Cities have been the cradles of modernity, the incubators of human progress and growth, the anvil of human prosperity and creativity. On the flip side, they have been sites of poverty and disease, crime and violence. UNFPA’s State of World Population 2007 has just reminded us that the future is urban: by 2030, half the world’s population will be urban. India may be slightly behind the world’s urban curve but within the next quarter of a century, an estimated 40 per cent of this country’s population would also be living in its cities and towns.

Exercises in number crunching of this kind would be rendered futile if they do not inform the way we think, the way we live and, most important, the way we strategise. So what do these figures say about the future of the world, and more specifically of India? Will it be Maximum City or Future Shock? Can slums — half of India’s urbanites are slum-dwellers — be transformed in ways that transform its residents? How can urban chaos be managed before it turns explosive? Can a humongous sprawl like Mumbai, well on its way to become the second most populated on the planet with 25 million inhabitants, be better managed? How does one ensure improved infrastructure and basic services to large urban agglomerations? One of the clearer trends emerging from the report is that the great transformations of the future will take place not in the megapolises of the past, but in the smaller cities and towns. Non-metro India has already forged ahead. Chandigarh has the highest per capita income among Indian cities; 77 per cent of Panaji’s households have monthly incomes over Rs 10,000; in Vadodara there are 40 cars to 1000 people.

... contd.