Yechury pens to Puri for postponement of urban policy framework as election nears

The CPI(M) has urged the Centre to allow the next government to take a decision on the country's new urban policy instead of trying to push it through, days after the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs released its first draft of the National Urban Policy Framework (NUPF). In a letter to the Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said that the deadline of March 10, 2019 for consultations was a highly exclusive planning format where a large number of people, groups working on urban affairs will not be able to participate.

"This is also a period when the general elections are about to be announced and soon we shall have the Model Code of Conduct in place. In such a background, I suggest you to sincerely not just postpone the date of the deadline, rather allow the new government to take the call on the urban policy framework as the mandate is desired by the people of the country," he said in the letter. Yechury also said that urbanisation policies of the government, including the smart cities plan, have been "failures".

"They foster a built environment that is disconnected from the continuously changing socio-economic conditions of urban space. It, thus, clearly marks the utter failure of the policies of urbanisation which have not fetched the desired results. The much-acclaimed flagship programmes of ‘smart cities’, etc., do not even find a comment in the draft and this, in itself, shows the failure of such programmes; not to quote from the massive data that speaks about the same," he said.

(With inputs from agencies.)