On that day, I saw a truck leave a construction site with a tangled wire trailing behind. I frantically looked to see what the wire was attached to and spotted the scaffolding a few meters ahead. I shrieked and grabbed the hand of the woman walking in front of me just as the metal pipes came crashing down.
We hugged for a brief second, and then walked our separate ways. Mumbai (pictured top) is a city that is being made every day, and so much of the Bandra-Khar area that I inhabit is never not under construction. Since I moved here from Seoul earlier this year, I have learned to be hypervigilant every time I walk the streets.
I was reminded of that moment last week as news broke about the collapse of a five-storey building in Delhi, which killed seven people. Authorities had flagged safety concerns in the neighbourhood months earlier, the Hindustan Times reported, after 23 people died in a fire at another building. As the world’s most populous country, India can feel like a place where life can be startlingly cheap, and people die every day in tragedies that could have been prevented.
According to analysis of government data by the Times of India, between 2020 and 2004 nearly 33,000 deaths occurred due to building collapses, fires or people falling into pits and maintenance holes. The collapse in Delhi has prompted questions, once again, about the state of urban infrastructure in India’s biggest cities. At a time when the country is undertaking a rapid infrastructure boom – new airports, high-speed expressways, luxury residential towers– daily life in cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru appears to be deteriorating.
Indian cities are not walkable, they rank among the worst for air quality, construction is poorly regulated, seasonal flooding is common and waste management remains under pressure. These challenges are only going to increase; the World Bank expects India’s urban population to double, going up to 951 million, by 2050. More than half of the urban infrastructure the country will need by then has yet to be built, it said.
So, what would it take to make our cities better and safer? The experts I spoke to broadly agreed that Indian cities don’t lack rules as much as the political will and institutional machinery to enforce them. For infrastructure veteran Vinayak Chatterjee, one solution lies in giving urban local bodies more power.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
