Articles by Tikender Panwar

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget 2022-23 provides no relief to the people, especially those living in urban centres who were severely hit by the pandemic. With an estimated 200 million plus people without work, most of them in the cities, there was a dire need for addressing this problem. However, the urgent need for some sort of urban employment scheme remained unaddressed. The only positive aspect of the budget speech is that the finance minister has finally accepted what we, through various forums, have been advocating for long — that the current model of urban development is not sustainable. That a…

It came and went without much hooha. World Mountain Day on December 11th. And its theme for this year, “Sustainable tourism”. It was an apt theme that the UN chose. But it also exposed the limited understanding of mountains in the larger context. Mountains across the world, including our own Himalayas, attract a large number of tourists. But considering them as just hotspots for sustainable tourism is not the right approach. These mountains are actually large ecosystems so profound in the sustainability of our existence. The Himalayas provide abundant proof of this. The lives of millions of people depend on these…

On October 1st, a day before Gandhi Jayanti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sequel to his flagship and equally lauded and critiqued programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission. The aim of  Swachh Bharat 2.0, added Modi, is to make “urban areas garbage free”. He stressed that in the second phase, “the garbage mounds in cities will be processed and removed completely. We are processing about 70% of the daily waste; the next step is to take it to 100%.” Swachh Bharat 2.0 will also focus on source segregation of solid waste, utilising the principles of 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), scientific…

The first urban commission in 1988 visualised development of cities by linking them with manufacturing and industrialisation. The current scenario, however, is more service-driven where the bargaining power of the workers' vis–a–vis the state has shrunk drastically. Basic necessities considered as essential deliverables by the state are being privatised. Housing, water, health, education and such other sectors have seen massive privatisation, both vertical and horizontal, leading to an ever widening gap between the urban rich and the poorer working class. In this process, the organised strength of the urban working class has been weakened and more informalisation has crept in.…

June 25th, 2021 marked the sixth anniversary of the launch of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM). Positioned as a game changer by NDA-1, the terminology and packaging of the scheme caught public attention as a novel idea for urban development. Rankings were announced to mark the anniversary in which Indore and Surat were declared the country’s best smart cities, and Uttar Pradesh the best state. This is the first time that states have also been ranked, with Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu ranked second and third. The Centre also announced joint winners under the COVID innovation category — Kalyan-Dombivali and Varanasi.…

For opaqueness and unsolved mysteries, no other government project comes close to the Central Vista Redevelopment Project (CV) currently underway. The strong push, particularly from the prime minister, for timely completion of the new parliament building before his second term expires, is resulting in brazen violation of building laws as mentioned in the Delhi Master Plan (MPD). The over Rs 20,000 crore project will witness the construction of a triangular-shaped new parliament, new residences for the prime minister and vice-president, a new central secretariat building and demolition of existing buildings along Rajpath. These include some which are just 10 years…

The COVID pandemic has exposed our hollow development strategies aimed at achieving the United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDGs), to which India is a signatory. This hasn’t just brought to the fore the need for revisiting our strategy to move forward for a better and equitable world harmonious with nature. At the same time, it has also thrown light on how the present processes will not help in achieving any landmark advancement in attaining close proximity to the sustainable development goals. Instead, what we are witnessing is a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. To elucidate further, here are a few critical areas that require immediate intervention if we…

Dead bodies floating in the Ganges and washing up ashore in neighbouring Bihar is just one in the long list of gory stories that we have been witnessing in recent weeks. Frantic calls for help from people struggling to find a hospital bed, oxygen, blood plasma, medicines and even places for cremation or burial, continue to flood social media platforms, even as the cost of saying the final goodbye becomes too steep for many. And while citizens have come together to create resource pools, sharing leads and contact numbers, cross-checking and circulating them, union health minister Harsh Vardhan claims there…

The rapid spread of the COVID virus in India is worsening by the day. As is its management. Thousands are dying and lakhs are getting infected every day. Desperate cries for oxygen or a hospital bed from relatives and friends of COVID patients are flooding social media. Open the morning papers and what hits you are pictures of sick patients and their families gathering at the gates of hospitals. It has become a literal ‘life and death’ struggle. For even after death, bodies have to wait for space at cremation and burial grounds. This is definitely a war-like situation, where…

Little did Kirtee Bhai, who in a webinar had referred to ‘Delhi’ as a ‘way of governance model’ for cities, imagine that just a few months later Delhi would be would be transformed literally into a municipality. Kirtee Bhai, a member of the first urban commission constituted in 1986, was making a comparison between Delhi and Mumbai, terming the former with a legislature as a better model for city governance. A few weeks back, the central government passed an amendment in the Government of National Capital Delhi Act of 1991 (GNCTD), turning Delhi city-state into an adjunct of the central government…