India's Urban Planning

• For India's urban journey, urban planners recently emphasised the need for a multigenerational process.

More on the news:

• According to the Economic Intelligence Unit's 2019 Global Liveability Index rankings, two of India's main cities, Mumbai and Delhi, are falling in the rankings. It evaluates livability in 140 cities.
• India has a population of 1210 million people in 2011 and a 31.1% urbanisation rate (Census of India 2011).
• Urbanization is the process of more people moving into urban areas.
• The number of urban centres and the rate of urbanisation vary widely across the nation.
• Ten States—Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Kerala—comprise more than 75% of the nation's urban population.
• Urban planning is now necessary as a result of the recent Joshimath event, in which a tunnel boring machine struck an aquifer there, causing a loss of approximately 800 litres of water every second.
• In hilly urban India, land subsidence incidences are on the rise, and inadequate urban planning are making the situation worse. It is estimated that 12.6% of India's land area is susceptible to landslides.
• In addition, the urgent need to flood-proof Indian cities has been highlighted by the burning problem of urban flooding.
• In order to improve urban resilience to land subsidence, government should concentrate on gathering reliable data, while landslide risk needs to be mapped at a detailed level.

What is urban planning ?

• Making physical blueprints and development regulations is a professional method of building metropolitan regions.
• Urban planning combines social, economic, environmental, and constructive initiatives to create a decent, healthy environment for people to live, work, and move around in.
• It was carried out to lessen the adverse physical and social impacts on people that the industrial revolution had brought about, particularly in metropolitan areas.
• Urban local organisations or local governments put these concepts into practise.
• The populace chooses the members of urban local bodies. Urban, metropolitan, and regional development authorities are responsible for planning and implementing development in major cities and urban areas. These entities serve as functionaries for the state government.

Data of urbanization:

• Goa, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Gujarat all have urbanisation rates that are higher than the national average.
• Below National Average: The levels of urbanisation in Bihar, Odisha, Assam, and Uttar Pradesh continue to remain below the national average of 31.1%.
• Union Territories with a higher than 75% urbanisation rate include Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Lakshadweep, and the NCT of Delhi.

The necessity of improving urban planning capacity:

• Rise in Urbanization India. India has 11% of the global urban population.
• Nonetheless, in terms of absolute numbers, India has a larger urban population than other, more densely populated areas, such as the US, Japan, Western Europe, and South America.
• Urbanization will account for 73% of the increase in India's overall population between 2011 and 36.

Urban Planning's Significance for India:

• Urban planning will aid in controlling urban expansion by ensuring that cities have the infrastructure and services needed to support their expanding populations. India is one of the world's fastest-growing nations.
• Enhancing quality of life: Urban planning can create more livable, walkable areas that are safer and more enjoyable to live in, as well as guarantee access to essential services like water, sanitation, and healthcare.
• Urban planning can aid in promoting economic growth by using tools like zoning restrictions, transportation infrastructure, and the creation of business areas. Cities are significant drivers of economic growth.

India's urban planning challenges:

• Rapid urbanisation: India is seeing a rapid rise in both its population and urbanisation, which places a tremendous amount of pressure on its cities to meet the requirements of its residents.
• Absence of essential infrastructure, such as dependable water and sanitation systems, suitable housing, and public transportation, is a major barrier to the efficient planning and management of urban areas in many Indian cities.
• Land use planning: In many instances, India's cities lack participatory and informed land use planning, which results in unplanned and haphazard growth, a lack of enough open space, and encroachment on floodplains and green spaces.
• Climate change and natural disasters: Indian cities are also susceptible to landslides, earthquakes, and floods, which are frequently made worse by climate change. This necessitates careful urban planning and risk reduction strategies.
• Lack of public participation: The effectiveness of urban planning depends on the involvement of the public. Nevertheless, India lacks the necessary structures to involve citizens in decision-making, which alienates and mistrusts the population.

