A team from IIT-Bombay was among various premier research institutions invited by the Ministry — the others included IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIM Bangalore, IISc-Bangalore, School of Planning & Architecture-New Delhi, TERI and National Institute of Technology-Warangal — to discuss the establishment of Centres of Excellence (COEs) in Urban Development by these institutes. “The meeting was conducted three weeks back in which the Ministry of Urban Development conveyed to the various institutes that the need for Centres of Excellence in areas like urban infrastructure, land use, urban housing has been felt for a long time…” said IIT-B Research and Development Dean Krithi Ramamritham.

He said the Ministry sought the institutes’ views on setting up of COEs in urban transport and urban development, criteria for selections of such centres, their roles, activities and funding, among other issues.

Elaborating on IIT-B’s proposal, to be presented soon, professor Kavi Arya said: “We already have been undertaking projects in the area of transport and through the Centre, we intend to scale up our activities.” He added that the Civil Engineering department “is vibrant” in this space. “We have stalwarts such as professor S L Dhingra and new faculty like professor Tom Mathews very active in this area,” he said.

Arya said that since a lot of money is spent on infrastructure, an urban scenario simulator model as being proposed by IIT-B would be immensely useful as it would anticipate the effects of a project at the planning stage itself. “In Indian traffic modeling, while certain problems are general, others are more local. For example, Mumbai is a city where traffic movement is predominantly in the North-South axis and land costs are very high and space limited. This begs localised solutions, which might not be the same as what might work in, say, Delhi,” said Arya.

While IIT-B says that it may specialise in the local context, national problems will be the prime focus of the proposed centre. Arya said that the areas in which the centre can work would include validation of ideas such as building a satellite city, aligning new flyovers and designing new masterplans for cities, among others.