New Delhi has a new address: the Metro, which slices the city with its multicoloured Lines ? blue, yellow and red ? raises its head from some of the densely packed suburbs of the city and ducks the traffic bottlenecks with its underground stretches. Delhi is no more defined by the sprawling bungalows of Lutyen’s zone, or the languid charm of Chandni Chowk.

At the heart of this change is a city that is hungry for more. It wants more buses, more flyovers, more roads, more water, more electricity, more houses, more jobs and more income.

Delhi is not an isolated case. It is joined by most of the big cities of India ? Mumbai that extends almost till Thane, Chennai that moves into Kancheepuram, or Barackpore that is now more or less a part of Kolkata. Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Surat, Jaipur, Kanpur, Nagpur and Vadodara are becoming bigger and bigger.

A new report on urbanisation by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) says that by 2030, 590 million people in India will live in its cities, nearly twice the population of the United States today. It also predicts that Mumbai and Delhi will be among the five largest cities in the world by 2030. The pull towards the cities will be so strong that by 2030, for the first time in the history of India, five states ? Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Punjab ? would have more people living in cities than in villages, says the report that was submitted to the Prime Minister in September this year.

The rapid speed and scale at which India is urbanising, says the McKinsey report, hasn’t been witnessed anywhere in the world, barring China. India?s famous ‘demographic dividend’ ? by 2025 only 16% of the Indian population will be over 55 years of age, whereas in China this number will be around 28% ? will make Indian cities more youthful than China’s.

The Census of India, 2001, defines an urban area as one that has a minimum population of 5,000, where at least 75% of the male working population is engaged in non-agricultural pursuits and where the density of population is at least 400 per sq km.

India?s urbanisation narrative is similar to those of other developing nations. Large-scale migration to urban centres, expansion of cities to include neighbouring towns and re-classification of rural areas into urban areas are some of the key reasons behind this rapid urbanisation. It’s no surprise then that once an island city, Mumbai has now grown to absorb far-flung areas like Navi Mumbai and Thane. The city’s growing demands have made a second airport at Navi Mumbai a reality.

As the MGI report points out, cities have become the engines of economic growth. ?Cities could generate 70% of net new jobs created by 2030, produce more than 70% of India’s GDP, and drive a near four-fold increase in per capita incomes across the nation,? says the report.

So is India beginning to live in its cities?

Linkages between cities and villages are now many times more than they were earlier. Urbanisation is a means to develop rural India. As a country urbanises, as a city’s infrastructure is extended to rural areas, you reduce the distance between the two. Rather than viewing it as a rural-urban divide, it should be seen as rural-urban synergy. Rural India is a vote bank, but elections results in Bihar have proved that development is the key to that vote bank.

The McKinsey report also says that urban growth need not be at the cost of villages. Its argument is that the rural population that resides in the proximity of large urban centres has an estimated 10-20% higher monthly income than the average rural income. The report predicts that by 2030, ?200 million people who live close to cities will benefit because they will enjoy improved access to jobs, markets, and the urban infrastructure.?

But this growth comes with enormous strain on resources. India’s big cities, already bursting at the seams, are clamouring for the most basic of infrastructure, something that’s taken for granted in developed countries. As the MGI report notes, India’s cities fall short of delivering basic standards of living across some of the key quality-of-life indicators.

The horror of such directionless growth is already playing out in the lives of city dwellers ? taps running dry, sewage spilling out, traffic chaos. For the lucky ones untouched so far, 2030 could bring some of these nightmares closer home, predicts MGI.

The McKinsey report says lessons from across the world, especially from the United Kingdom, South Africa and China, prove that cities can be turned around in a decade. Shanghai’s transformation is a case in point. Only 50% of Shanghai’s estimated $29 billion spending on urban services is funded through local taxes and user charges. The rest of the funds come from monetisation of land assets and bank loans on preferential terms as well as a 30% share in local taxes such as value added tax giving the city much required financial muscle to implement key civic projects.

For India, to bring an overarching change in the way its cities function, the report highlights three key areas: funding, governance and planning.