Highlights
Town Planning in India is On the Decline , Thanks to vested interests and greed for profits
Speculators and land sharks corrupt the planning process right at the very inception
A Model Land Pooling law is the need of the hour for India
Town Planning in India is On the Decline , Thanks to vested interests and greed for profits Adv. Aditya Pratap
Town Planning in India started off on a strong note with the establishment of Chandigarh - The City Beautiful, by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952. Designed by renowned architect Le Corbusier and supervised by his brother, Pierre Jeanerette, the city of Chandigarh grew into a beautiful grid of sectors replete with wide roads, large parks, and wide plazas. For a nation whose population was predominantly rural, Chandigarh was envisioned as a quantum leap providing a standard of housing and quality of life unseen before.
The example set by the city of Chandigarh was soon to be emulated by other states. Odisha's capital city Bhubaneswar had a parallel start in 1948 while Gandhinagar in Gujarat took off in the year 1960. Both cities tried to emulate the city beautiful to a varying extent with roads laid out in a grid-iron pattern, sector-based housing and designated zones for markets and offices. Greenery, through provided, would not be as ample as in the 'City Beautiful'. Government offices and public schools were established to provide employment and education opportunities respectively.
Enter Builders and Colonizers - An Inverse Relationship between Planning and Profits Emerges:
Unfortunately, none of these cities would attract enough industry to make them hubs for young working Indians. That place would be taken by Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Bangalore, and Pune where vested commercial interests lobbied with town planners to reduce greenery and maximize commercial spaces. Entire open areas would be eliminated to make way for saleable built-up areas where profits could be made. Arterial roads and highways would be realigned to increase the commercial value of land banks owned by politicians and land sharks. As a consequence, while these cities boomed, pollution, congestion, water shortages and an acute absence of greenery would come to harangue the citizens on a daily basis.
How Chandigarh was Planned:
The planners of Chandigarh, led by Le Corbusier, followed scientific principles of town planning. Firstly, the raw agricultural land of farmers was acquired from them by payment of compensation. Thereafter, these agricultural land holdings, many fragmented in nature, were pooled togther into a large layout from which proper roads and sectors were demarcated.
