Most urban agglomerates in India today are veritable disasters, typically for the same set of reasons, primary among them being the lack of foresight as well as capriciousness in planning. Planners by and large have not an iota of knowledge about urban ecology, and the matter of sustainable cities is mumbo-jumbo for them. Of course, if self-sufficiency is to be a criterion, there cannot be any such thing as a sustainable city. For, cities have always relied on their rural hinterlands for food and other goods and services, and have had precious little of ecological resources to conserve themselves. In that, Bangalore could have remained unique. It had a unique ecosystem of lakes, and was equally known to be a city of gardens for its huge and innumerable green spaces that still dominated the landscape when the British left the country.
But all that was once precious, is now as good as lost. Frittered away, if you may. Coincidentally, most of the environmental degradation that was wrought on Bangalore had corresponded with the rise of the IT industry in the city. This is not to blame the latter; only to point out that the frenzied urban enlargement the city has witnessed since then has been powered by an agenda that chose to turn a blind eye to environmental issues. Both the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (the brainchild of the earlier Congress regime) and the Agenda for Bengaluru Infrastructure Development (ABIDe) (baby of the subsequent Bharatiya Janata Party dispensation) have been dominated by technocrats. They thought more of urban governance (read, infrastructure), and less of urban ecology. There is nothing wrong with building infrastructure; it can, however, be calamitous when not implemented within an ecologically sound framework.
The failure of policymakers and lawmakers are now writ large all over. Both lakes and parks are diminishing at a rate faster than the growth of the city’s peripheral limits; the metropolis is sinking under its own stinking garbage heap; and “chaotic” is what you would describe the town as when trying to negotiate your way through the city’s unruly traffic. Bangalore, like most other cities, is bursting at its seams, and few have started even to talk of urban ecology. And lopsided priorities are there to be seen – the obsession is with upgrading a swank Bangalore International Airport which caters to a few thousand people every day, rather than clearing the mess of a Majestic bus station which is availed of by lakhs of passengers daily. It’s all skewed, and tell-tale.
And why not? After all, Bangalore, home to many scientific institutions, also laps up the claptrap of an ex-bureaucrat who believes that pigeon droppings are harmful to human beings and other birds. This former civil servant recently described the high density of pigeons in Cubbon Park, virtually the city’s lungs, as a health hazard, and his contention was swallowed as the gospel truth by the citizenry. When scientific obscurantism rules, environmental awareness naturally becomes scarce. What else can you expect in a state ruled by a party which did not even pay lip service to environment in its last election manifesto. The issue of urban ecology stays damned.
