Need Comprehensive Parking Plan for Ahmedabad

A friend asked: “Why Ahmedabad City cannot generate revenues from parking?” This question has arisen because Delhi has just done that. 

Delhi’s parking rules have included parking area management plans at ward level, revenue generation from parking management and use of this revenue for local area improvement or the larger public good. “The most notable is the provision on the utilisation of parking revenue for local development works that include pedestrian safety, non-motorised lanes and development of parking lots.” (Anumita Roychowdhury in https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/air/delhi-notifies-first-ever-parking-rules-to-restrain-vehicle-use-cut-air-pollution-66941) The rules do not confine to narrowly deal with only provision of parking and its pricing but also the structural issues of the city, such as providing for ‘complete street concept’, and prioritising pedestrians, cyclists and public transport in the complete streets. It also suggests modal integration, particularly of the public transport with the para-transit through arranging for of pick-up and drop by the latter at public transport stations. Interestingly, hawking zones, resting zones and overnight parking requirements have also been addressed. 

Transport ourselves to Ahmedabad, which too is enforcing parking regulations. But, it does not have a Parking Plan. Only regulations. The Parking Rules are being enforced by the Police Department, which is not a planning and development department but only regulation enforcement department. Parking is not allowed on any arterial roads. These are no tolerance zones for parking. 

Parking lots or spaces have been created wherever possible. The open plots belonging to the AMC have, been for the time-being, converted into parking lots where paid parking has been provided. These lots do not have any paving and are open grounds that have got converted into mucky plots during the monsoons. In summer, these become dusty. 

Paid parking has also been created on road sides, particularly where wide side roads are available. For example, SG Highway has small such parking areas, with capacity from 10-20 four wheelers. Needless to mention that such small paid parking lots are not adequate. They get full quickly and what follows in continuing of parking on the road side in small lanes where ‘no parking’ zone is not provided for. As the strict ‘no parking’ in most parts of the city get implemented, including in front of residential apartments, the available parking facilities are going to be fully occupied. For example, on a weekend (Saturday and Sundays) and during holidays, no parking space is available in two-storey basement parking in Alpha Mall.

Lack of parking on one hand and constant fear of vehicle being towed away, has created a peculiar conundrum; how to travel within the city.

By public transport? Which one? The Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS)? It is not available everywhere. It has a last-leg connectivity problem, from home to BRTS stop and vice-versa. People have used shared auto-rickshaw for the purpose. Shared auto-rickshaws, that take about 8-10 passengers are not always an option of people during summers, and rainy seasons; not for upper and higher-middle income groups. Or that of Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Services (AMTS), which have more wide-based routes. Metro is under construction and has the most limited route.
To access both, AMTS and BRTS, there is no option but to walk? On broken footpaths, and jumping up and down to and from the footpaths, which are often one foot high. Or walk in mud on the road side where there are no footpaths or even walk on pot-holed roads. At least, on some roads, parking on footpaths is now not permitted. 

The footpaths are being constructed on some roads, I would call them model roads (CG Road for example) and there are plans to do the same on three other arterial roads. But, that’s it. We need a footpath plan, for each ward, to make walking to public transport possible.

Even if footpaths are made, many other important issue has to be addressed. Dealing with the animal life on the roads. Older one grows, important it becomes. Ahmedabad has many dogs on the road. They cannot be now caught and taken away through old methods deployed by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) due to protection from the Supreme Court. Morning walkers in the city walk with a stick to ward them off. In last few years, monkeys are found in gangs on the city streets. I have personally experienced their presence on the roads when on a morning walk. The delinquent behaviour of motorised vehicle drivers, coming on both sides of the road and driving at high speeds even on pot-holed roads, has made both walking and cycling on Ahmedabad City streets hazardous. Question is are these conditions encouraging to shift from private to public transport, and that too inadequate public transport?

Are these excuses? Blaming everyone and everything for not making a modal shift, from private to public transport? The everyday travel’s unwanted experiences are too many to blame individuals for not making a shift. So, if private vehicles were going to be used, next issue pertains to parking provisions.

