Ditching laissez-faire, India plans a city

NAGPUR, India: A year ago, this relatively small, forgettable city in the heart of India did not have an air-conditioned cinema. In the sweltering heat of May, the rich here were known to fly one hour to Mumbai, the financial hub of India, to see a movie. There they stocked up on Levi's jeans and Domino's pizza and other big-city treats that Nagpur failed to provide.

But in a social experiment highly unusual for this most unplanned of countries, the Indian government has handpicked Nagpur to be fattened and primped into an international metropolis.

Lush parks and smooth roads have been lain, and malls and multiplex cinemas have sprouted. A drastically renovated airport is to become the cargo hub of India, with a terminal that is 100 times larger than the existing one and is to handle at least 100 jets at a time instead of the current five. An ecofriendly mass-transit system is being planned to absorb an expected surge in road traffic, years before the average Nagpurian owns a car. The government is building a special economic zone with tax breaks and ready-to-use water, electricity and fiber optic cable, in the hope of attracting 100,000 technology jobs to a city long dominated by coal mining.

Borrowing a chapter from China's playbook, the Indian government has begun working to make metropolises out of smaller, isolated cities, from Jaipur in the north to Vijayawada in the east to Mysore in the south, garnishing them with fresh infrastructure like international airports and financial grants linked to improvements in governance.

"One hundred million people are moving to cities in the next 10 years, and it's important that these 100 million are absorbed into second-tier cities instead of showing up in Delhi or Mumbai," Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Indian government's chief economic planner, said in a telephone conversation.

Since its independence from Britain in 1947, the city-building philosophy of India has been, to put it tenderly, laissez-faire. Except for the recently developed technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad, India has not added cosmopolitan, globally connected metropolises to its old ones: Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Mumbai. As the Indian population tripled, the 1.1 billion people living on about 3 million square kilometers, or 1.1 million square miles, were left to scramble for space and opportunity in the few thousand square kilometers that contained well-paid jobs, 24-hour electricity and air-conditioned cinemas.

To take just one measure of the shortage of developed metropolises, there are 65 million Indians for every airport with the three-kilometer, or two-mile, runway required by large jetliners, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In the United States, the figure is 1.6 million people; in China, 25 million.

Even as China beefed up second-tier cities like Dalian, Hangzhou and Tianjin and linked them to the world, India waited. And its cities began to break. In Mumbai, a majority of people live in slums, and a sewage river passes through just as the Seine streaks Paris. Delhi is chronically short of water and electricity. Calcutta teems with rickshaw drivers who break their bodies for a few cents a ride, because there are too many people vying for work in so tiny a place.

No one knows if India has the stamina to build Nagpur to completion, and then build 20 more. But many experts regard metropolis-building as a silver bullet for India, slaying many problems with a single shot.

"Much of India's future will undeniably be made in the second-tier cities," said Ashutosh Varshney, a specialist on Indian political economy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The existing metropolises "will reach saturation points before long, or have already reached such points, and re-engineering their capacities for further growth will not be easy."

New metropolises could erode poverty, easing the load on cramped, Dickensian cities and creating more hubs where rural migrants can go for jobs in textile mills or the retail sector. More international airports could help raise incomes for the 700 million rural Indians by making it easier for their produce to reach export markets.

The Indian metropolis-building might also be an environmental boon. Upstart cities like Nagpur, on which millions have yet to descend, can grow on an ecofriendly model, with green spaces, mass transit and rainwater harvesting, in a way that old cities, with entrenched infrastructure, cannot.

"There's a whole lot of leapfrogging possibilities when you're creating new capitals," said Ahluwalia, the government planner.

New cities are also craved by industry, which is struggling to pay soaring land prices and wages in the traditional metropolises.