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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.
Meanwhile, the COE, said IIT-B, will see students’ involvement in a big way. “Industry is not in a position at present to throw the kind of intellectual resources that exist in centres such as ours at such infrastructural problems. Besides, there is a dire need for creating the kind of trained manpower that will populate future businesses in infrastructure and in transportation,” said Arya.
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RatingIt was heartening to hear that some academicians are keen to develop urban simulation models specifically for indian conditions which are drastically different from U.S where bulk of urban simulation is going on. Be it largescale or agent based modelling it is very impotant to ingrain the impact of individual behaviour of agents like unauthorised growth and sprawl ,dispersions created by political system and capacity for empirical testability.In india most of the times we are lost in simulation technicalities and fail to rationalise our model outside the regime of algorithms.
I am a BTech. in Civil Engg. from IIT-Bombay ('97 batch), I also have a MS in Transportation Engg. from USA. I have been involved in projects for DoT's and public transit agencies. Software such as HCS (Highway capacity software), CORSIM (Corridor Simulation), Synchro, can be used in big metros like Mumbai, Delhi, to model traffic flow and solve the congestion to a certain extent. Also, high occupancy lanes, and carpooling solutions can be introduced. Pricing solutions such as Congestion-pricing, and Parking-pricing will also help reduce traffic. Rapid Transit networks with surrounding cities, as far as Pune, and bunch of suburbs can definitely attract increased suburban growth, and ease a lot of city traffic. Infact, the BEST SOLUTION that I see for India today is introduction of these RAPID TRANSIT NETWORKS around every major City, and even Town that encourages living in Rural areas.
Urban planning as an organised profession has existed for less than a century. It is all too obvious, therefore, that the uneducated representatives in the village, towns and cities of India and urban planners of settlements have not displayed any forethought in the development and planning of towns and cities in India and in their conscious design, layout and functioning. Villages, towns and cities laid out with forethought and design permeate antiquity. Perhaps the earliest of these were those of the ancient Mesopotamian and Harrapan civilisations of the third millennium BCE. Ur located near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in modern day Iraq and some ancient cities of the Indus Valley in modern day India are perhaps the earliest examples of deliberately planned and managed cities in history. The streets of these early cities were often paved and laid out at right angles in a grid pattern. There was also a hierarchy of streets (commercial boulevards to small residential alleyways).
In Harrapan settlements, archaeological evidence suggests the houses were laid out to protect from noise, odours and thieves and had their own wells and sanitation. Ancient cities often had drainage, large granaries and well-developed urban sanitation. However, what have the councillors of the Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Ahmedabad Municipal Corporations, State MLAs and MPs and other politicians been doing all these 60 years since independence and how is it that they have allowed the big towns and Metropolis of India to degenerate into vast slums?
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