Bengaluru, Chennai and Surat could each soon have an adviser with an unlikely title: chief resilience officer.
The advisers will have the mandate to work with all stakeholders to make their cities resilient to shocks and stresses amid rapid urbanisation. And helping them in decision-making will be advanced tools such as those that can navigate big data.
All this because the three cities have made it to the 100 Resilient Cities project, run by the New York-based non-profit organisation Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation has so far chosen 67 cities worldwide, including Amman in Jordan, London in England, New York in the U.S. and Melbourne in Australia.
The financial commitment for the project is $100 million. This doesn’t mean each city gets $1 million. What the cities would get are funds to recruit the chief resilience officer. Other than that, support would be in the form of tools, people and the network.
Last week, Michael Berkowitz, managing director of the 100 Resilient Cities project, told The Hindu that it was aimed at helping cities organise themselves around their key challenges and help them access resources or best practices efficiently to meet those challenges.
The common challenges in the three Indian cities, as listed in the project’s website, are flooding, infrastructure inadequacies and pollution.
Additionally, Bangalore has to deal with poor transport, while its southern neighbour Chennai has to contend with overpopulation and a constant threat of cyclones. Surat, which two decades ago faced a deadly outbreak of plague, also has disease-outbreak and rising sea levels listed as challenges. Water will remain among the key challenges for Bengaluru, as it now depends on pumped water from the Cauvery nearly 100 km away.
Bengaluru, Chennai share water woes
A.R. Shivakumar, a scientist from the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Science, said he believes that half of the installed borewells in Bengaluru city have stopped yielding water. “Unless rainwater harvesting is followed in a big way, water will be hard to come by in Bengaluru,” he said at a workshop on lakes held on Saturday.
Researcher T.V. Ramachandra, from the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, had in a research paper pointed out that “the visualised outcome for 2020 indicates certain doomsday for Bangalore city with the current lopsided approaches in urban planning.”
He had then concluded on a grim note: “This will lead to further changes in the regional climate; enhanced pollutants in air and water, increase of temperature, consequent thriving of disease vectors and loss of vital natural resources.”
Raj Cherubal, Director (Projects), Chennai City Connect, described as a platform for industry associations and civic organisations, listed flooding and shrinking of water bodies as top issues for Chennai. Then, “there are several poor people living near the river banks. We need to figure out what are the alternatives available for them,” he said.
Mr. Cherubal said: “Every city has gone through something bitter and then change. Great cities globally were bad and had dirty river moving through and then they changed. So, Chennai is not facing something new now.”
Chennai, Bengaluru and Surat all find a place on the list of top 10 metropolitan areas in India by population. But why do only they find a place on the Resilient Cities list from India? It isn’t as if the other Indian cities were free from the problems of rapid urbanisation.
For getting in, cities need to apply, and then a panel of judges has to review those applications. And what the panel is looking for, as the project’s FAQ section puts it, are “innovative mayors, a recent catalyst for change, a history of building partnerships” and an ability to work with a wide range of stakeholders.
There is no timeline for the project, said a Chennai Corporation official, who wished anonymity. The official said at a recent council meeting that the details of this project were submitted to the State government, whose approval is needed for work to start.
(Report coordinated by Sriram Srinivasan)
