Maddening City Scapes - 1

I love our indian cities very dearly. I have had the opportunity to live in the three big southern cities , Chennai , Bangalore and Hyderabad. While all the three cities seem to have their own merits and demerits , I cant help feeling sad for the fact that they are all headed in the same direction and just reflect various stages of neglect and disarray.

The population of these cities is becoming too huge for the infrastructure to handle which is slowly but surely crumbling down. while in some cases, you can see some action being taken to widen and build new roads , new flyovers to ease smoother flow of traffic, the progress on these fronts is just too slow to keep pace with the rapid development in industries such as IT , BPO and Pharma which attact vast populace to relocate to these cities. Once there is such a vast section of upwardly mobile population, retail and hospitality industry has stepped in to cash in too - resulting in a number of spanking new malls sprouting up everywhere.

I do marvel at the developments shopping is a delight with retail customers being spoilt with variety and innovative schemes. New restaurants and hotels offer lots of cuisines to choose from. The night life though still bland is looking to improve too. World class housing projects are coming up everywhere. Private enterprise is flourishing.

All these developments have resulted in more usage of resources such as land , water , power and roads. So much that , i have noticed every 6 months there is almost a 50% increase in traffic jams ! I listen so much more to the radio in my car these days , atleast a couple of hours every day and I seem to be getting used to this kind of life too as is everyone else.

But there sure comes a point when you can no longer ignore the happenings. Just the kind of thing that is happening in bangalore now, where every one is realising that the city's infrastructure has crumbled.

I happen to read a survey of India Today a few months back which was talking about the dismal state of our cities. Most of the cities need thousands of crores of investement pumped into them and that too over a short period of time if any of our cities are even to come close to better offf cities in asia like Bangkok or Shanghai. Note that I dare not compare our cities with Singapore or the western cities which are actually light years ahead in terms of development , infrastructure and civic amenities.

How can we ever get there ? will we ever ?
I hope to see a day where our cities are atleast comparable or boast some of the good things in other world cities.