Clearly, the ones available are not adequate as discussed. Let me here come to the story of a parking station constructed in Navrangpura area, behind the Navrangpura bus-stand. Navrangpura bus-stand is Charles Correa designed building of early 1960s. Bus-stand building is in utter neglect. Behind it rises a white ugly looking building which is the parking station, for those who are to visit the CG Road, about a km away. Is walking 1 km a big deal? It is when you have to jump up and down the 1 ft wide footpaths, encountering all the hazards mentioned above then it is. But, for the entire stretch of the CG road, this is the only parking lot. And it could also be more than 1 km walk for many. Till recently, on-road parking was available in limited numbers and parallel parking was tolerated so no one used this parking lot. It needs to be seen with the strict enforcement of parking regulations, it gets used. 

Lastly, till the public transport system is well developed, if people are going to use private transport, then there should be a city-wide plan for parking. Plots in the existing developed areas should be identified to construct a parking station from which the city can earn revenues. A few that can be counted on finger-tips, are not adequate. Open plots should not be used for parking. On them, multi-storey parking facilities should be constructed so that value could be realised from the remaining parts, much like we are now approaching slum redevelopment. The multi-storey parking facilities should be priced in a way to raise revenues for the city, to do more footpaths at the least.

The city level Comprehensive Mobility Plans should become low-carbon, with not just public transport plans but also cycling and footpath plans (plans for NMT), plans for e-vehicles (particularly the three-wheelers), parking stations and with a future provision of charging stations or battery swap stations for e-vehicles. We do not have luxury to think piece-meal now.

Climbing the Smart Cities’ Bandwagon

Rahul Gandhi, in a tweet, ‘Promises Direct Election of Mayors To Build "Smart Cities"’, reads the news headlines. The tweet from Rahul Gandhi said that good leaders were needed to build smart cities and hence suggestion that the Mayor, who is directly elected is answerable to the people who elect him/ her. This understanding of Rahul Gandhi is true. Urban policy makers and scholars have long argued, and among them passionate policy maker late Mr. K C Sivaramakrishnan (who was urban development ministry’s secretary at the centre), that there would be responsible urban governance if mayors were directly elected by the city’s residents.

Direct elections have to be accompanied by financial and legislative powers as well. In the current situation, the city governments are extremely poor, and do not have financial wherewithal to make any significant investments without the funds coming from the state or the central governments. Many cities, particularly the small and medium ones, have so poor financial situation that they are barely able to meet salary expenditures of meagre staff (in conditions of under-staffing of the municipal governments). Thus, direct elections of the city mayors have to be accompanied by enabling them with financial powers, to enhance their financial base as well as take decisions about expenditures. Currently, in most municipal bodies, the municipal commissioner, a representative of the state government, and through whom the state level ministers, in many cases the Chief Minister, decide the expenditure priorities at the city level and interfere in the city’s affairs. Cities do not have power to decide on which items expenditures should be made.

Another enabler for the mayor to work is the power to make legislation. For example, the city does not have power to pass its Master Plan, i.e. plans for physical development; the state government approves these plans. Or the city’s government does not have power to decide taxes; the state government decides as to what taxes and at which rates should be levied by the city government! Compare this with cities in China, where the city government decides taxes. At one point in time, Beijing city was levying 31 fees on an average, only 14 of which were legal, on McDonald restaurants over and above normal taxes (Wong 1998). Fiscal decentralisation and powers to the cities to collect taxes is one important aspect of high levels of infrastructure investments in the cities of China.

In India, virtually, city government does not have any powers. In that case, the direct election of Mayors would have limited impacts. A good example of such direct elections was in Simla wherein the Mayor and deputy-Mayor were directly elected in 2012 due to amendment in the state legislation. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu too have direct elections of mayors. But, this would not mean better municipal governance or ‘smart municipal governance’.

The news item also states that “Ahead of the 2014 national election, the BJP had promised to build 100 smart cities. But while 98 cities have been selected by the government for the flagship project, and Rs. 500 crore allocated for each, critics say progress in the project has been tardy.”[1] Tardy it is; the implementation of ‘smart cities’ programme. According to some estimate, there has been offtake of only 17% of the stated allocations under the smart cities mission (SCM). Some expenditures under what is called a project of the SCM, are from other programmes such as Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT).

An aside on AMRUT. The name of the programme should have been Atal Mission for Urban Rejuvenation and Transformation. But, then it does not give us a neat ‘Indianised’ acronym.

Scholars have argued that ‘smart cities’ would require ‘smart governance’. Which is true. But, direct election of mayors is a first tiny step towards it. Smart governance would require many urban reforms, two of which have been mentioned above.

