continues and infrastructure to treat
sewage is grossly inadequate to meet
the demand even where it exists.
It is unlikely that the quality of
the urban environment can be
dramatically improved therefore, if
such fundamental questions remain
unresolved.
Urban transport receives scant
attention from policymakers. Policy
distortions have led to rising
automobile dependency, higher
safety risks for road users, and land
use plans that are based not on the
needs of people, but primarily
designed to facilitate use of private
motorised vehicles.
It comes as no surprise therefore
that pedestrians and bicycle riders,
who form 30 to 70 per cent of peak
hour traffic in most urban centres,
also make up a large proportion of
fatalities in road accidents. A paper
prepared by the Transport Research
and Injury Prevention Programme
(TRIPP) of the Indian Institute of
Technology, Delhi, says pedestrian
fatalities in Mumbai and Delhi were
nearly 78 per cent and 53 per cent
of the total, according to recent
data, compared to 13 per cent and
12 per cent in Germany and the
United States.
Such alarming death rates — and
an equally high injury rate — should
persuade policymakers to revisit
their urban planning strategies and
correct the distortions. But many
cities such as Chennai have actually
done the reverse — reduced
footpaths and areas for pedestrian
use to facilitate unrestricted use of
motorised vehicles.
The practice in progressive world
cities has been different. Curitiba in
Brazil, which has attracted global
attention for innovative urban plans
using low-cost technologies, has
done everything that Indian
policymakers would dread to do.
Starting in the 1970s, this provincial
centre with the highest per capita
ownership of cars in Brazil (other
than the capital) at the time, banned
automobiles from many crowded
areas in favour of pedestrians, built
an internationally acknowledged bus
system that reduced household
commuting expenditure to below the
national average, and created new
housing areas that were provided
transport links in a planned manner.
Some of the prestigious land
development in the city, including a
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SUB-TITLING 101
new Opera House, came up in
abandoned sites such as quarries.
The bus-way system cut riding
time by a third, Scientific American
noted in a review in the mid-1990s,
by providing for advance ticketing,
specially-designed boarding areas
with wider doors for entry/exit and
dedicated lanes for faster transit.
G. ANANTHAKRISHNAN
The Hindu, 13 December 2005
Explanation: