Blog

The Fellowship with the Smart Cities Mission was my first hands-on experience of the complexity and interconnectedness of the Urban Development sector. During the second year, as I started working with the Climate Centre for Cities (C-Cube), I noticed the same complexity and interconnectedness increasing multi-fold.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit health, livelihoods, and the economy across India. It is an added threat to the risk that climate change poses to development and shared prosperity. Similar to the pandemic, the impacts of climate change, especially extreme weather events, are also felt disproportionately by the poor and the marginalized.

The air quality in most Indian cities is quite poor with a high concentration of PM 2.5. 21 of the most polluted top 30 global cities are in India. In recent decades, increasing urbanization, vehicle population growth, insufficient infrastructure to support municipal solid waste management, and biomass burning for cooking have aggravated the situation further in urban areas.

According to World Road Statistics 2018, out of the 199 countries analyzed, India has the maximum number of road accidents and accounts for 11% of the world’s road accident related deaths, 84.7% of which occurred in the “economically productive” age group of 18-60 years.