Proper urbanisation is one of the most pressing challenges facing India today. It is inevitable that over the next 20-30 years, India will double in urbanisation from 30 per cent to 60 per cent. This will be at a time when we also have the largest pool of young people in the world. The combination of urbanisation, the demographic surge, globalisation, and the economic growth that consequently will be unleashed, present the most significant opportunity for India to reach a developed status. But for this, we have to get our cities right. Classical concepts on urban matters are based on implicit assumptions of slow steady growth, not the explosive torrent of people rushing into each of our metropolitan areas. To make our cities world-class, we will have to think of a new paradigm.

Inclusive and participatory: The bane of cities has been the stark contrast between the rich and the poor. This is a global phenomenon. In India, it is lavish skyscrapers jostling with slums. In the urban sprawl of the United States, it is violent inner cities surrounded by posh suburbs. In Paris, it is a rich city centre surrounded by alienated immigrants in suburban high-rise ghettos. A world-class city will have the least amount of such differences, and in its design and architecture will be meant to be inclusive. This will be supported by a democratic process based on participation and transparency of governance, so that everyone feels they have a voice. This sense of inclusion will also be the source of public safety and peace. An important factor in creating inclusion is the city retaining enough land in its possession, either for public spaces and utilities or for providing facilities for the economically weaker sections.

Real-time cities: The cities of the future will have to be planned, managed and choices made in real time. This means that they will truly be simulated in great detail on a digital platform. Today's technology allows us to do that. The combination of GIS and GPS and the granularity of data that can be captured, stored, processed and searched, will allow us to have a full replication of a city in a computer. This creates unprecedented ways of improving city management. For example, the volume of cell phone signals on the roads can be used to detect traffic congestion in real-time. All public services will be delivered electronically wherever possible. Every citizen will have a smart card, which is designed to make his interaction with the city and its agencies hassle-free. Real-time planning will allow the modelling of the impact of new vehicles, new malls or new apartment blocks, and help in zoning, land use, building bye-laws and variable pricing of scarce public services.

Carbon-neutral: As the onslaught of global warming and climate change becomes more acute, the world-class city will have to be carbon-neutral. This will mean that for every carbon emission due to vehicles and factories, there will be a carbon-sink to neutralise it. This will be managed in real-time, with an internal market for carbon credits.

Alternative energies: A truly world-class city will have to get at least half of its energy from alternative sources. The small area and high density of population will make it possible to power the city through hydrogen and solar power and other sources of renewable energy.

Water-neutral: To address the challenge of water and the impending battles over water rights, cities will have to be designed to be self-sufficient in water. This will mean designing a water-spine, either of rivers or lakes and other catchment areas. It will mean implementing rainwater harvesting and water recycling. It will require real-time tracking of ground water levels. The water-spine will have to be designed both for efficient storage in times of low rains as well as be capable of handling the overflow in times of floods.

Transport-spine: No world-class city can be even thought of without pervasive public transport. In fact, the public transport-spine will have to be designed first with commercial, industrial and residential areas planned later. While there will of course be roads, and buses and private cars, there will be a real-time pricing to choose between public or private transport based on congestion analysis. The different modes of transport will be integrated and designed to provide seamless end-to-end travel connectivity for the citizen.

Supply-chain: Cities are ultimately engines of commerce, connected as they are to the rest of the country by airports, ports and roads and telecommunication links. They take in human capital and raw materials and create products and services. This will require sophisticated supply chains to be thought of in their design. This could be the supply chains of knowledge, or that of its industrial out put. It could well be the supply chain of what is required to keep the city running well. Understanding these supply chains and the impact of that on the infrastructure and the environment will be the key to modern city design.

Local: While the cities are global, the day-to-day management will have to be all local. This means that the empowerment of people at the level of the ward or locality. It will mean the citizens of an area making a choice over how their budgets will be spent. It will mean common public schools of high quality where the parents of the locality will have a say. The same real-time models that will help the city to do long-term, large-scale planning can be used for local planning and simulation so that ordinary citizens can make informed choices.

Migration: One of the principal reasons for ill-planned cities is the under-estimation of migration. Never in human history has urbanisation happened so fast and with such numbers as is happening today in India and China. Such numbers make all plans and estimates for public services and land go haywire. This migration at both ends of the spectrum has its consequences. At one end, the rural poor migrate to cities looking for jobs. While they are actually very resource-light in their impact, their acceptance for living in the most appalling circumstances creates the overflow onto public spaces as we see in Mumbai. At the other end, the educated migrant with his white-collar outsourcing job, becomes an apartment-owner and a car-owner in his 20s. This leads to the traffic congestion you see on the streets of Bangalore. Part of the solution, of course, is to develop not one or two cities, but 100 cities across the country, so that the load of migration can be absorbed. Individual city planners have, of course, no control over that. However, they will need to have a strategy both to absorb the rural poor as well as the new middle class that will throng their city.

Culture and creativity: If cities are not just going to be centres of business activity, but also throbbing with innovation, they will have to actively encourage creative folks. This will require a culture of tolerance and allowing diversity to flourish. The uneasy tension that exists today in our cities between traditionalists and modernists, will have to give way to a more tolerant framework of live and let live. A world-class city will have a significant number of its inhabitants from certainly all over the country, and perhaps from all over the world. This will require a melting pot, which allows an outsider to quickly get into the groove and get assimilated rather than be always treated as an outsider.

To those of us fighting the daily battles of our urban lives, many of these ideas may sound utopian. But if we truly want to make our cities world-class and make sure that the majority of our people can aspire to a decent standard of living and quality of life, we need to break out of the usual refrain for building more flyovers and broadening roads, and adopt a new paradigm for defining a vision for of our cities.

The author is CEO, President and MD of Infosys Technologies Ltd