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Need for an urban vision

Kashmir Times. Dated: 7/4/2015 3:39:06 PM

Instead of regulating growth of urban towns, policy planners are focusing on stop-gap and adhoc arrangements to accommodate growing number of vehicles on roads

Despite its commitment to build and create civic amenities in the existing major cities of Jammu and Kashmir and regulate growth of upcoming towns, ruling PDP-BJP coalition government needs an urban vision with foresight and advanced planning for the convenience of the people. Its commitment to create new facilities in growing urban centres in J&K should not be limited to civic amenities but renewed vision for the new urban towns with master plans in place for the next not only twenty years or so but for the next one century or so that the new challenges can be overcome with ease. The team of planners and policy makers need to focus on the needs of the people migrating to urban centres in search of greener pastures and employment opportunities. This needs a comprehensive review of the planning initiatives for the future and create a new model of urban vision with inclusive growth of all the towns looking forward to the future needs of the people also as well as maintain the heritage status of the towns that have come up in a planned and haphazard manner during the past few centuries as has been the case with other major towns of India. In fact, the policy planners and managers of urban centres should learn from previous experiences in meeting the new challenges posed by growth urbanization of small towns and the growing pressures on existing facilities that were created for smaller populations. The pressure on the natural resources like water, air and new infra-structure has been increasing with the passage of time and growing urbanization and these resources are under tremendous strain during the past half a century. For instance, water resources alone consume a major part of the spending of the local self governments for meeting the growing requirements of the increasing population and increased usage of water for sanitation and other purposes. The governments at the local level are facing hardships in meeting the daily requirements of the people in the urban centres and drinking water supply. This has to be augmented through alternate means like transportation of water from different sources to new and upcoming colonies that have come up in haphazard manner on the outskirts of old urban centres.
Instead of regulating the growth of residential colonies, the government agencies have been forced to meet the daily requirements in terms of water and energy of new colonies that came up in an unplanned manner with backing of land mafia. This has unfortunately happened due to lackadaisical approach of successive governments because they did not count on growing urbanization and trans-migration of people from rural and far-flung areas for seeking better education facilities for their children and better employment opportunities for themselves. The governments have failed to gauge the impact of migration of people from hinterland to urban towns and also did not spare a serious thought for carving out new residential colonies for these populations. Apart from this, Mass Transit System (MTS) for transporting people in urban areas on mass scale at peak and rush hours has been the biggest casualty due to ill-planning of the policy makers. As a result of this laxity, people have been depending on personalized transport system which led to massive increase in small vehicles. The growth of roads has remained almost static to meet this challenge resulting in frequent traffic jams on the city roads and lack of space for parking of such vehicles. The simple answer to this challenge is the introduction of MTS network so that number of personalized transport vehicles is reduced to such an extent that crowding of roads is checked and there are no frequent traffic jams. But it is sad state of affairs that government agencies instead of finding a way out is focusing on stop-gap arrangements like creation of spaces for parking of vehicles in urban areas for providing temporary relief to the people. Such measures are unlikely to stop the problem of crowding on the roads leading to slow down of vehicular traffic movement. Making the public transport an efficient and disciplined organ of the towns is the only solution to check growing number of personalized vehicles. The whole planning process for the urban areas needs to be revisited for the future generation, if government wants to ensure smooth life in the future cities of J&K.