Montek looks to Lahore for solutions

Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia will be visiting Lahore, to study its modern urban infrastructure to provide solutions to problems of urban India, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 24, 2008, 24:51:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Lahore, the cultural and political epicentre of undivided India, can now provide solutions to problems of urban India.

It has attracted modern Indian planners to study the city’s urban infrastructure. Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia will be visiting the city, where the Congress adopted the resolution for complete Independence and the Muslim League decided to have a separate Muslim nation, to study the its modern urban infrastructure.

“I, along with secretary, planning (Subhas Pani) will be visiting Pakistan to study what they have done to maintain urban infrastructure of Lahore despite population growth,” Ahluwalia said last week in the presence of Farzana Rana, Pakistan’s Union minister for women and former Pakistan Peoples Party spokesperson.

Lahore, despite a two-fold increase in population in the last 30 years, has been able to maintain its infrastructure, unlike many Indian cities, which are crumbling under population growth. “Lahore has modern infrastructure with its historical cultural ethos,” was a how thecity was described by veteran journalist, Lahore-born K.K. Katyal.

While Lahore will be on top of the agenda for Indian planners, they will also examine government schemes implemented in Pakistan including the newly launched Benazir Income Support Programme which provides the poor money to sustain themselves. “It is an innovative programme which covers the entire country but its benefits will reflect only after some time,” Rana said.

A commission official said Lahore was selected for the study because it has urban infrastructure similar to many Indian cities. “Lessons learnt from Lahore can help India in finding solutions to some of its urban problems like congestion,” he added.

Katyal described Lahore as nerve-centre of politics, culture and education political-cultural in undivided India, when Delhi was just a small town.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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