The City’s heady ‘growth’ created its own challenges, especially the lack of civic infrastructure. However, Gurgaon today faces newer challenges, like traffic congestion, declining road safety and pollution. Planned as a ‘counter magnet’ to decongest Delhi, the City in now itself in the grip of congestion. In this context, the Sustainability theme is gaining rapid traction here. Public Transport is an integral part of Sustainability, because it helps rebalance public space in a city, giving greater priority to safe and secure environments, social inclusion and integration, high-quality public life and pedestrian needs. Rapid Metro Gurgaon hosted the ‘Sustainability Report on Urban Mobility’, along with Global Compact Network India. The idea was to explore the possibilities for sustainable transformation through urban mobility – with the Rapid Metro being the ‘last mile connector’. “Sustainable mobility offers opportunities for realising the creation of smart cities and escalating economic performance through a shared value approach,” said Pooran Chandra Pandey, Executive Director, Global Compact Network India. “With the advent of Rapid Metro, we have paved the way for the reduction of cars on Gurgaon roads, and for the advent of a greener and congestion-free Cyber City,” said Rajiv Banga, MD & CEO, IL & FS Rail. The world is today confronted with some mega trends – like climate change, urbanisation, lifestyle diseases, migration, drop in agricultural output, growing consumption, carbon emission, and energy, water and waste related challenges. Sustainable transportation can help tackle some of these challenges, as it forms a critical part of urban development, by providing access to education, markets, employment, recreation, healthcare and other key civic and social services. Cities with integrated transport modes are more likely to evolve and prosper as centres of trade, commerce, industry, education, tourism and services.
Global Compact Network India (GCNI) is the Indian Local Network of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). GCNI is a country level platform for public and private sector companies, civil society organisations, academic institutions and business associations, and aids in aligning stakeholders’ practices towards the ten universally accepted principles of UNGC in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and (anti)corruption. Rapid Metro Gurgaon, an initiative of IL&FS Rail, is developing the country’s first fully privately funded Metro Rail system. IL&FS has developed an array of commercially viable models for infrastructure projects on the Public Private Partnership (PPP) platform.
Reviewed by Dr. Ramesh Goyal, Immediate Previous President, Indian Medical Association.
Read More...