Srinagar city is expanding at a very fast pace. Newer and newer regularised and non-regularised colonies are coming up in Srinagar everywhere. On the periphery of Srinagar as it touches the borders of Pulwama, Ganderbal, Budgam, and Baramulla there now can be seen shopping malls and supermarkets. Supermarkets have begun to come up in many villages of Budgam like Panzan as well. These supermarkets are doing brisk business reflective of the buying potential of these villages. The fact of the matter is that the population is increasing at a rapid pace and even the population of villages increasing rapidly. These villages are feeling the pressure of the city site people moving to villages to build their own homes.
One must note with a bit of pessimism that the valley of Kashmir has the densest population of all the regions of erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir. This rising population will ultimately lead to the creation of more cities and towns and the landscape of the entire valley will change. The thing that worries one more is that this expansion is by and large horizontal. At a population of 40 lakh souls at this horizontal expansion, Srinagar city will cover the same area as the current area of Hyderabad or Chennai. That would be a massive infrastructural challenge for the establishment. To provide electricity, roads, and water supply to such a vast area would be unthinkable.
However, that is exactly where we are heading. Decongesting Srinagar is a good idea but then decongesting it by horizontally expanding the city is an equally bad idea. The town planners need to put their thinking caps on and see the feasibility of vertical expansion. Vertical expansion would ensure wider roads, round-the-clock surveillance of streets, proper power supply, water supply, and watertight accountability of these deliverables.
The city planners as well as the general public need to understand the need to expand this city in a scientific way. We cannot leave our city at the whims and fancies of land sharks who will build more and more unregulated colonies and bulldozing establishment with huge infrastructural challenges.
We hope things change for better.
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