The Hindu Business Line : Wages of town non-planning

The panel probing the Kumbakonam school fire tragedy will discover many culprits but almost certainly overlook the worst offence: Poor town planning. It is easy to blame the population for many of the problems, forgetting that several world capitals have very high density. Nor will planners accept that streets should be wide enough to be usable normally let alone in emergencies, that cities can, and should, harvest all the water they consume, or that they are unnecessarily overcrowded, says P . V. Indiresan.

THE Justice Sampat panel enquiring into the fire tragedy that killed over a hundred schoolchildren in Kumbakonam will no doubt ask many incisive questions. What did the teachers do? Who authorised the construction of the thatched roof that caught fire? Why was the school not inspected? There will be a host of other queries in a similar vein. However, it is unlikely that the panel will enquire whether the street, on which the unfortunate school was located, was wide enough for fire engines to negotiate. It is even more unlikely that it will make any recommendation about how wide should streets be made.

In the same vein, the panel is unlikely to enquire why there was no hydrant in the locality for the simple reason that there are no hydrants in any town in the country. Therefore, we cannot expect it to make any recommendation about how enough water should be kept ready at all times to handle emergencies.

The panel will probably criticise the cramped conditions in the school but it is doubtful whether it will stipulate how much space a town should reserve for schools and playgrounds. Public memory being short, the episode will soon be forgotten. In all probability, the same old bad practices will return and no one will bother until another disaster strikes.

It is a law of nature that accidents will happen. Yet, it is possible to have systems in place to minimise damage. In the case of fire, the simplest precaution is to have enough room for fire tenders to reach the scene quickly, ambulances to ferry the injured, and enough water for the tenders to function. Then, a street needs a clear pathway of at least two lanes — six-seven metres wide.

In Indian cities, most streets are lined with cars. Therefore, the streets should offer 6-7 metres wide free movement even after cars are parked on both sides of the street. That means the carriage way should be at least 12 metres wide. Add another 3-4 metres for footpaths. Then, in the prevailing situation, the minimum width for a street should be set at 15-16 metres, around 50-55 feet.

Any suggestion that, at least in future, our streets should be not less than 50 feet wide will be received with disdain as Utopian. Will the same experts guarantee that cars will not block the carriage way, not merely now but for decades to come? Will they guarantee that no fire will erupt at any time in the future? Can they assure that, in case of fire, there will be enough facilities to provide succour? Incidentally, a wide passage way is needed not merely for emergencies; it is needed for the smooth flow of normal traffic.

We need hydrants too but without water they are of no use. There will be water in the hydrants only when people have enough supply of water for their daily needs, not otherwise. No person, who is starved of cash, will have a savings account; no community starved of water will allow hydrants to store water.

Unfortunately, all our cities are woefully short of water. In recent years, water has become a lucrative business, so lucrative that many petty politicians have developed a vested interest in water scarcity. For those politicians, whether it is the rural poor or the urban, people are worms to be trampled down. Someday even that worm will turn and rebel: Rural folk will refuse to give up their water anymore. Someday, urban dwellers too will revolt.

Ideally, a city should generate its own water. Surprisingly enough, that is quite feasible. A hundred litres of water a day is reasonable consumption per person in modern times. Developed countries consume much more. Then, a family of four will need about 150 cubic metres of water per year. (Let us hope that we will settle down to a four-member family. In a recently-constructed residential development in Boston, the average family size is 1.8. Many families have single parents; most children know no fathers; few fathers know their children. Let us hope that such a fate will not await us even though our popular media propagate such Western lifestyles as attractive and glamorous.)

Ideally, the rain that falls on the house should be sufficient to meet the water needs of the household. Then, in most parts of our country, dwellings will need an average of 200 sq. m. of space to rain-harvest 150 cubic metres of water per year. Town planners would declare that an allocation of 200 sq. m. space per dwelling is unworkable in the same manner they would say that 50 feet wide streets are unworkable. Thus, the Delhi Development Authority has a norm of 25 square metres per dwelling — so little space that fire tenders cannot enter even high-income DDA colonies — forget about streets where the poor live.

Our planners will argue, and vehemently too, that ours is an over-populated country; we cannot have more space for dwellings. Yet, at an average of 200 square metres per dwelling, the space required to house the entire nation will be less than 1.5 per cent of the country's land area (of which 15 per cent is uncultivable). In other words, we have enough and more space to let our dwellings harvest their own water. Our cities, or at any rate future expansions, can be designed in such a way that they will be self sufficient in water, enough to afford to have water in hydrants for emergencies. It is possible to prevent disasters like the one that stuck Kumbakonam.

Kumbakonam became the tragedy it did because there was no other space for that unfortunate school to exist, nor manage without a thatched roof. So, let us turn to the third question about how much space a town should set apart for non-residential activities. Let us start with roads.

If the average dwelling has an area of 200 square metres, with plots, say, 10 metres wide and 20 metres deep. Then, each dwelling will face 10 metres of roads. With dwellings on either side, the share per dwelling will halve to 5 metres. If the street is 16-metre wide, street area per dwelling will be 80 square metres. If we add non-residential streets, the street space per dwelling will go up to 100 square metres.

As a thumb rule, we can take it that the space required per dwelling for schools and other public services, for playgrounds, for business and commerce, for waste disposal and above all, for parking cars in commercial areas, will add up to another 100 square metres, making a total of 400 square metres per dwelling. At that rate, population density will be 10,000 per sq. km. In comparison, the norm used in the planning of Delhi is 35,000 persons per sq km. Other cities and towns are worse. Such excessive congestion has made us accident-prone. So, our towns kill many people callously.

Everybody is convinced that ours is an overpopulated country; that it cannot afford the standards of the West. Nothing can be farther than the truth. Many countries like Belgium, England and Holland have higher population densities than we have. Their largest cities, including London, Brussels and Amsterdam, have population densities less than 5000 per sq km. Hence, a population density of 10,000 per sq km is actually miserly. In any case, even at that undreamt-of rate, we will need no more than three per cent of land area to house our entire population.

Unfortunately, our policy-makers are unmoved by these arguments. They will not accept that our streets should be wide enough to be usable normally let alone in emergencies. They will not accept that our cities can, and should, harvest all the water they consume. They will not agree that our cities are unnecessarily overcrowded.

A hundred children in Kumbakonam did not die but were killed by the false arguments of experts that our country is far too overcrowded to permit civilised urban design.

They are the kind of experts that know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Because they made our streets too narrow, overcrowded our towns and cities, left no space for schools and essential services, made no effort to provide enough water for people's needs, they killed many innocent children in Kumbakonam. Because of their obduracy, they will continue to kill.

The Sampat Panel may discover many culprits in the Kumbakonam tragedy. It will almost certainly overlook the worst offender, namely, the town planners and the municipal leaders neither of whom will let civilised habitats to emerge.

Kumbakonam made big news only because it was a dramatic event. The numbers that get killed every day, in road accidents or because of avoidable pollution are far, far higher. That is routine, not news. Hundreds and thousands die because we have become callous and because we do not get at the root of how bad things happen. It is the fashion to blame nature for our misery. Nature has not been unkind to us; we have been unkind to ourselves.

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to: indresan@vsnl.com)

This is 131st in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on August 23.

More Stories on : Infrastructure | Water | Accidents | Vision 2020

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Colour Chem open offer and asset valuation

Of little import

RBI's Annual Report 2003-2004 — At what price protection from forex reserves?

Importance of public investment in infrastructure

Wages of town non-planning

Party carnivals

When advertising distracts and not informs

Depreciation of securities