Mumbai, Nov 4 - India and China fundamentally differ in their approach to their cities with the former a victim of the Gandhian ideology that militates against the 'idea of the city', suggests London-based design and urban expert Deyan Sudjic.'China does not want to see its cities overwhelmed, and forbids free internal movement. India's constitution guarantees it,' Sudjic said in a special issue published to coincide with the three-day Urban Age conference that ended here Friday.India, notes Sudjic, was to be rooted in the Gandhian 'self-sufficiency of village life' after independence.Sudjic is director of the London-based Design Museum, and was earlier design and architecture critic for The Observer, the Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University and co-chair of the Urban Age Advisory Board. He founded the architectural monthly Blueprint in 1983.Gandhian ideology displays a 'profound antipathy towards the idea of the city', notes Sudjic. Change coming now can be tough, he suggests.Struggling with the command and control economy for long, urban India is now exploring liberal market approaches to city infrastructure, and with the first results now visible 'it is questioning their effectiveness'.Comments Sudjic: 'The new India is impatient with the things that don't work in its cities: the traffic jams, the shortcomings of infrastructure, the bureaucracy. It wants to see big changes and has invested in huge projects like Delhi's new metro system.'He compares China with India, asking whether Indian democracy and its legal system are really an advantage in its competition with its neighbour, which forbids internal movement in a bid to avoid seeing its cities overwhelmed.'Like China, India is finding new ways of doing things that involve profound political shifts,' says Sudjic, and cites the case of Marxist-ruled Kolkata experimenting with market forces.'Bangalore and Delhi have also struggled with attempts at liberalising their approaches to planning work effectively.'Kolkata, he believes, is alone among Indian cities in taking steps to a 'genuine locally-centered civic government, rather than remaining entirely in the hands of a state with a vast rural hinterland'.He points to India's overlapping systems of state, city and federal power. This, for instance, made it difficult for Mumbai's city government to introduce a plan for vaccinations for all newcomers.
(c) Indo-Asian News Service
