India unlikely to see many new cities: Bibek Debroy

Urbanisation in India was somewhat chaotic. It has not been planned very well, said Debroy

Country is unlikely to see many greenfield or privately developed cities in the future as most of the efforts would be on revamping existing urban areas, said NITI Aayog Member Bibek Debroy.

"I think rare will be the case where India will have completely private funded cities. That is unlikely to happen, nor there is going to be a case where we will have completely greenfield cities," Debroy said addressing the inaugural session of a conference here.

"There may be a few, but by and large we are talking about brownfield cities," he added.

Debroy was of the view that almost half of the increase in urbanisation between 2001 and 2011, is in census towns, which raises governance problems of their own.

"Urbanisation in India was somewhat chaotic. It has not been planned very well. Most of the times when we complain about the nature of urbanisation, about the inefficient use of resources, those are fundamentally complaints about the bad management of the urbanisation," he said

Talking about public private partnership, he said: "I hate the expression PPP. Therefore it has to pinned down phrase. Too many people do too many things when they use PPP."

Elaborating he said: "For the most part, we are not really talking about completely privately developed cities. I am highlighting this because I have noticed that Paul Romer who is soon to become Chief Economist of the World Bank and much of the Romer's work is on propagating not just as an academic, but also commercially the idea of completely privately developed cities with as far as I know with dubious success and not academic but commercial."

Meanwhile, NITI Aayog is organising a two-day workshop on improving urban infrastructure through best practices in public financing on July 21-22.

The workshop will focus on areas such as PPP process — key success factors from government perspective, PPP models and payment mechanisms, planning and preparation for PPP projects.

The workshop will be attended by municipal commissioners of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Assam.