Welcome Remarks by Dr Arvind Gupta, Director VIF

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Sh Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of State (IC) Ministry of Urban Development, for a Vimarsh Talk on ‘Urbanisation in India: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities’.

Over the years, eminent speakers have spoken to the public on variety of issues of importance to nation and society from Vimarsh platform. This year we have had the honour of listening to the Chiefs of the three armed forces. The Vice President Sh Venkaiah Nadu addressed us from this forum in June this year. Today we have the honour of having the Hon’ble Minister Sh Hardeep Singh Puri with us.

Sh Hardeep Singh Puri has had a distinguished diplomatic career spanning 39 years. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1974. A distinguished diplomat, he presided the UN Security Council in August 2011 and November 2012, and chaired the UN Counter Terrorism Committee during 2011-12. In his long diplomatic career, he has held Ambassadorial assignments at Brasilia and London and has been Permanent Representative of India at the Indian Mission to the UN in Geneva and New York. He was appointed as the Minister for State for Urbanisation with independent charge in September 2017. Sh Puri is the author of the book Perilous Interventions, published in 2016. The book, already in third print, gives an account of the chaos in the UN Security Council during the Libyan and Syrian crises which Sh Puri saw personally.

Ladies and Gentlemen, today we are focusing on the increasing pace of urbanization in India and the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

According to UN figures, 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This number will rise to 68 percent by 2050. The level of urbanisation in Asia is close to 50 percent. By 2030 the world will have 43 mega cities each with more than 10 million inhabitants, most of them in developing countries. Sustainable urbanisation is the key to sustainable development. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 exhorts the UN members to make cites sustainable, inclusive, safe, and resilient. This is a daunting task, particularly for developing countries with growing populations.

India will see major push to urbanisation in the coming years. Indian cities will have to provide the inhabitants of basic services like health, housing, education, water, sanitation, infrastructure, communication, commutation and pollution free air and land. As the recent visuals from cities like Delhi, Mumbai and other cities show, there is a considerable work that needs to be done by the governments at the center, states and at local levels. The coordination among disparate agencies will need to be improved.

We will need to upgrade our town and city planning skills, making them more citizen centric and scientific. The municipalities, the vital but weakest link in the chain, will have to be strengthened and made accountable. The archaic municipal laws will need to be overhauled for decent living and work environment. In India, the safety of women, children and elderly in cities has assumed greatest urgency. Megacity management and planning is a challenge of different kind. We will need the skills for tackling these challenges. Technology will need to be harnessed to address these.

Friends, in the last few years, the Government has come up with major policy initiatives. As we have seen, infrastructure is being built at a rapid pace across the country. Rural areas are becoming urbanised. The Government has also launched an ambitious ‘smart city’ programme and PM Awas Yojna.

But the challenges for sustainable urbanisation are formidable. The urban population is set to increase from 377 million to 600 million by 2031. Unplanned, unscientific, under-resourced growth can potentially create the problems of slums, air, water and land pollution, congestion, sanitation, waste management, and the lack of affordable housing. How are these problems going to be resolved? What are the roles of multiple stakeholders including the Central Government, State governments, local administrations and citizens? What kind of Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model of cooperation work in India? Do we have the necessary skills and human resources to tackle the challenge of urbanisation?

To talk about these and other issues, we could not have had a better speaker than the Hon’ble Minister for Urban Development.

I now invite the Hon’ble Minister to address us.