A long time ago, in an age far,
far away, there was talk of turning Mumbai into Shanghai. Impressed with
China’s infrastructure, people often mention Shanghai. Sometimes, they actually
mean Pudong, carved out of nothing more than fishing villages. Shanghai wasn’t
Greenfield. Pudong was. Of course, this involved land acquisition, resettlement
and rehabilitation. The implicit assumption is this is easier in a country
without democratic processes, so dissension and conflict can be contained.
Doesn’t work in India. Our problem of urban planning is we can’t have
Greenfield cities.
Consequently, we are stuck with
chaotic Brownfield urbanization, inevitable because economic development is
correlated with urbanization. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had smaller towns
with population sizes between 50,000 and 1 million, as bridges between larger
villages and 3 million-plus cities, which then lead on to metros? These 50,000
to 1 million cities will naturally be Greenfield. SEZs, especially if you leave
out ITES-type ones, were meant to be this. They actually had little to do with
exports. How they were marketed is irrelevant. Stuck with problems of land
acquisition, the idea hasn’t worked that well. This doesn’t mean the idea is
devoid of economic rationale.
Cities exist and prosper because
they provide assorted network effects and positive externalities. That’s the
reason urbanization is correlated with economic development. Who will develop
these cities and govern them? Urban governance, provided threshold population
and other criteria are met, must mandatorily be through elected urban local
bodies (ULBs). Many States seem to be skeptical about ULB an capacity, which is
why they use the “industrial township” route, acceptable at developmental
stage, until the town is inhabited.
This is like a charter city,
where the city is governed by its own charter, independent of other
legislation. At Vibrant Gujarat, there was a special pavilion on Dholera
Special Investment Region (DSIR), described as a new Gujarat within Gujarat.
The CM spoke proudly about it, describing it as something that would surpass
Shanghai. If you watched the video at the pavilion, you would have believed
this. The mind boggled. (You can boggle the mind by visiting the website too.)
There’s a slight difference between a SIR and a SEZ. For a SEZ, one needs to
acquire the entire contiguous land. With a SIR, even partial land acquisition
works. Dholera will be Gujarat’s first SIR, also the first under Delhi-Mumbai
Industrial Corridor Project (DMIC), the joint initiative with Japan.
