Let there be concrete

INDIANS ONCE KNEW how to build great cities. Take the ruins of Hampi (pictured), a site in southern India that rivals Angkor Wat in magnificence but gets only 47,000 foreign visitors a year, compared with the 2.3m who flock to the Cambodian attraction. Built in the 15th century, Hampi was crammed with splendid temples and mosques, mighty stables for elephants, markets for diamond traders and a granite chariot. Intricate sculptures illustrating the Kama Sutra adorn the walls of many buildings. One palace even had a flush toilet. By contrast, around half of Indians today, including many city-dwellers, still defecate in the open.

Modern Indian cities are mostly ill-planned, crowded, polluted and jammed with traffic. Rural voters still outnumber urban ones by about two to one, and there are no powerful mayors. Apart from a few pampered places such as New Delhi, politicians were mostly indifferent to cities. That is changing as people like Mr Modi respond to their growing clout. He promises to build 100 smart cities by 2020, generating millions of jobs.

The first, GIFT City, is now rising on 886 acres (358 hectares) of semi-desert near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. Two glass towers, 28 storeys high, adorn a barren landscape. From the top you see spidery roads, a modern waste-treatment plant and a half-built school. Developers broke ground three years ago, and by 2024 there should be 110 towers, a metro, 25,000 apartments, hospitals, hotels and an artificial lake. The hope is that there will also be 1m jobs, many in financial services. An area prone to earthquakes and intense heat may not be ideal, but developers point to efficient air-conditioning.

Not everyone is enthusiastic. “GIFT is humbug,” proclaims Gujarat’s opposition leader, Shankersinh Vaghela. A town planner calls it “ridiculous, a London Docklands-style project in the middle of nowhere.” He says it is flashy, politically led and follows the Chinese model of construction (a Chinese company is in fact involved). Mr Modi enjoyed touring China in the past and visited it again this month. He is impatient to show how fast India is developing. Thanks to his personal interest, GIFT is certain to succeed: state-owned banks are filling those towers “to be in the good books of Mr Modi”, says the planner.

Locations for all 100 cities have been tentatively named and states will experiment with plans for them, bidding for central funds ($945m is budgeted for this year). Not all of these will materialise, and the concept may be redefined to include improvements to existing cities. The prospects would be better if municipal corporations were stronger. Varanasi, for example, a city that has been in continuous use for over 5,000 years, today verges on dysfunction. A warren of old buildings and narrow streets on the banks of the Ganges, it needs the most basic things, such as working sewerage and transport systems.

The grandest new city is being planned by the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu. He calls India a “sleeping giant, with huge untapped potential”. Hyderabad flourished under his rule in the 1990s as the IT industry moved in. Last year his state split and Hyderabad was hived off. Mr Naidu, his eyes sparkling with excitement, says he “will build a city, a world-class capital, a really smart city…it is a one-chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

His creation, Vijayawada, one of the 100 on Mr Modi’s list, will house 22m people near the eastern coast. Given a dense population with strong property rights, acquiring the necessary 50,000 acres is proving difficult. Mr Naidu will reward original owners of farmland by returning smaller plots of more valuable urban property to them. He says that central government must pay for the construction work first; private developers will follow. Perhaps the master plan should include a few Kama Sutra sculptures.