Letters: Clearing urban jungles

This refers to the article “Urban India’s blight” (December 9). Increasing urbanisation indicates economic growth of a non-agricultural nature and should be welcome, given the limits on the capacity of a piece of land to support the ever-increasing number of family members dependent on it. It is, however, advisable to focus on developing smaller towns of, say, a population of 500,000, since that would be easy to manage. It may also be worthwhile to divide large cities into smaller administrative units since the former are increasingly facing tremendous difficulties in maintaining and improving urban infrastructure. Attractive tax incentives can be given to businesses setting up new offices in, or shifting to, smaller towns. That would be a sustainable solution for urbanisation.

Kishor Kulkarni, Mumbai