ekal
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Apparently Nagpur is going to be a test case for modernizing a city in just a few short years.
Ditching laissez faire, India plans a city - International Herald Tribune
Ditching laissez faire, India plans a city - International Herald Tribune
NAGPUR, India: A year ago, this relatively small, forgettable city in the heart of India did not have an air-conditioned cinema. In the sweltering heat of May, the rich here were known to fly one hour to Mumbai, the financial hub of India, to see a movie. There they stocked up on Levi's jeans and Domino's pizza and other big-city treats that Nagpur failed to provide.
But in a social experiment highly unusual for this most unplanned of countries, the Indian government has handpicked Nagpur to be fattened and primped into an international metropolis.
Lush parks and smooth roads have been lain, and malls and multiplex cinemas have sprouted. A drastically renovated airport is to become the cargo hub of India, with a terminal that is 100 times larger than the existing one and is to handle at least 100 jets at a time instead of the current five. An ecofriendly mass-transit system is being planned to absorb an expected surge in road traffic, years before the average Nagpurian owns a car. The government is building a special economic zone with tax breaks and ready-to-use water, electricity and fiber optic cable, in the hope of attracting 100,000 technology jobs to a city long dominated by coal mining.
Borrowing a chapter from China's playbook, the Indian government has begun working to make metropolises out of smaller, isolated cities, from Jaipur in the north to Vijayawada in the east to Mysore in the south, garnishing them with fresh infrastructure like international airports and financial grants linked to improvements in governance.
"One hundred million people are moving to cities in the next 10 years, and it's important that these 100 million are absorbed into second-tier cities instead of showing up in Delhi or Mumbai," Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Indian government's chief economic planner, said in a telephone conversation.