If China shows the highest planning costs on the ground, India shows the least costs. India’s urban development has suffered from a strong hierarchical structure and an economic philosophy that prioritizes rural life over urbanization. Together, Nehruvian bureaucracy and Gandhian economics, which romanticized rural agricultural life, made it more expensive to convert rural land to urban use. India’s urban development has lagged behind China’s, and the pressures of urbanization have resulted in the illegal construction of slums and illegal and chaotic development in major cities.
Gurgaon, a city southwest of New Delhi, is different. Gurgaon was a small city 25 years ago, but today it is a city of about two million people filled with skyscrapers, luxury apartment towers, golf courses, five star hotels and shopping malls. Often referred to as the “Singapore of India,” Gurgaon is home to the offices of nearly half of the Fortune 500 firms.
Gurgaon, however, did not grow with a plan but because of a lack of common sense. After the state of Haryana streamlined the licensing process, it left developers in Gurgaon to come up with their own needs with little intervention from any national, state or local government. As a result, almost everything that works in Gurgaon today is secret. Security, for example, is provided privately in almost all housing, shopping and technology areas. In all, around 35,000 private security guards protect Gurgaon, compared to only 4,000 government officials. Gurgaon also has India’s largest private entrance, which fills an important gap, because it should have access to the tallest buildings in Gurgaon.
But it’s not all good. No developer in Gurgaon was big enough to organize city-wide sanitation, water or electricity services. For a price, private companies provide this, but in inefficient ways. Excrement it does not flow to a central treatment plant but is usually collected in trucks and dumped in a public place. Tap water is often delivered by private trucks or from illegally pumped groundwater. Reliable electricity is available 24 hours a day, but often uses polluting diesel generators.
Compared to the rest of India, Gurgaon is doing well but its performance is still a long way off. Is there a middle ground between the ghost towns of China and the chaos of Gurgaon? Surprisingly, privately planned cities may be the answer. And one of the oldest is in India.
Jamshedpur was was established by Tata Steel, as a company town, in 1908. It has landscaped parks, paved roads and even a lake, but it is not a playground for the rich. A working city. However, it is the only city in Jharkhand state that has a sewage treatment plant, and is one of the few cities in all of India where residents enjoy affordable electricity, reliable electricity and safe tap water. In a survey by marketing research firm Nielsen, residents ranked the city among the best in India for its cheap and reliable supply of sewage, water, electricity, public sanitation and roads.
Jamshedpur works because Tata has enough land to have the right incentives to plan and invest in city-wide infrastructure. Tata also had to maintain good facilities to attract employees. In Gurgaon, private developers have built a lot of infrastructure, but only up to the building line. By extending the property line to the city scale, incentives to build large infrastructure such as sewer, water and electricity facilities are also increased.
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