If you despair of India’s unplanned, and often ugly, urban sprawl, here’s the good news. In the next 20 years the country will have seven spanking new planned, hi-tech, green cities. They’ll have green belts, smart meters for water and power connections, and smart grids for power and water supply.

That’s not all. These urban centres will have facilities for recreation, schools, colleges and hospitals, apart from residential, industrial and commercial areas. In some of them, residential areas will be mixed with commercial or industrial areas. In others, zones for commerce and industry and residences will be clearly demarcated.

Strung across western India, and set to house between 1 million and 3 million people each, the seven-city project got a boost last week when the Union Cabinet sanctioned Rs 1,75,00 crore for developing their trunk infrastructure — sewerage, drainage, earthworks, waste management, roadworks and flood management.

Ever since state capitals like Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh and Gandhinagar were developed between 1950 and 1970, India hasn’t witnessed cities coming up from scratch. The only exception is New Raipur in Chhattisgarh, which is being completed now.

The project is still on the drawing board, of course, and the first phase — 25-50 sqkm industrial hubs — will come up by 2018. First off the block is likely to be Dholera in Gujarat, which, at 540 sqkm, will be only slightly smaller than Singapore. “It’s a tough and difficult project,” says the man charged with this task — Amitabh Kant, managing director and chief executive officer of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC). The seven towns fall within the DMIC, which cuts through six states — Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat (see map).

Well-planned, hi-tech and green, these will be cities of the future. “Today’s cities have to be compact, vertical and sustainable,” says Kant. “These will be cities where people can live, work and play, which conserve energy and enable all classes to live together,” adds Talleen Kumar, joint secretary in the central government’s department of industrial policy and promotion, which is overseeing the industrial corridor project.

At Dholera, there’s a lot of focus on public spaces, with landscaping of road space. The idea is to encourage people to walk around and mingle, with the needs of blue-collar workers (neglected in most cities) being a focus area. “They will be modern, lively industrial cities, unlike those developed in India in the past,” says a planning expert who declined to be named.

They will also be smart cities, with extensive use of information technology (IT). So homes, offices and factories will have smart meters for water and power connections, apart from smart grids for power and water supply. With IT-enabled smart grids, for example, solar power from individual units can be ploughed back into the grid. Japanese electronic majors like Hitachi, Itochu Corp, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and NEC are among the members of the four Japanese consortia developing these smart communities.

Amitabh Kant, MD and CEO, DMICDC Pic: Prem Singh

The cities will also use environment-friendly systems for a range of services, from public transport to sewage treatment and waste management. Dholera will have a mixed land use and polycentric structure, with residential areas close to commercial and industrial areas so that most people can walk or cycle to work, reducing the need for fuel-guzzling transport. Each of the cities will also have provisions for mass public transport — a bus rapid transport system or light rail transport like metros or monorail.

Six gas-based power stations in the corridor will provide clean energy to these cities, besides which there are also plans for solar power projects in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Global firms drawing up master plans for these cities are already anticipating and addressing problems. In Dholera, for example, global consulting firm Halcrow has ensured that industrial units don’t face the expressway that cuts through the city site and that there are no service roads along it. So vehicles entering or leaving the premises will not come directly on to the expressway — a common problem in many highways and urban expressways in India.

So what’s driving this sudden burst of urbanisation in India? A 1,483km dedicated freight corridor (DFC) — a high speed, high capacity rail line between Dadri in Uttar Pradesh near Delhi and Mumbai to transport manufactured goods to ports — is the backbone of this project. An area of 150km on each side of this corridor is to be developed as an industrial corridor to give the manufacturing sector a boost and sustain an economic growth rate of 9-10 per cent a year. “Manufacturing needs to be given a fillip and that needs world class infrastructure to enable Indian industry to compete with the best in the world,” says Kumar.

The corridor is expected to pull in $90-100 billion worth of investments in the next 30 years, double employment, triple industrial output and quadruple exports from the region over five years. It has several investment regions and industrial areas. “It’s a first of its kind, in terms of vision and scale,” says Arvind Mahajan, executive director of consulting firm KPMG.

Both the DFC and the DMIC are part of the India-Japan business partnership, with the Prime Ministers of both countries making joint announcements about them in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

The new cities are an offshoot of this industrialisation that’s planned. “When you plan for manufacturing, you plan for urbanisation along with it,” says Kant. Songdo in South Korea and Suzhou in China have been role models for the DMIC cities.

With the McKinsey Global Institute projecting that 590 million Indians will be living in urban areas by 2030, these new cities could ease the pressure on existing cities, already bursting at the seams. “If we don’t build new cities now, we will be fighting unplanned chaos later,” says Manish Agarwal, executive director of consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

But is it wise to create infrastructure so far ahead of demand? “Infrastructure has to be built proactively, not reactively. We can’t wait for roads to be clogged before doing something about it,” says Rajiv Lall, managing director and CEO of Infrastructure Development Finance Company.

While there needs to be some perspective planning based on projections, planners must be prepared for demand not materialising as expected, cautions Songsu Choi, lead urban economist at the World Bank. Both China and South Korea have developed greenfield cities, but the latter has had more successes, with Bundang, for example, growing beyond expectations.

Others point out that the DMIC cities are hardly likely to decongest existing ones since they are catering to only an estimated population of 12 million. Says Chetan Vaidya, director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, “This is not a natural process of urbanisation; this is trying to do something unnatural.” Cities don’t stop growing because of new settlements, he points out, but for other reasons like lack of economic activity, saturation and non-inclusiveness.

Few satellite towns have been successful in decongesting cities on their own, says architect Hafeez Contractor. Navi Mumbai, he points out, took off only after Mumbai started spilling over. “Major cities have never stopped growing. That is where the employment is,” he points out.

“The key to the success of these cities will be economic activity,” says Vaidya. Chandigarh, Gandhinagar and Bhubaneswar were state capitals to which people were forced to come to for work. That led to these cities growing, with Chandigarh now boasting of a thriving industrial suburb. Whether the new cities will succeed or not depends on the way industry responds, he points out.

That could be a wild card, considering the DFC — the logic and the USP of the corridor — has been delayed. Kant isn’t worried, though. The DFC was one way to connect these investment regions and cities to the rest of the country, he says — but it is not the only way. They are being linked to the national highways and the normal train network. Besides, the delay will not be inordinate, he insists, and will not be a huge damper for investments.

Some think that these cities will end up being little more than the sleepy Bokaros, Rourkelas or Bhilais of the west. However, the planning expert strongly disagrees. The steel cities revolved around one company or set of products, he points out, while the DMIC cities will house the value chain of different industries.

Again, merely building new cities with world-class infrastructure may not be enough. “It is equally critical to have a proper institutional mechanism with world class managers to operate them as cities of the future,” says PwC’s Agarwal.

Perhaps that’s why Kant says: “This needs a different level of thinking and execution.” Wait 20 years to see if India can measure up.