Manu Joseph: Why Indian cities may be doomed to remain unliveable

livemint.com:

As an Indian, my standards are so low that my idea of exciting urban development is a Nitin Gadkari tweet. I enjoy reading the plans of the minister for road transport and highways—his great projects, how he would punish Indians who don’t follow the law (this part especially), how he hopes to replace vehicular horns with the sound of Indian musical instruments, and how very soon road travel from Chennai to Bangalore would take only two hours. I did try to point out to him on X that right now Bangalore to Bangalore is two hours.

I do not seriously believe he can change my quality of life, but he is the only politician I know who at least gets the fantasy right. And I so enjoy reading his tweets that sometimes I look furtively behind my shoulders to see if I am alone. Usually, Indian politicians don’t give any hope when they speak of our urban future.

They speak of nonsensical things like “smart cities" and “twin cities." The fact is India’s politicians and people have worked together to make Indian cities among the most unliveable and ugly places on earth. India is obsessed with the image of its airports. Otherwise, across a vast landscape, India is an urban catastrophe.

I believe this will not change. There is no hope. I can think of only two phenomena that convey an accurate representation of modern India.

One is the Olympics and the other is any Indian town. The games expose how poorly run India is and how unkind we must be to each other to fare so poorly even against small nations. Our cities convey the same.