What is a ‘smart city’? Everything done in a city is called smart. Sabarmati riverfront development is smart; leave aside 10-12 thousand people displaced and lives of many ruined. Research is available on the disruptions in lives of those displaced. Metro projects is also called smart. We do not know the long term financial implications of the metro projects. Whether these will lead to reduction in private vehicular movement in the cities and thus resulting in reduction in air pollution is unknown. In fact, the results are going to be too far away in terms of improving local air quality. If there is any lesson on this issue to be learnt is to follow what Chinese cities have done and how many years after which the results with regards to reduction in emissions from transport could be seen.

Smart city as an idea, comes from envisioning of city using real-time data for city management systems. For example, if the data on sewerage systems is digitsed then its clogging at any point could be monitored and quickly responded to. There could be warning about traffic congestion to decide on time and route of travel. To some extent, google maps is helping in this. The city governments or their transport departments have little role to play. A smart city would have a real data base for levying property taxes. It could warn residents about inundated areas during heavy monsoons. And so on. But, to be able to put in place data-dense city management systems would require city level data. There is very little city level data today in Indian cities. In last few years, whatever data was available online has vanished.

Another idea of ‘smart city’ is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable cities. This idea, coming from the cities of developed countries, to a great extent from the experience of American cities, wherein, the cities have sprawled due to real estate and car-industry driven suburbanisation. Indian cities too are following this pattern of real estate industry driven suburbanisation. A developer/ builder buys land from farmer (s) and creates a large real estate development away from the city. The city is then forced to build roads and provide other trunk infrastructure. Which then leads to increase in land and property prices and the developer/ builder rakes in moolah, with no ingenuity of theirs but manipulation and political connections. The land prices increase so much that cheap lands for the housing of the urban poor have to be found on the city’s periphery. That is where many of the housing under the Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana (PMAY) – Urban, are located in many cities. The poor located in such colonies struggle to commute, access education and health, and other urban amenities, for a long period of time; just because, the sprawl creates speculative profits of the real estate developers/ builders. This is hardly ‘smart city’.

The smart cities in India, are hardly about data-intense urban management or about sustainable cities. Labels such as ‘smart’ are used with almost no content. Thus, everything is ‘smart’ in any programme of the city, as already mentioned above. Thus, picking garbage is called smart. Recycling garbage is smart. Building footpaths is smart and e-payment of property tax is smart. Since everything is smart, the term smart cities has lost its meaning. Term smart has become empty of its meaning. Because even ‘jumla’ is smart. In such a situation, direct election of mayors, although a good move, would yield very little in actually making cities smart. It would have meaning only if the term smart were to mean, equitable and sustainable cities.

References

Wong, Christine (1998): ‘Municipal Finance in China: The Development of Extra-Budgetary Revenues’, paper presented at the International Municipal Finance Forum organised by World Bank, Washington DC, April 15-16.

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[1]  https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-elections-2019-rahul-gandhi-promises-direct-election-of-mayors-to-build-smart-cities-2016227  (accessed on April 2, 2019).

Facilitating Pakoda Economy

In the February of 2018, the Prime Minister of India said that selling pakodas too constituted as employment, in response to his opponents’ criticism that no employment was being generated during his rule in India. He was alluding to self-employment in the trade sector, in which a sizeable proportion of urban dwellers are engaged in and dependent on for survival. Now that CMIE has estimated 1.1 million employment loss in the year 2018, the pakoda-economy becomes all the more important.

There are two types of self-employed, in particular, those who are engaged in petty trade such as selling various things and services on the streets. Things sold on the streets are items of daily use, even clothes and footwear, fruits and vegetables, and cooked food items (the golgappas, bhel, idli, pakodas and chai). After the chai selling attained great heights, now the pakora selling too has ascended in importance. These cooked food economy is fragile, it has to be cooked every day, and in peak summers, probably multiple times a day.

Some engage in the chai economy or pakoda economy out of choice and many have become big business rising from the footpaths. For example, Shankar Vijay icecreamwala in Ahmedabad, now has an upmarket ice-cream shop called ‘Shankar’s library’. Or Sarath Babu of Chennai, who started his career of selling idlis on the street to graduating from IIMA and has moved up in life.

