A new Pune

Pune is a city with lot of land which is being used the same manner as it was more than half a century ago. The city has grown and become a modern metropolis and many villages which were the edge  city of now become the centre of the city. Pune is now getting a transportation infrastructure of metros ring roads  befitting metropolitan area with perhaps more than 5-6 million people. There is an opportunity in this transformation to envision the future of the city for the next 50 years and reuse some of the land also accordingly. 

Agricultural College as a Central Business District 

Very prime land near the nerve centre of the the metro network where almost three metro lines Criss cross is being used for an agricultural college. 

The Proposed Pune Metro Rail Network

There is no ecosystem for agriculture in Pune city. There is hardly enough water even for its residents.  It will be difficult even for the students to practice what they learn or to interact with agriculturalist or farmers. What was once the right place place for agricultural university is perhaps now a misfit. Areas like Solapur on Marathwada or Vidarbha  which face challenges in creating a strong agricultural economy for which there is an a viable market and which is sustainable environmently. Need this college more than Shivaji Nagar Pune.  There is a strong case to to shift this university to the epicenter of areas which require speedy thinking and solutions for creating the second green revolution for Maharashtra. 

Maybe one idea may be to shift it to Baramati !

Similarly there is a need to re envision Pune and create a city in which the traffic flows and people movements are balanced. Having two three pockets like Hinjewadi or Kharadi where few lakh people commute everyday in one direction is not a recipe for a balanced development. No transport system can take skewed loads. The mistake of creating Nariman Point at one edge of the city should not be repeated. It simply destroys the life of one generation of people by eating up all their personal time in commute. It is necessary in Pune to create a central district where lots of work can be done by just walking around or by simply sitting on a small bus or an electric vehicle. Perhaps it's time for Pune to learn from what Kuala Lumpur did it and create a  City centre.  There was a racing track in the middle of Kuala Lumpur rather the city grow so much that the racing track came to be located centrally. When Kuala Lumpur wanted to reinvent itself it took up this racing track and converted into the Kuala Lumpur City Centre  with modern amenities.

The interests of entire KL was put ahead of just the Selangor  Turf club members and the results are there for the whole world  to see. Selangor Turf Club was an institution of the British Raj in Malaysia meant for the amusements of the British elites. Set up in 1800  it definitely appears to have become  an elitist institution by the time Malaysia decided to use its land for the greater good.

I think it is time to do the same thing with The Agriculture College  at Shivaji Nagar, Pune. It has about 1000 students and  the college and the farm appears to cover an area of about 100-150 acres. The College is between 200 metres to one kilometre from three metro lines- the locations for which have already been decided. With this infrastructure Shivaji Nagar would become the hub of the city and would have very high public transport connectivity.

The Government should  pay fair compensation and take over the Agricultural College and build a very modern city centre on the entire land. If government wishes it will also take over some portion of the military land abutting it and add to this areas. This will create both flow into the City centre and out of City centre using the metro rail network. . For example the line to Hinjewadi will not be like the Virar to Nariman point line,  having traffic only on one direction.  This line can bring in people to the city centre from suburban residential areas and  and can take people from the City centre to Hinjewadi. Utilisation of the metro network and the roads will be high on both directions hereby making life much better for citizens. Viability of the metro network can be substantially altered by such a development as its capacity utilisation will be high along every direction and along every line of the network.

Optimisation techniques such as  theory of constraints also suggest that the greatest benefits to any system arise when the usage of suboptimal resources is increased drastically by removing the constraints that limit their use.

The agriculture University will also benefit tremendously by being shifted to areas in which agriculture is the prime business or occupation.  It will get a place of importance in that area and will be in the right in the middle of problems and can find solutions for these problems.

 If this land parcel is developed as a dense CBD then one could expect at each acre would house 800-1000 employees. This new City centre will be very near to the dense but traditional parts of the Pune city and will be an excellent employment generator for the areas in which a large portion of the people live thereby reducing the load on the transport network. The Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai could serve as a precedent and a base upon which Pune could learn and develop this area

Raj Bhavan Pune

The White House which is the official residence of the US President, arguably the most powerful political leader in the world, is only 18 acres.  Pune is not even the capital of Maharashtra.  Raj bhavan occupies very large tracts. It is  obvious that these were created with very different idea of projecting the power of the rulers of those age.  A reading of this (Terraces of the Raj) will make it amply clear of the nature of the disconnect of this building with modern India ! Since no Governor of India is new to its weather and we now have air conditioning in buildings and cars these summer  Raj bhavans have lot all its relevance.

The Raj Bhavan at Mahabaleshwar is even more of an anachronism. It is not relevant to this discussion except to highlight this point ! 

India has progressed a long distance from the British Raj and now there are no rulers and there are now only people representatives who are there to serve The people representatives need to be accessible and not appear  disconnected  to the people they are  elected  to serve . We have to evaluate whether the people representatives need to have such large tracts of land which are hardly used in the centre of the city. This tracts of land today can be used for creating centralised business districts in which public services for which there is a large volume of traffic such as stamp duty registration courts can be housed on this premises. Incidentally Raj Bhavan also falls almost at the edge of one of the metro lines. . This may appear to be a revolutionary idea today but logical one and it should be  evaluated on the merits of the idea rather than it's being a divergent from the past concepts that we have run with so long.

It is very classist and elitist to think that only farmers land can be acquired for alternate uses and only their land can be envisioned for a different way a of land use. To be fair every land should be open for such evaluation and should be available to the service of the society upon payment  of a fair compensation. This should be true of farmers land or the agriculture University or the Raj Bhavan. To say that the right to property of the President or the Governor is different from right to property of  all citizen is to make a mockery of the constitution. The time has come to have an open constructive  debate about these ideas.

I am not an urban planner but as  an user of various city infrastructure and having lived and travelled and seen some amount of cities, I thought that we should learn from the solutions other cities came up with when they faced similar problems.  Intelligent adaptation of good ideas is actually good thing and hence I think this idea needs to be put out in public domain and discussed. Its flaws drawbacks could be looked into and fixed and, if  the idea is found a viable one  may be taken up for implementation.