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Brownfield incremental cities
Written By idontspam - 7 July, 2010
Bangalore Train Transportation public transport Commuter rail local train cities tier 2 brownfield subir roy Commuter rail
The challenge for India is to write a new chapter in low-cost urban development, the way it has done in wireless telephony and automobiles (Nano) writes Subir Roy
Why did I post this under Commuter Rail? Because it ties in very well with what we are trying to say. Commuter rail infrastructure costs afraction of the fortune we spend today as most of it is already available. Incremental investment in mordenization of signaling and operations is all that is required to make it efficient. If one picked the cities identified in this report, connect them to Bangalore and did all that the author is trying to say, we can have a world class ecosystem up and running in no time.5 years tops.
Is the govt listening? Are the bearucrats up to it?
COMMENTS
silkboard - 9 July, 2010 - 03:37
Subir's article made a nice read. Him, Mr Ninnan, Surjit Bhalla at times, and Aditi Phadnis, and several more - there are some wirters at business standard that keep me hooked to that paper.
Naveen - 31 July, 2010 - 10:57
Srivatsava - 9 July, 2010 - 03:06
IDS,
A rail network and connectivity to the "City" is no doubt of paramount importance. One factor to encourage growth of these townships/ satellite towns is to create a JNNURM like infrastructure creation model for them - Such a scheme should focus on the basics, like water, sewage, garbage, 'decent' roads and discard 'big ticket' projects like metro, TTMCs, expressways etc
Imagine if there was no JNNURM for Bangalore/Chennai/Mumbai-sized cities, and we had a JNNURM only for tier-2 ities and another JNNURM for satellite towns of big cities. A lot of investments would have been diverted to the 'newer' and 'smaller' urban centers. - If that were to happen, private investment, job creation etc will follow
Apologies if the comment is little off-topic.
Brownfield & Greenfield cities
idontspam - 8 July, 2010 - 06:17
Mr Subir Roy, noted with interest your column on building brownfield incremental cities as an alternate model of development. While developing teir 2 cities and satellite townships is not an entirely a new concept, one of the factors
preventing the growth of these towns is the choice of the cities and their linkage to the big city's economic ecosystem. At Praja.in we have attempted to use commuter rail service for Bengaluru as a means to kickstart this kind of brownfield city development.
We believe that by picking towns & growth centers close to an hours train ride from the city and using them as low cost housing magnets one can incentivise the growth of these magnets as well as retain the umbilical cord to the primary
economic growth engine, The City. The key to this economic model is the reliable, jam free, relatively inexpensive connectivity provided by high frequency train service.
You can read more on the proposal at http://praja.in/en/crs-bangalore. Welcome your thoughts on the same.
***
Thank you for your response. We are roughly on the same wavelength. I am attaching two articles by me, the first one "30 new Bangalores" was written in early 2008 and the second one "Greenfield cities" a fortnight ago.
I will be pursuing praja.in with keen interest.
Regards
Subir Roy
***
I will post his articles here if he is okay with it, the recent one is available here. The greenfield idea is being implemented in Lavasa already privately and also being contemplated by the government here.
silkboard - 9 July, 2010 - 03:40
Several beurocrats mention, but will never like to be quoted that low cost options don't excite ministries for reasons that can be guessed. I bet Mr Gokarn and the likes would know a lot more about this angle. Wonder if a newspaper can take the lead in detailing the full ecosystem (supply chain, and drippings) of one such sample large project.
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