Governments all over India know how to handle poverty but not prosperity. And that is the problem with Bangalore and Hyderabad. People are becoming richer, buying multiple cars, bigger houses and travelling more but infrastructure is not catching up.Leverage Buses, Metro Rail & AI to Solve Hyderabad’s Mobility ProblemToday Hyderabad’s biggest problem is mobility. If people are spending three to four hours a day going up and down from office, what energy do they have left for work? So what should Hyderabad do immediately?One, Hyderabad should have a minimum of 15,000 airconditioned public buses, big and small, and electric ones to saturate Hyderabad so that more people commute by bus. They must use the AI to track their routes to see where people are going, when they are going, how they are going and adjust the routes carefully by studying the pattern of travel every day of the week, every hour and every season.The govt must also allow private companies to run buses like in Singapore. This will create efficiency and jobs. The bottomline is — provide mobility solutions to all the people so they don’t spend too much time stuck in traffic instead of being productive.Second, they must invest in a minimum of 500 km of metro rail because Hyderabad already has about 70km and they’re adding more but it will take three to five or eight years to come up so its better to start right now because the time this comes up, the population will increase.Hyderabad also needs to make sure that 80% of its population is not more than one km away from a metro station like in Paris and no house should be more than 500 meters from a bus station.Build Walkable Streets and Heat-Resilient FootpathsThird, they must make wide footpaths in areas where there’s a concentrated activity, like in HITEC City, so people can walk comfortably. There should either be trees or a shelter running the entire length of the footpath like in Singapore because it’s very hot in Hyderabad during summers.Plan New Growth as 15-Minute CitiesAlso, all new development should be planned on the concept of 15-minute cities so that you have residential accommodation and offices side-by-side. The key is to make sure you reduce the commute for people.And in the core area of Hyderabad allow only vertical development. If people are too spread apart, getting them water, sewage and other facilities becomes extremely difficult and people have to put up with long commutes and it becomes a mess.In these new developments you must make sure you have schools, hospitals and other social infrastructure within a short distance. Hyderabad, which already has a population of 1.3 crore, must plan for a city of over two crore with very good public transport.And all this they should start doing immediately because once you get into a mess, and Hyderabad is already into a mess in the congested areas, its too late. People blame Bangalore but look at Hyderabad now.Governance Reform: City Corporations and AccountabilityAlso all the governance should be done by city govts like in Bengaluru, which has five city corporations, or London that has 24 boroughs. Break the civic body into smaller parts for better governance.Any city corporation should not have more than around 25 lakh people as it becomes very difficult to manage. This will ensure accountability.What Went Wrong with Bangalore?What went wrong with Bangalore is that governance sucked. We had one city corporation, which was very corrupt and mismanaged. Second, the CMs wanted to play the role of a mayor and control power which is why governance was broken. Third, they never expanded public transportation.We still have 6500 buses whereas we need 15,000. Because these buses are being run by a PSU, they’re losing money and can’t expand. Cost of operations is high, employees are absent, buses break down and their management is poor as they are run by IAS officers who keep changing often.Bengaluru’s metro is five years behind schedule. And even for the existing metro there are not enough trains. The trains are crowded and when that happens people start using their own vehicles.Bangalore was a walker’s delight but they destroyed the footpaths. And then there is a total corruption in the city government. Bangalore is an example of bad governance, misgovernance, corruption and lack of investment.Fix the Urban Political GapLastly our cities lack political power. Every 10 years we’re supposed to have delimitation based on population. The percentage of urban population has gone up but the number of seats has not. That’s why political leaders don’t care and use taxpayer money garnered from cities to put in rural areas where they get the votes to come to power. The writer is a businessman, investor, chairman of Aarin Capital and Manipal Global Education, and former CFO of Infosys (As told to Swati Bharadwaj)
