UN’s World Cities Report said last year. But India’s cities seem grossly underprepared. In the first pandemic year, they slid down a global Smart City Index of 109 cities prepared by the Institute for Management Development.
All four contenders—Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru—lagged across indicators such as sanitation, safety, public transport, green spaces, employment, and local governance.
Each of those indicators needs redressal—by chance or by design—to mitigate future crises and to prepare for a more urban India.
The world has enough precedent: past pandemics famously reshaped cities, from a sewer redesign and the cleaning of the Thames after a cholera outbreak in the 1850s London, to an architectural redesign after