A 1600km stretch of high hills blanketed in forests near India's west coast is one of the most remote places in the world. There are at least 5000 types of flower. Elephants, snakes, tigers, and cave bats all live here. The mountainous territory is inhospitable. The second I cross into it, civilisation disappears. I can't get a mobile phone signal.
And yet here in the middle of the Western Ghats, I descend into a steep valley and find myself in what will soon be one of the most advanced cities on earth.
I first read about it in an advertisement in an inflight magazine, and became intrigued by visions of a metropolis governed mainly by machines. A central bank of computers will control everything from household security to the transport network.
It's a half-billion dollar project to build, from scratch, an urban dream in the middle of the mountains.
Standing on the promenade in the heart of Lavasa, I have a vantage point across the site. Ten years ago there was nothing here but a few tribal villagers living in low, thatched huts. Now they watch this city rise from the valley, like a girl gazing at her mother while she puts on her make-up.
If it looks surreal to me, it must look bizarre to the villagers. There are tall, thin, multicoloured apartment blocks in long terraces; they appear to have been lifted from the Italian streets of Portofino. Opulent chalets above me could be from Bavaria.
In the brochure, the Lavasa Corporation has used pictures of Oxford to illustrate how picturesque Lavasa will look when it's finished. It's as if the developers have picked the most beautiful parts of Europe and transplanted them here.
Right now, though, it's a ghost town. Work has halted while the Indian authorities debate environmental issues surrounding the development - though few doubt the project will reach completion.
There's a state-of-the-art hospital, which looks deserted. Electricity pylons stretch to the horizon. The only building that could be described as remotely busy is the canary-coloured town hall, where men in suits and sleeveless yellow safety jackets stand outside for a smoke. This is the opposite of an Indian city.
"Indian cities have not distinguished themselves in the annals of urban management in terms of how well run they are," says Scot Wrighton, the American city manager for Lavasa. He's responsible for running the city until it receives its first residents and elects a mayor. Although this is an Indian project, the developers scoured the world for an expert who knew how to run towns with western efficiency and cutting-edge technology. Wrighton, who has previously managed a few midwestern cities, was their choice.
Many Indian cities are unplanned and riddled with slums. Affluent districts have security guards on constant watch or locked gates at least. Since 24-hour access to any kind of amenity, from water to electricity, is rarely guaranteed, people who can afford it have their own generators and water pumps. So the challenge for Lavasa's planners is to create a city that doesn't suffer from these problems. The way they hope to do it is by replacing human bureaucrats with machines.
Miles from police and the emergency services, Lavasa is forced to be self-sufficient. The chairman of the Lavasa Corporation, Ajit Gulabchand, dreams of turning this city into its own governmental entity. His ambitious promise is that Lavasa "will be a city that governs itself" using technology, leapfrogging cities in the rest of the world.
But Lavasa is also a profitable real-estate development. Mumbai is only a few hours away. And the nearest city, Pune, is an up-and-coming IT hub. I notice here how hard they're trying to attract the kind of nerdy IT workers who are engaged in India's booming technology companies, such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. There's a videogaming arcade opposite the American diner. Developers will also be building a space theme park.
This may be India's first city designed for Generation Y. It's a geek's paradise. And not only will the geeks live here, the geeks will rule.
"Electronic governance is really nothing more than conducting the basic transactions of government via an electronic portal," says Scot Wrighton. This means replacing paper-based filing, forms and bills with digital ones, and transferring every point of contact between the government and its citizens online.
The philosophy is that automating government can make bureaucracy faster, easier and more transparent. In Lavasa, one of the major companies responsible for installing and maintaining the technology is Wipro, one of India's big three IT firms. The linchpin of the e-governance system is a website through which residents will be able to pay their bills, access emergency services, make complaints and do anything else involving the government's help. Households without computers will have a digital automation unit fitted to give them access to the site. The hardware will be replaced every four years, and software will be updated through the internet. Wipro's man responsible for installing the hardware is known only by his initials, UGK. He won't tell me what the U stands for but the GK means Gopal Krishna. In phase one, he says, the city would be fitted with 70km of optical fibre.
Metre by metre, researchers are mapping the city using a geographic information system. It includes water pipes, fibre-optic cables, electrical wires, transport links, and the footprint of every building. If a pipe bursts, they will know exactly where.
UGK says: "We will have smart metering, which will allow you to capture the points of failure on a predictive basis, a preventive basis."
I'm impressed, but can't escape the feeling I'm being given the hard sell. But if the Lavasa Corporation doesn't attract a critical mass of at least 100,000 residents, there simply won't be enough teachers, doctors, lecturers, shop staff and other people to supply and use the services. It will remain a ghost town.
The PR team says Lavasa can also be a role model for the rest of India.
"We can't just cram more people into these already overloaded cities," says Wrighton. "What we're going to have to think about is how to structure that and deliver those services differently. That's the laboratory of Lavasa. We'll figure out what works and what doesn't work."
The corporate video is as professional as a Hollywood movie. Over helicopter shots of the lush hills someone quotes Byron: "There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less but Nature more ... "Four hundred million people will migrate from rural areas to the urban areas in India over the next 40 years. This huge migration took a thousand years to happen in Europe. It will happen in India in just 40 years. India will have to expand its cities and towns." The solution is Lavasa.
The next morning I take a tour of the entire 10,000ha site. It is mostly empty land. Reaching the edges, where the black Tarmac gives way to dirt roads, we stray into tribal territory. The number of people living in Lavasa will be capped at 300,000 to make sure services aren't overwhelmed. It will be a quarter of the size of Mumbai but with only 2 per cent of the population.
Some fear the environmental impact on this corner of the Western Ghats may be too big, and that's why work is at a standstill.
Lavasans will be living their hi-tech, sheltered lives parallel to the forest-dwelling tribes just a few mountains away. For it to work, it would have to meet everyone's needs, not just those of the wealthy and privileged.
* Angela Saini is the author of Geek Nation, How Indian Science is Taking Over the World (Hodder and Stoughton)
Technology gurus of India lead the way
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Biotech queen
Named one of the world's 100 most influential people last year by Time and dubbed "India's mother of invention", Mazumdar-Shaw founded Biocon in her Bangalore basement at the age of 25 to make drugs affordable for all. Now Biocon is Asia's largest biotech company.
N R Narayana Murthy
"India's Bill Gates"
In 1981 Murthy used $250 to found Infosys Technologies, a consulting and IT services firm that now has offices in 33 countries. The 64-year-old chairman is worth an estimated US$1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) but lives a simple life.
Nandan Nilekani
Tech guru
The charismatic former chief executive of Infosys helped move India into the IT age. Now he's heading up India's new ID programme, the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), which many believe will benefit the country's faceless millions.
G Madhavan Nair
Space-race heavyweight
Until recently the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, Nair supervised sending the Chandrayaan-1 rocket to the moon in 2008 as well as 27 other successful space missions.
Manish Gupta
Spoken Web prophet
Gupta runs IBM's Spoken Web, a voice-based internet service which could boost the number of internet surfers by hundreds of millions.
Azim Premji
Modest IT billionaire
The media-shy chairman of Wipro built the family business, which produced cooking oil, into a software giant after entering the IT market in the 1980s. Premji, 65, is the 28th richest person in the world but drives a Toyota Corolla and flies economy class.
- OBSERVER
'Lost' Indian region to get city of future
The hilltop city of Lavasa is being built just three hours from Mumbai, and will be a quarter of its size but have only 2 per cent of its population. Photo / Supplied
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