Global Commitments:

• Support urban planning as one of the suggested approaches for achieving sustainable development is one of India's global commitments to the SDGs (Goal 11).
• The New Urban Agenda of UN-Habitat: In 2016, it was approved at Habitat III. It outlines guidelines for the design, development, management, and enhancement of urban environments.
• The concept of spatial sustainability is mentioned by UN-Habitat in 2020. It implies that a city's physical surroundings can influence how well it produces social, economic, and environmental value and well-being.
• India's National Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement include a target to reduce the GDP's emission intensity by 33 to 35% from 2005 levels by 2030.

Significant Government Urban Planning Programs:

• The goal of the Smart Cities Mission, which was established in 2015, is to create 100 smart communities across the nation that will have cutting-edge infrastructure and provide their citizens with a high standard of living.
• The Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), which was established in 2015, aims to enhance the fundamental urban infrastructure in cities and towns, including the transportation system, sewage system, and water supply.
• Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY): This programme was introduced in 2015 with the intention of giving the urban poor access to affordable homes. There are two parts to it: PMAY-Urban for cities and PMAY-Grain for rural areas.
• The Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban seeks to eradicate open defecation in urban India and achieve 100% scientific waste management in 4,041 statutory towns across the nation.
• The National Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY), which strives to integrate urban planning, economic development, and heritage conservation in a way that is inclusive and with the goal of preserving the heritage character of the City, is known as HRIDAY.
• By guaranteeing a pucca dwelling to eligible urban poor, including slum dwellers, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban addresses the scarcity of housing for urban poor people.

Way Forward

• Integrate local state and national urban development and associate initiative to create sustainable cities
• In general, urban planning is essential for the growth of wealthy, habitable, and sustainable cities in India.
• It can aid in making sure that everyone enjoys the advantages of urbanisation and that cities can develop and prosper in a fair and sustainable manner.

ChatGPT – Powered WhatsApp Chatbot

MeitY's BHASHINI is creating a WhatsApp chatbot powered by ChatGPT to help Indian farmers learn about various government initiatives.

Important Points:

• BHASHINI is the name of India's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered language translation platform (BHASHa INterface for India).
• The introduction of the WhatsApp chatbot may take some time due to ChatGPT's limited support for regional languages and present dependency on English for input.

What are the intended purposes?

• Users will be able to send queries via voice notes.
• Simply ask a question using voice notes, and ChatGPT will react with a voice-based answer.
• The chatbot was created with the rural and agrarian population of India in mind, which is primarily dependent on government initiatives and aid.
• Because these potential users speak a variety of languages, it is crucial to create a language model that can correctly identify and understand them.
• This will help a lot of Indian farmers who might not be accustomed with smartphone typing.
• The ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot will support 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Odia, and Assamese.
• The Bhasha Daan Initiative will be used because the majority of the chatbot's users won't be able to communicate in English.
• Bhasha Daan is an initiative to get public feedback for several Indian languages as part of Project BHASHINI. It solicits participation from residents in the development of an open data repository for the purpose of digitally enhancing one's native tongue.

What drawbacks do these models have?

• It's likely that generative AI models like Google's Bard or ChatGPT don't always provide appropriate responses.
• In regards to the James Webb Space Telescope, Bard recently made a mistake. The value of the company's shares dropped by USD 100 billion after the error was found.
• At its present testing phase, the WhatsApp chatbot can only respond to questions that are straightforward regarding government programmes and other subjects.
• This is mostly caused by ChatGPT's inability to currently obtain information from the Internet in real time.
• Only data from 2021 and later is available in the dataset used to train ChatGPT's language model.
• Nevertheless, this might alter soon. Recently, a revamped version of the AI technology that underpins ChatGPT's search engine, Bing, was unveiled by Microsoft.
• The feature will be powered by GPT 3.5, an improved version of the OpenAI language model that serves as ChatGPT's foundation.
• This was known as the "Prometheus Model," and it asserted that it could reply to search queries more effectively than GPT 3.5 by using more recent data and annotated responses.

What is ChatGPT?

