Delhi, or more precisely the National Capital Region (NCR), is expected to be the second-largest city after Tokyo by 2025, says the update of the World Urbanisation Prospects of the United Nations.
The city will have 32.9 million citizens, a handshaking distance from Tokyo, but instead of recognising this as an emergency, neither the NCR Planning Board nor the urban development ministry, which develops the Delhi Master Plan, have moved even beyond 2021.
It is an emergency because according to the UN report, Delhi did not figure in the list of top 10 largest cities even in 1990. But by 2011, it had already become the second-largest city in the world with a population of 22.7 million, from 9.7 million in 1990.
The population in 1990 had itself trebled from that of 1970. In the same period Mumbai, for instance just doubled its population.
The humungous size of Delhi becomes obvious from the leap since 1990. It has added more population than Mumbai and Kolkata in the two decades till 2011. The report estimates that the annual population growth rate in Delhi region will slow down now to 2.7%, but it will still propel Delhi NCR to retain the second rank, just behind Tokyo by 2025.
But none of this frenzied pace of expansion of the city figures in the discussions by the respective governments that have Delhi as their mandate. Which means that the second-largest city in the world is likely to be as chaotic then as now. The revision of the Delhi Master Plan for 2021 is still in the works, though already notified in 2007, while the National Capital Region Master Plan 2021, prepared in 2005, is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Both the plans, instead, estimate for instance, that Delhi will have a population of 23 million, or a whopping 10 million less people than what the UN report estimates. The corresponding projections are therefore likely to desperately fall short of the actual requirements. For instance, the 2001 Master Plan apparently choked because of the population projections of 12.8 million, which was lower than the actual 13.8 million.
Let’s put Delhi’s population in perspective. In 1970, there were only two mega cities in the world, Tokyo and New York. In 2011, the world counted 23 mega cities with at least 10 million inhabitants accounting for 9.9 % of the world urban population. The number of mega cities is projected to increase to 37 in 2025, by when, they are expected to account for 13.6 % of the world urban population.
According to the report, ?essentially this means between 1970 and 2011, the number of people living in mega cities has multiplied with three in every five people living in urban areas residing in cities smaller than 1 million inhabitants in 2011. But this proportion is expected to decline in future. By 2025, only one person out of two will live in cities of this size.?
In contrast, cities of 1 million and more inhabitants, accounting for about 40% of the world urban population in 2011, are expected to account for 47 % of the world urban population by 2025.
The high density of population that will live in mega cities and the high percentage of the population mean the future urban population will be increasingly concentrated in large cities of one million or more inhabitants.
The amendment to the World Urbanisaiton Prospects report claims that among the million-plus cities, the mega cities of at least 10 million inhabitants will experience the largest percentage increase. This increasing urban concentration in very large cities is a new trend that contradicts previous observations.
This means Delhi in 2025 is roughly equal to the size of a country like Iraq and a shade smaller than Canada.
This calls for a level of planning for Delhi at a far more dynamic level than attempted so far. Issuing of two master plans, at the city level and then at the NCR level, is a sure recipe for trouble. The two come from different entities, the Delhi Master Plan is the baby of the Centre’s urban development ministry while the second is from the NCR Planning Board.
It is like attempting to fuse the Five Year Plan with one independently crafted by each state and then hoping it works.
The Delhi Master Plan, for instance, is yet to get a handle on the height that buildings can reach in the city. It also has a plan to develop a real estate regulator for the city. Since the regulator will need approval from the state government to have any teeth, the builders are not really enthused about it.
Delhi NCR, given the numbers dished out by the UN report, needs to be run as a country administration with revenue-raising powers and the ability to undertake huge projects that can change the city’s contours. These are exercises that the plans are clueless about.