Urbanization... In The Hills

There is a report in the Times of India today that says the Kalka-Simla railway is to be declared a World Heritage Site.

The first time I visited Simla was in 1973, and I took the Kalka-Simla railway both ways - and it was great.

I had already spent 5 years in a Darjeeling school, where too there was a mountain railway that I simply loved.

As far as I know, the Darjeeling Hill Railway is already on the World Heritage list.

We have other hill railways too – in and around the Nilgiris, and up to Matheran in the Western Ghats.

All these railways are over 100 years old – that is, they were built when the automobile did not exist.

They were tremendous feats of engineering. Of the Kalka-Simla railway, the World Heritage Committee noted that it represents “an exceptional technical achievement in the development of the Himalayan mountains because of its length, its altitude and the difficulty of the terrain through which it runs in difficult tropical climatic conditions."

But what did this “exceptional technical achievement” aim at?

This quote is telling: “The railway enabled significant and enduring human settlement.”

That is, rapid urbanization in the previously inaccessible mountains was the purpose.

The Brits built over 80 “hill stations” – new cities and towns – in 50 years, all based on railway connections, in the age before the automobile.

The hill stations, and the railways, were laid in a “hub-and-spoke” arrangement around the principal metropolitan cities: The Simla – Mussoorie belt around Delhi; the Darjeeling – Shillong belt around Calcutta; the Ooty – Kodaikanal belt around Madras; and the Poona – Sahyadri belt near Bombay.

If we in India are to seek a renewed urbanization, the building of many, many new cities and towns, entirely from scratch, so that we can escape our present-day horrific urban conditions, we must emulate the British in India and build “hub-and-spoke” transport arrangements from the big cities to all these new urban centres in the hills.

Of course, the automobile revolution is now on, so highways should come first.

And let every middle-class Indian have two properties: one in a city; and the other in the hills – just as things were in British times when there was such a surge in the supply of new property on the market that properties did not cost much.

Good thought on a Sunday, what?

And read my earlier post: “Bungalows For All… And More”.