But, there are many who engage in chai or pakoda economy out of ‘no choice’ or as fall back arrangement when formal employment is lost. Many formal textile mill workers took to the business after their mills closed in Ahmedabad. Or new migrants to the city, not finding any employment, start selling things on the street. That is, they are engaged in street trade. Or as our Prime Minister has called them, mini-entrepreneurs, surviving by their wits on the hostile streets; paying the ‘local leader’ (agewan), who could be a vendor or local government official or policeman, for right to occupy street space; honked upon by the motorists or any motorised vehicle driver; breathing the polluted air as all our cities have crossed the limits of air pollution tolerance and often target of eviction drives by the local authorities and consequently not just losing their wares and incurring financial loss but also losing right to work for many coming days after the eviction drive. Ofcourse, street vending means working on streets without access to toilets and braving the summer heat, which is expected to worsen in the coming times due to climate change and expected increase in average temperatures in the cities.

If the pakoda or chai economy is the way forward for India, and for Indian cities, coming from the highest person of the country, it should be facilitated. Instead, urban planning categorizes it as encroachment and hence illegal, as this commercial activity is on land which is not earmarked as commercial. Street vending is on footpaths and in city’s plan footpath is part of the road and classified as road-land use and not commercial land use. Besides, footpath is for walking and rightly so, and not for commercial activities. According to the ‘The Street Vendors (Protection Of Livelihood And Regulation Of Street Vending) Act, 2014 (http://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A2014-7.pdf) which extends all over India, vending spaces have to be provided in the city’s Master Plan.

The street vendors are evicted by the police because, as per the Motor Vehicles’ Act, street vendors obstruct traffic flow and hence have to be penalised. The Indian Penal Code seeks to prevent obstruction of a public way and if done so the obstruction can be removed. The municipal legislation seeks removal or any permanent or temporary structures on streets and goods hawked or sold in public places. Municipal legislation also require any hawking or vending activity to obtain license from the relevant authority. It is not easy to get a licence and often a liscense is given to a person only if vending is the sole livelihood activity of the family. Note the term family is important here. We know that in low-income households, multiple members of a family have to work to remain above poverty line. How can then vending be the sole livelihood activity of a vendor’s family!

So without facilitation, through providing land for business through the implementation of the Street Vendors (Protection Of Livelihood And Regulation Of Street Vending) Act, 2014, making access to toilets in public places, a protected area for vending and increasing their access to finance, how is the pakoda economy to be an answer to lack of other employment opportunities in urban India.

The Town Planning Scheme – A Panacea for Planned Urban Development?

Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has launched Town Planning Scheme (TPS) mechanism to fast track area based infrastructure issues for 25 smart cities in the country. The ministry would provide an assistance to every city Rs. 2 crores of central assistance for planning purposes. The Town and Country Planning Organization (TCPO), located in Delhi, will provide hand holding support.

In regimes wherein lands are privately owned, as in all capitalist countries – in contrast lands are owned by the government in China and other socialist countries – it is difficult to obtain lands for public purposes such as for roads, laying of transport infrastructure, laying water and sanitation lines, for education and health facilities, and open and green spaces. These come in the category of public goods that give benefit to all the population while at the same time it is difficult to charge from them the full market value of land. If so charged, either the price of some of these facilities would sky-rocket – more than even what the education and health facilities in the private sector charge – or some of them would be unaffordable, such as open and green spaces.

In India, ongoing urban growth is expected to exacerbate the existing challenges of unplanned urbanization, informal housing, and access to basic services, particularly for low-income populations. Addressing these challenges requires the availability of public lands, which is extremely challenging in privately owned land regimes. Due to a growing population and lack of appropriate planning, cities’ peripheral areas—also called urban extension areas—sprawl in an unplanned manner, without access roads. This makes it extremely challenging to lay trunk infrastructure, reduces the amount of public land available for social amenities and green spaces, and leads to a lack of financing for infrastructure investments. The scarcity of public land makes provision of social housing difficult, even if national funds are made available for doing so

Indian cities lack open spaces.

Till recently, lands for public goods’ provisioning were acquired through Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which was amended through countrywide discussions into Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (RFCTLARR) Act. This new legislation is more equitable, transparent, and fair to landowners (the farmers on the urban periphery). But, urban planners and state governments are finding it lengthy, cumbersome and expensive. Hence, in its place, Town Planning Scheme is being proposed to be adopted for urban expansion areas or for development of urban periphery areas. Gujarat has been implementing the TPS since a long time, and more vigorously since 1999 and unlike the ‘Gujarat Model’ promoted in general in India, the TPS has seen partial success.

