Mumbai has second fastest urban growth in world: Study

Indian cities have witnessed highest growth for any urban cluster in the world with Mumbai and Delhi topping the list, a study to be released on Monday says, while raising questions over insipid urban development.

Updated on: May 22, 2011, 01:14:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indian cities have witnessed highest growth for any urban cluster in the world with Mumbai and Delhi topping the list, a study to be released on Monday says, while raising questions over insipid urban development.

The study using the temporal satellite data and latest census results show that Delhi has grown by 4.1%, Mumbai by 3.1% and Kolkata by 2%. Going by this present pace of growth, Mumbai’s population is expected to cross 25 million by 2015 whereas Delhi and Kolkata will touch 16 million by then. India’s population rose to 1.21 billion in 2011 in a decade with 35% of them living in cities, meaning fastest urbanisation in past five decades.

“The data indicates that the Indian cities are growing at a much faster rate than the planners are expecting,” said PK Joshi, the lead author of the study and faculty at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) University. “The urban nation is overloaded and under-planned.”

It is medium sized cities having problems similar to big cities but does not have resources, which are facing huge infrastructure deficit. “These cities face similar problem as those of mega cities; they have significantly lower resources to devote to the complex infrastructural, social and environmental issued associated with rapid urbanisation,” the study said.

Cities such as Jaipur, Pune, Kanpur, Surat and Lucknow fall in this category. A unique characteristic of most of medium sized cities is mono-centric and dense settlements with complex expansion over time. Jaipur, Kanpur and Lucknow witnessed a steep urbanisation in the past four years, the study says. Minister of State for Planning Ashwini Kumar recently said India needs an investment of over R1,60,000 crore to meet the increasing demand of infrastructure. “It is the biggest challenge of the 12th five year plan,” he said.

The study also says that Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Bangalore stand-out as mega cities with population ranging from five to seven million. Population of Hyderabad is expected to cross 10 million by 2015 whereas that of the others will cross eight million mark, the study predicts.

What was unique about these emerging cities was “high built up density at the core with decrease towards the buffer” meaning less congestion unlike Delhi and Mumbai which witnessed elongated growth. The satellite data showed that Kolkata and Mumbai have adopted the trend of upcoming mega cities in the recent past. But, overall India is witnessing fastest urbanisation in the world with 12 cities expected to cross 2.5 million mark by 2015.

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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