Cities becoming health traps; need clean air and open spaces: CEA Nageswaran

India’s cities need to tap all sources of funds available to them, including tapping capital markets, to fund themselves, said India’s chief economic advisor, V Anantha Nageswaran, also pointing to the need for cities to provide clean air and open spaces.

“Our cities have become health traps. We need to ensure that citizens and children are facilitated to undertake physical activity,” CEA Nageswaran said, speaking at a panel discussion at Leveraging Private Finance for Urban Infrastructure Development –Learnings from G20 Infrastructure Working Group (IWG) event in Delhi on Wednesday.

The chief economic advisor also stressed the issue of land use conversion, also raised by the chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.


“The issue of land-use conversion has been plaguing us,” the CEA said, highlighting a need for simpler processes similar to what some states have instituted under business facilitation legislation.

On the issue of financing, the CEA stressed that the onus of raising funds via land monetisation or asset monetisation lies with states.

“States need to appoint their state finance commissions at regular intervals and have their formulas for devolution and honour the finance commission recommendations,” CEA said.

Until last year, only nine states had constituted the sixth finance commission, whereas another seventh had constituted the fifth state finance commission.

Auguste Tano Kouame, World Bank Country Director for India, noted that India needed to focus on capacity management. He pointed to capacity, financing and comprehensive planning as three crucial aspects to be looked at for Indian cities.

The CEA also pointed out that post-Covid, there was a need to reimagine the way cities are viewed and development is thought about.

“We need to see cities as areas where we have green spaces, parks and farming,” added Kouame, pointing to the vulnerability of urban conglomerations to natural disasters.

Vipul Roongta, MD and CEO, HDFC Capital Advisors Limited, said that there was a need for special economic residential zones focusing on affordability rather than affordable housing, which would also attract private capital.

Swati Ramanathan, co-founder of the non-profit Janaagraha, which works on transforming cities, highlighted the need for the need for plan-linked projects to unlock private finance.

“Cities are not planned very well,” Ramanathan said.