The emphasis by various governments in South Asia to make metropolitan cities wor

ld class has led to the completion of projects taking precedence over planning.
Speaking at the annual lecture of Himal Southasian magazine here on Friday, emin
ent Pakistani architect and academic Arif Hasan said cities such as Karachi and
Mumbai want to imitate world-class cities such as Dubai and Shanghai. But the con
text of Shanghai and Dubai is far removed from South Asian metropolitan cities, h
e said.
For creating an image that would attract foreign direct investment, poverty is be
ing pushed to the periphery of the city and already poor-unfriendly by-laws are
being made even more unfriendly by permitting environmentally and socially unfri
endly land use conversions, Mr. Hasan said.
The world class image of the city is all about gentrification and it has no place
for informal businesses and hawkers, who make life affordable for the poor, he s
aid.
All megacities in the subcontinent have witnessed massive eviction of slum dwell
ers without compensation, Kolkata being the worst off.
A common trend in most South Asian cities is the phenomenal increase in their po
pulations in the past few years. Citing Karachi-based researcher and activist Ro
land D Souza, Mr. Hasan said, South Asian populations have grown about 550 per cent
between 1941 and 2011, much higher than Thailand at 280 per cent or Britain at
160 per cent. The more the population grows, the more migration takes place to c
ities.
This new urbanism is marked by high population densities that could not have been a
chieved without the violation of floor area ratio and density-related laws.
The government response to high demand for housing has been to ask people to acc
ess the market and liberalise loans. The poor cannot access this and loans serve
only about 16 per cent of the demand for housing. This has led to smaller and sm
aller housing units which are unfit to live in, Mr. Hasan said.

The Union Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley has stressed the need for creation
of jobs in the services and manufacturing sector so that the large segments of u
nder-employed population in the agriculture sector could get meaningful employme
nt. Delivering the Inaugural Address at the Services Conclave, 2014 in the natio
nal capital today, the Finance Minister Shri Jaitley highlighted the importance
of the Services sector exports to compensate for the deficit in the merchandise
exports. The Finance Minister said that the Government is making efforts to rais
e the share of manufacturing sector from 15% to 25% of GDP.
Highlighting the sectors of the economy that could spearhead the growth in the s
ervices exports, the Finance Minister said that the Indian pharmaceutical sector
has the potential of providing global quality health care in a very cost effect
ive manner. Noting that there was an abundance of quality scientists and researc
h professionals, Mr. Jaitley stressed that India could become a hub for settingup of R & D sectors. Noting that tourism sector needed a push by providing quali
ty hotels, faster domestic travel, easier visa/visa-on-arrival/E-visa facilities
and cleaner trains etc., the Finance Minister said the tourism sector could be
a driver of services export from India. Mr. Arun Jaitley noted that in the enter
tainment sector, 1/6th of the global eyeballs emanated from India and hence ther
e was an immense scope for services export from this sector. The Finance Ministe
r highlighted that India could become a regional hub for providing quality educa

tion.
Earlier, delivering the special address, the Minister of State (I/C) for Commerc
e and Industry Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman said that there was an immense untapped p
otential in the services sector that needs to be harnessed for increasing the sh
are of India s export in the global services arena. The Commerce Minister listed t
he sectors of entertainment, wellness, hospitality and professional services tha
t could provide a suitable platform for services export from India.
Smt. Sitharaman said that the two-day Services Conclave shall provide valuable i
nputs to the Ministry for further push to services exports.
Services Conclave 2014, is the second edition of the ongoing initiative of the U
nion Ministry of Commerce & Industry and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
The Conclave shall have 11 plenary sessions, each devoted to either a specific
sector or a challenge domain. The Conclave assumes importance against the backdr
op of increasing share of the services sector in the GDP, which stands at 57 per
cent in 2013-14 and is increasing.