• A ChatGPT variation is GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a large-scale neural network-based language model created by OpenAI.
• GPT models are trained on a significant amount of text data in order to generate text that is human-like.
• It has the capacity to formulate answers to a wide range of queries, offer justifications, and take part in dialogues.
• The ChatGPT has the ability to "admit its mistakes, contest erroneous premises, and decline unsuitable requests," as well as "address follow-up inquiries."
• The chatbot was also trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
• Usage: As some users have found, it may be used in practical circumstances for things like online content creation, digital marketing, customer service, and even code debugging.
• The bot can simulate human speech while responding to a variety of queries.
• It is being considered as a substitute for standard emails, party schedules, CVs, and even college students' essays and assignments.

Global Sea-level Rise and Implications: WHO

According to a recent assessment by the World Meteorological Organization, (WMO), the countries that are most at risk from sea level rise worldwide are India, China, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands.

The Findings of the report:

• India, China, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands are the countries that are most at risk from sea level rise internationally, according to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) report, "Global Sea-level Rise and Consequences."
• The hazard posed by the sea level rise affects a number of major cities on all continents.
• Shanghai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Jakarta, Bombay, Maputo, Lagos, Cairo, London, Copenhagen, New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Santiago are a few of these.
• Significant economic, social, and humanitarian challenges are involved.
• According to the research, sea level rise endangers human lives and means of subsistence along with coastal farmlands, water reserves, and infrastructure resilience.
• Storm surges and tidal variations, as was the case during the landfall of hurricane Sandy in New York and Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, amplify the effects of average sea-level rise.
• The WMO warned that future predictions based on climate models and ocean-atmosphere physics are unknown on how quickly Antarctica's greatest global ice mass may melt.
• Sea-level rise varies geographically and is not consistent globally, but the research warns that it would "encroach on coastal settlements and infrastructure and condemn low-lying coastal ecosystems to submersion and loss".
• If urbanisation tendencies in vulnerable places continue, this will worsen the effects and provide greater difficulties when access to energy, water, and other amenities is limited.
• Increases in the frequency, intensity, and severity of droughts, floods, and heatwaves, as well as continued sea level rise, will increase risks to food security in vulnerable regions.
• Climate change will also put increasing pressure on food production and access, particularly in vulnerable regions, undermining food security and nutrition.

Findings related to India:

• Mumbai: By 2050, there could be a sea level rise that will have an impact on 998 structures and 24 km of roads.
• A 5 km long road in Chennai and 55 buildings are at risk; in Kochi, 464 structures are anticipated to be affected by 2050, with a peak of 1,502 buildings.
• Thiruvananthapuram: 349 and 387 buildings, respectively, are projected to be affected by sea-level rise by 2050 and sea-level rise with high tide.
• By 2050, approximately 206 structures and 9 km of the city's road system are anticipated to be submerged owing to potential shoreline alterations.
• The Ministry of Earth Sciences reports that over the past century, the sea level along the Indian coast has generally been seen to be rising at a rate of about 1.7 mm/year (1900-2000).
• A 3 cm sea level increase could result in a 17-metre inland sea intrusion. This might result in 300 metres of land being submerged by the water in a century at current rates of 5 cm/decade.

India is more Vulnerable:

• Due to the multiplicative effects of sea level rise, India is most at danger.
• Due to the ocean's rapid warming, the volume of water has expanded, contributing to half of the sea level rise in the Indian Ocean.
• Glacier melt does not contribute as much.

What suggestions are made?

• We must deal with climate catastrophe and deepen our knowledge of what generates instability.
• It is crucial to actively back community resilience initiatives to combat climate change and enhance Early Warning Systems.

What is raising the sea level?

• The global mean sea level is rising due to several factors, including global warming.
• First, ice sheets and glaciers around the planet are melting and replenishing the ocean with water.
• Second, as the water gets warmer, the ocean's volume grows.
• Aquifers, lakes and reservoirs, rivers, and soil moisture all contribute less to the decrease in liquid water on land, which is a third factor contributing to sea level rise. Groundwater pumping is largely to blame for this movement of liquid water from the land to the ocean.

About World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

• It is an intergovernmental organization with a membership of 193 Member States and Territories.
• It was established by the ratification of the WMO Convention in 1950.
• WMO became the specialised agency of the United Nations for meteorology (weather and climate), operational hydrology, and related geophysical sciences a year later.
• The UN Economic and Social Council is the parent organization of WMO.
• WMO is headquartered in Geneva.