The TPS works on a philosophy of win-win solution for land owners whose lands are being acquired and for the city government that wants lands for public purposes. TPS is a process of pooling and reconstitution & reallocating lands followed by appropriating parts for public purposes, such as for roads (15%), social and physical amenities (5%), open and green spaces (5%), housing for socially and economically weaker sections (10%) and sale of lands for raising finance for infrastructure investments (15%), from the land parcel of the owner. Compensation is provided to the land owner for the land appropriated at the jantri rates (official land rate) but adjusted for the cost of investments made in infrastructure. This means that if the infrastructure costs are higher than the compensation price, the land owner has to pay the planning authority what is termed as betterment charges. Vice-versa in case of value of compensation is more than the infrastructure costs. These decisions are taken for each owner, plot by plot. So far so good.

But, the real world is different than what urban planners think of and what the urban plans portray and plan for. When the TPS of an area, with size from 100 hectare (ha) to 1,500, is prepared, location of some plots of land change in case the land parcel is reserved for public amenities of a green space or even roads. The decision regarding reconstitution and reallocation are done after negotiations with the land owners. The second round of negotiations happens with the land owners for financial settlement. In a sense, the TPS process allows for negotiations with the land owners, and hence is equitable. Equity is also embedded in the fact that the lands are made available for public purposes. The TPS has been widely used in Ahmedabad and Surat in Gujarat and not in other cities of the state.

Figure 1: Location of BSUP housing in Ahmedabad, 2017

Source: https://www.wri.org/wri-citiesforall/publication/ahmedabad-town-planning-schemes-equitable-development-glass-half-full 

The benefits are: Ahmedabad has used TPS lands for resettling about 20,000 households evicted due to urban infrastructure projects. Their locations are spread across the city (see figure 1), with significant proportion located on city’s periphery. Ofcourse, all has not been hunky-dory with the resettlement process as many households pushed out on the periphery of the city have been immiserized. But, for the first time in urban India, resettlement has been provided to slum households evicted due to infrastructure projects. Ahmedabad has also higher road network density than other cities in India (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Average Area Under Roads in Select Cities

Source: https://www.wri.org/wri-citiesforall/publication/ahmedabad-town-planning-schemes-equitable-development-glass-half-full 

In Ahmedabad, till now, informal settlements on private lands have not been evicted. We are not sure of the future. But, in such settlements, lands could not be made available for public purposes. Thus, the TPS mechanism does not work on brownfield sites, that is in already developed parts of the city. It works only in the immediate periphery of the city wherein the land price escalation is expected due to urbanisation as well as infrastructure investments and hence land owners are not unwilling to give up a proportion of their lands.

The TPS mechanism does not work at all in the greenfield sites, that is for planning within urbanizing limits of the city where development is expected after a 15-20 years. Such lands are still used for farming. If parts of such agricultural lands are appropriated through TPS mechanism, the farmers, who are already under great economic stress, would further lose their livelihood and go down the poverty route. The desire for planned development in rural areas surrounding an urban area has led to a situation of conflict of urban planning authority with the villages. For example, in case of Ahmedabad, 68 villages of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar districts have demanded withdrawal of a notification declaring their village lands (a total area of 625 sq km) to be part of the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority and thus be brought under the TPS mechanism.

Pre-empting appropriation of farm lands for planned development of the peripheral areas of a city is also abuse of the mechanism. In Gujarat, the Special Investment Region (SIR) Act of the state has made mandatory use of TPS mechanism in the proposed SIRs such as Dholera (also declared as a smart city), and Dahej. This means that instead of RFCTLARR Act, 2013 (the current land acquisition act that gives fair compensation to the farmers, the TPS mechanism would be used. In other words, TPS mechanism is being used to subvert the RFCTLARR Act! This is surely an abuse of the TPS mechanism.

The TPS mechanism works in certain situations and does not work in some other. It should not be seen as a coercive mechanism of appropriating private lands for public purposes. On the other hands private ownership of lands in Indian cities require some mechanism to procure them at low costs for public goods. There has to be careful application of the mechanism, which till now has been practiced as a mechanism of negotiations and not coercion. It seems its wholesale promotion and adoption may lead to more coercion than negotiations as PILs pending in the Gujarat High Court for the SIRs indicate.

For full report on the TPS mechanism, see: https://www.wri.org/wri-citiesforall/publication/ahmedabad-town-planning-schemes-equitable-development-glass-half-full