A UN Habitat publication warns that inequalities and worsening informal settlements (read slums) could lead to widespread violence and chaos in the cities and towns of the world. The newly-released report titled “Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009” says that with almost 200,000 new dwellers flooding into the world cities and towns each day, there is an urgent need to check the mushrooming of such settlements. The...

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government. “That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the...

For some time now, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been the organising framework for the activities of international organisations and donor agencies. It is probably not very useful any more to quarrel about their relative lack of ambition, their limited aims and absence of recognition of the structural causes of poverty and inequality. All that is well known; even so, simply because of their wide acceptance, the MDGs have...

With the national capital furiously gearing up to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Games, the alarming number of deaths of construction workers in absence of proper safety norms and adequate compensation is a cause of concern, say social activists. The actual number of accidents and casualties are much more but many such cases never get reported, they add. Fifty nine construction workers were killed and 115 suffered serious injuries...

THE ongoing negotiations with the World Bank provide an opportunity to urban policymakers to reinvent the present form of JNNURM (called v1.0). Thus far JNNURM v1.0 has focused on upgrading macro-level dimensions of city’s environment, ignoring the social and economic diversity (e.g., mixed uses and building types) prevailing in urban areas. The top-down urban ‘renewal’ model underlying the present version of JNNURM is largely founded on the planning practices of...