AMN /
A UN report has projected that India could add 300 million new urban residents by 2050 and it will need to build climate-friendly cities to address the challenge of accommodating the needs of the growing population.
The first ‘World Cities Report 2016 – Urbanisation and Development: Emerging Futures’ report by UN Habitat said in India, urban areas already contribute more than 60 per cent of the GDP, and the new urban residents’ projection has lead to a call by the Indian government to build 100 new cities over the period.
The report said that central to this challenge are the twin bottlenecks of municipal finance and infrastructure finance for transport, electricity, communications, water supply and sanitation in support of production. Large South-Asian countries like Bangladesh, India and Pakistan feature massive, expanding urban populations in mega-cities such as Dhaka, Mumbai, Delhi, Karachi and Lahore as well as in growing number of secondary cities, it said.