Agraj Pratap Singh
New Delhi, Jan 11 . With India striving to become a thirty trillion dollar economy, the audits across the country’s Urban Development landscape must be oriented towards making constructive and implementable recommendations, as the cities are poised to be the growth hubs in realising the nation’s goal, according to a top official.
Such audits would boost the government’s efforts to provide high-quality urban governance and services to the citizens, said the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Sanjay Murthy.
The CAG made the remarks while chairing the concluding session of a three-day workshop on “Urban Development and Governance” on Saturday.
Murthy emphasised that the knowledge acquired from the workshop must be implemented in their respective audit domains by the officials concerned who attended the training, in a bid support the economy’s growth.
Speaking exclusively to ., retired IAS, and currently a Professor of Practice at the Indian School of Public Policy, OP Agarwal, who headed the faculty that conducted the workshop, said that in all economies around the world which witnessed rapid growth, there was expansion of manufacturing and the services sectors – activities primarily happening in the urban areas.
He stated that, therefore, the cities are extremely important for many reasons, especially from the perspective of economic growth as these are the places that also cater to the youth for providing jobs in the manufacturing and services sector.
Agarwal underscored that the urban areas have to be prepared not only to accommodate the rapid growth, but also to proactively enable the same.
He stated that the way to go forward for achieving rapid progress is to strike the right balance, and for that, a sustainable, low growth path, which simultaneously keep supporting the economic activities must be followed.
He said that the planning and the infrastructure development of the cities need to be based on an economic vision and not as per the traditional process, which is incremental, and does not take into account a future economic growth driver.
According to the expert, plans for the expansion and development of the urban areas should be based on the vision for the future. In this regard, he mentioned the Niti Ayog’s new initiative for twenty growth hubs, and said many states have already picked up the idea.
Agarwal said the idea is to have focused attention on selected regions which can be developed as growth hubs.
This would typically be a region around a city, which can be planned effectively to become a one trillion dollar economy. If there are twenty such regions, then twenty trillion would accrue from such focused locations.
He also stated that the vulnerability to disasters is higher in cities, given their higher density, and the need is to prepare them in advance for such challenges.
Futuristic plans based on key economic drivers for such focused regions will help determine the infrastructure needs and the land requirements for these needs, which is going to create a more credible basis for master planning.
The COVID pandemic, earthquakes, or floods, have clearly shown that cities are vulnerable to emergencies and disasters.
He pointed out that after considering all such challenges, there is now a recognition of the need to build capacity at the municipal, state and national levels to deeply understand these challenges and also look at how these can be dealt with.
“In today’s planning, it is important to identify what are going to be the economic drivers for the city, how fast do we need to go, and what is the ambition,” he said.
Meanwhile, the workshop was attended by seven IA&AS officers and sixteen Senior Audit Officers/Assistant Audit Officers from across the country.
The training was conducted by a faculty headed by Agarwal, with members like Chetan Vaidya, Former Director, School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Hitesh Vaidya, Former Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) and Alok Shiomany, an expert in urban finance.
C & AG, being the apex and the sole audit authority for urban local bodies and related institutions, plays an important role in highlighting issues related to urban governance. . APS .
