THE story emerging from the terribly failed urban management of a megacity like Bengaluru has demonic proportions. The international IT hub was in the news a few weeks ago when ecological experts expressed their anguish over the way the city had destroyed its greenery and its water resources. Now, as the world celebrates ‘Earth Day’, the experts are back again with a difficult-to-digest solution to Bengaluru’s problem of potable water -- purifying wastewater into usable, potable water. The fact that a city like Bengaluru has come to such a pass, also suggests that many other cities in the country may be travelling in the same direction, to a similar fate in the near future. This curse of badly-managed urbanisation threatens to be on our head -- not just in India but also elsewhere in the world. This ‘Earth Day’ message is actually terrible in import and purport. The root of the problem is in the horrible way the leaders and managers of Bengaluru allowed their mental process to go haywire, directionless. This mental waywardness is of demonic proportions, one must insist. And this is happening in most cities of at least in India. The civic leaders and urban managers are showing open signs of decay in the quality of urban planning and handling of issues in most cities. Greenery is being lost to human greed, and water resources are shrinking and dwindling because of the an unholy collaboration between land mafia and political power.

 

Nobody appears to be interested genuinely in keeping the cities clean and free from all sorts of pollution. But that clear goal is eluding almost every city because of the rotten mental process of their respective leaderships. Today’s urban planning and designing hardly has futurism so that the cities would remain as vibrant and as ecologically secure those have been all along. The stories of most cities at least in India have been more or less the same -- neglect of ecology because of the unscientific consideration of human need and not even a grain of thought for the collective future. If Bengaluru signifies that, every other city in the country also does the same. Hence the actual concern that travels all over the urban India as destruction of cities comes to fore menacingly. The trouble of today’s urban India is that it refuses to think of the future. True, the cities may plan their Metros, for example, by thinking about how their personae would be say a quarter of a century later. But this planning does not include ecology as the most important consideration of future urban growth in the country.

 

Bengaluru offers a classic case of this most unhealthy syndrome. A few months ago, the country witnessed one of the worst phases of urban flooding even after heavy rains for just a few hours. The reason of that flooding was simple and common to every city -- there was no way out for the excess water the cities received through exceptionally heavy rains. Bengaluru was also included in that list of unfortunate cities of India -- no matter its economic growth, no matter its promise of employment, no matter its prosperity that comes through money ringing in its registers. Then we did it, and now we are doing it -- raising the alarm against thoughtless urbanisation. We are conscious that the powers that be may not appreciate our stand and may go to the extent of accusing us of not having a futuristic vision for cities. But unbothered by such shallow accusations, we are sure our alarm has its own importance in today’s context. We wish to issue a word of caution against thoughtless urbanisation, and unplanned urban growth. We wish to tell the country that it should stay clear of the demonic verses that are being sung in praise of so-called modern growth.