Planning Infrastructure

In most Indian cities, a familiar sight is that of what can be loosely termed as "construction". Flyovers, road, bridges, transit railways, parking lots, new residential and office buildings - every city seems to be playing catch up with the lost time of the first 50 years of modern India.

It is good! It is good for the economy, for creating jobs at every stage of the value chain, for creating infrastructure to service the needs of an ever increasing population.

There are some key elements missing from these infrastructure construction activities:

1. Planning for future capacity
2. Concern for pedestrians
3. Creating green spaces
4. Ease of use

1. Planning for future capacity: in most infrastructure projects the planners seem to plan for immediate rather than future capacity. Witness the construction of flyovers across busy intersections. Why not create flyovers over all the intersections at one go - instead of coming to a breakdown situation and then deciding to build?

2. Concern for pedestrians: in no project the planners factor in needs to pedestrians. How does a pedestrian get to cross the road? How does the pedestrian alight from the bus? Is the footpath wide enough to carry hundreds of thousands of pedestrians who walk every day for short or medium distances? The true test of a civilised nation is how it treats it's less priviliged citizens. In this respect India has a long way to go - at least in its treatment of pedestrians.

3. Creating green spaces: after all the construction has ended and the dust died down, what will leave for our children to inherit? Endless concrete stretches? The scenario is scary. In all our infrastructure projects - where is the planning for creating green spaces?

4. Ease of use: ease of use was never a priority for our planners. We create skywalks for pedestrians because we cannt give them footpaths. Fantastic, but anyone thought about the ease of use of skywalks which are as high as a three storey building? What about the mandatory escalators on all sides? When the pedestrians finally have to get off the skywalk - do they spill on to the road or the footpath? Why dont we have escalators from all platforms of all railway stations which have more than ten thousand passengers transiting every day?

Who will teach these to well educated planners? The best way would be to make them pedestrians and users of public transport for such a time till they improve planning and delivery.