With few notable exceptions, Indian cities have no non-religious, egalitarian public spaces. The few that existed are vanishing and as our cities grow we are not making any attempts to build new ones.

Anurag Behar, CEO of Azim Premji Foundation, says: "A city is not its gated communities, but its public spaces. These define the character of any urban environment and connect the people of the city. Since we don’t have these, our cities have no (or are losing) character and have no sense of connectedness.

Disregard of public spaces is only one aspect of our poor urban development. While we grapple with this complex overall problem, a step forward on the specific issue of public spaces would be if all academic institutions were to throw open their gates...." Read More

Jyothi Shankaran

    Jyothi’s last role was as Senior Editor with the business news channel Bloomberg TV India. He also worked as News Editor at business-standard.com, the online version of the business newspaper Business Standard. Jyothi is a chemical engineer from the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar.