In this article, we will discuss Issues Regarding Urban Infrastructure. So, let’s get started.
Issues Regarding Urban Infrastructure
- Climate Non-Friendly: Urban infrastructure development results in high economic value-add but often leads to unequal and inequitable growth.
- Negative externalities such as air and water pollution, climate change, flooding, and extreme heat events impinge on the economic value of urban infrastructure.
- The houses are built without ventilation, using building materials that do not provide insulation and with architectural design that does not work with nature – the climate crisis will exacerbate these risks.
- Age-Old Planning Techniques: Town and country planning acts in India have largely remained unchanged over the past 50 years, relying on techniques set up by the British.
- Cities still create land use and regulatory control-based master plans which, on their own, are ineffective in planning and managing cities.
- Several city-centric issues such as air pollution, urban flooding, and droughts exist as obstacles in holistic development of urban India all of which point to infrastructural shortcomings and inadequate planning.
- Procedural Delays and Lax Implementation: Master plans face prolonged delays in preparation, sanctioning and implementation. They lack the mandate for integration with other sectoral infrastructure plans and largely remain as wishlists.
- Often a static, ‘broad-brush’ approach is taken towards cities that have dynamic fine-grained structures and local specificities. In most cases, the rate of implementation is quite low.
- Even with provisions of rainwater harvesting, sustainable urban drainage systems, etc, in regulatory mechanisms like the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), adoption at user end as well as enforcement agencies remains weak.
