$1.68 trillion will be needed to provide housing for the growing population in the nation of cities
Ashok Kumar, a junior company executive living in a modest suburb of India's capital New Delhi, wakes up each morning at four o'clock.
He does so in order to fill three buckets with the brownish water that trickles from his kitchen tap for barely 30 minutes each day that has to last him and his family of five till the same ritual begins once more the following morning.
They can hope for no more for most of the year, especially during the hot summer months.
There will be neither electricity to pump water up to his third-floor flat, nor water in the underground taps that service about 100 families or around 700 people in Kumar's residential block.
Kumar's family is engaged in a perpetual race with their neighbours for water.
Soon afterwards, if Kumar is fortunate, it might take him 90 minutes to scooter 20km to work on narrow, pot-holed roads choked with indisciplined traffic belching diesel smoke.
When he arrives at work, his anti-pollution mask which he wears across his face is black and needs replacing for the return journey home.
What also frequently need changing are his blackened clothes.
Despite such handicaps, Kumar can be counted amongst the fortunate few in Delhi, which has a density of 9340 people per sq km according to the 2001 census - among the highest of all Indian cities.
But the majority of Delhi's nearly 20 million residents do not enjoy Kumar's "comforts" in what is also perhaps India's most prosperous metropolis.
For as well as over-crowded tenements, insufficient water and electricity, they have to bear the additional debilitating burden of living in what is one of the world's most polluted cities, dotted with proliferating slums.
According to the National Capital Regional Planning Board, the city slums that comprise 28 per cent of Delhi will, over the next decade, encroach on all available space and create a situation where 57 per cent of people will have no water, 41 per cent no sewage facilities and 40 per cent no power.
In a recent presentation to Delhi's Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, the capital's principal planning body said that those who cannot afford to migrate from the capital will be buried deep under sewage and garbage as already over-stretched facilities prove inadequate.
City traffic, too, will slow down from 14km to 5km an hour as slums spill over on to roads.
That's not all. Officials said more than 2000 metric tonnes of pollutants were daily released into the city's atmosphere, where the incidence of respiratory diseases was 12 times the national average.
Besides, around 12 per cent of children in Delhi were asthmatic because of pollution, which was expected to rise by 72 per cent in five years.
New Delhi also has more than 10 million vehicles and the world's highest road accident death rate of six people per day in addition to which thousands were either permanently maimed or badly injured each year.
"If the current pressure of population in Delhi and other cities across India continues it will be nothing short of apocalyptic for the country," the city's leading urban designer planner and architect Pradeep Sachdev said.
Making the looming environmental and human disaster worse was the indifference of the federal and state governments, city planners and even local citizens as India's population soared and cities mushroomed haphazardly to somehow accommodate it.
Numerous other city planners said that if the prevailing trend of annually adding more than 20 million people to its population - nearly equivalent to the entire population of Australia - was not somehow halted, economic, social and environmental justice for the poor and the country's ecological security would remain a "mirage".
Consequently, the majority of India's population would end up living in hovels and slums in unbearably wretched and inhuman conditions.
India houses 17.31 per cent of the world's population. It is projected to become the world's most populous country by 2025, surpassing China with a population exceeding 1.6 billion by 2050.
Of this astronomical number, nearly 60 per cent were below the age of 35 with growing aspirations that needed cities to sustain.
According to McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the research arm of international McKinsey consultants India was emerging as a "nation of cities" and needed the astronomical investment of around US$1.2 trillion ($1.68 trillion) to meet this.
In its frightening projections, MGI's analysis revealed that with India's gross domestic product expected to increase five-fold by 2030, some 590 million people, or twice America's population, would need to live in cities that would generate 70 per cent of employment for over 270 million citizens.
Over the next two decades, MGI states that 68 Indian cities would have a population of over 1 million, up from 42 today, compared with Europe that currently has 35. Of these, 91 million households would be middle class, up from 22 million at present.
To sustain this daunting population explosion 6.47sq km of roads would need paving - 20 times the capacity added since 2000 - in addition to 7400km of commuter rail lines, also 20 times the capacity installed over the past decade.
Economists said that to erect this urban sprawl would need millions of hectares of land. This, in turn, would impact adversely on agriculture and India's food security where 77 per cent of its people live on less than US$2 a day.
By 2030:
Population:
- 590m urban Indians
- 290m more people of working age
Economy:
- 70% of new employment will be generated in cities
- 5-fold projected growth of GDP
Transport:
- 7400km of commuter train tracks will need to be constructed - 20 times the capacity added in the last decade
- 2.5bn sq m of roads will have to be paved - 20 times the capacity added in the last decade
Housing:
- 90m urban households will be middle class, up from 22m today
- 700-900m sq m of commercial and residential space will need to be built - the equivalent of a new Chicago.
