Unnatural urbanisation

Urban planning must be more eco-sensitive

Last week, a 20-minute thunderstorm in Delhi uprooted many trees, some of them between 40 and 50 years old, throwing the city out of gear for hours. This chaos has become a pattern whenever a pre-monsoon storm, with high-velocity winds, hits the city. But the problem is serious enough for the Delhi High Court to take note of the callous urban planning that causes these venerable old trees, which provide the polluted city its vital green lungs, to lose their moorings. As the court rightly pointed out, the growing concretisation of the city, without providing trees sufficient breathing space around their trunks, causes their roots to dry out and make them vulnerable to the elements. Though the Delhi government has resolved to plant trees to make up for the losses, this exercise does not adequately compensate for the huge biodiversity destruction that accompanies each fallen tree in terms not just of flora but also the birds and insects that have inhabited them for decades.
 

The wholly avoidable and dwindling tree population in Delhi is only one reflection of the reckless nature of urbanisation in India that is visibly destroying the natural habitat. Chronic annual monsoon floods in Chennai and Bengaluru, an unmistakable 21st century trend, and the ritual shutdown of Mumbai when the rains intensify are symptoms of the same problem. In Chennai and Bengaluru, the haphazard construction over surrounding lakes, wetlands, and marshlands has deprived both cities of natural drainage systems, and unique bird and insect life, which could have partially offset the mysterious inability of municipal bodies to adequately clean drainage networks ahead of the rainy season. In Mumbai, it’s the hectic horizontal and vertical construction on mangrove forests and low-lying reclaimed land that has deprived the city of a critical conduit for monsoon rain, apart from contributing to the massive destruction of marine biodiversity.

Given that urbanisation is unavoidable and the need to provide housing for an expanding population will inevitably encroach on land, it is critical that planners pay more attention to optimising the environmental balance with urban development. This demands some degree of forward thinking by urban bodies in promoting vertical rather than horizontal development to contain urban sprawls — the steady encroachment of Delhi on to the Ridge, the city’s green lungs, or of Gurugram over the ecologically priceless Aravalli offer unedifying examples of the absence of such planning. Frenetic tree felling for sundry infrastructure projects in all major cities is another issue that can be approached with greater imagination than a mindless replanting exercise, which is of limited value. The degrees to which cities are out of sync with nature can be seen most tragically in India’s Himalayan and Nilgiri mountains, where Dubai-style glass and concrete jungles are sprouting on fragile and stunning beautiful terrain. An insistence on the use of local, eco-friendly material could have easily contained this unsightly sprawl. But as Delhi has demonstrated, the lack of eco-sensitive urban planning in India is promoting an ecological and aesthetic disaster — for which Indians will pay in the long run.