 It is now my pleasure to invite the co-chairs of the next session, my friend Mr Rakesh Mohan, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Sir Harvard Davis to start the proceedings. The main roles that Rakesh and I will be performing in this session is to discipline the speakers and make sure we try to keep to time, albeit we are slightly delayed already. I'm going to be very brief as I've already spoken. The papers that have been prepared for this meeting give a vivid description of Mumbai and its challenges and we've heard a little bit more about it from the Commissioner. This may well be the largest conurbation in the world in 20 years time and now it exhibits some of the most dramatic contrast in income and in wealth. On the one hand, we have a dynamic financial centre, we have Hollywood, we have amazing real estate prizes, exciting new developments at Bandrakola, but alongside that the slums at Dharavi and elsewhere, which may be Asia's largest. We also, of course, have to work within the context of democratic structures which are robust and one of India's great shock absorbing strengths, if you like, but also make decision making in an environment of a city quite complicated and time consuming. I'm sure that the speakers will tell us a lot more about these issues and others and I'm going to invite Rakesh to speak to introduce this session. Morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm absolutely delighted to have this opportunity to participate in this important event. Given where I am now, that is the Reserve Bank of India, I don't often get a chance to speak on urban issues. Actually, the last time that I was asked to speak on these issues was a few months ago by the Rockefeller Foundation and that time I spoke for about an hour. So this time, of course, the organisers must have heard about that so they made me a chairman so I don't get to speak. This Urban Age Conference is really very, very timely. As has been said at different times, it is around now sometime in 2007 that the majority of the world's population has become urban. That is, there are more people now living in urban areas in the world than in rural areas and that's an epochal event. It is also about now that we in India have begun to take the issue of city development much more seriously than we have ever before. In fact, I see many friends here that many of us who did work seriously on urban issues about 25 years ago then gave up because no one listened to us so I'm very glad at least a quarter of a century later that something is happening. I'll just make a couple of points. First, that the pace of urbanisation in the 20th century was something quite unprecedented. From 1950, only about 500 million people were added to urban areas in the world. In the next 50 years, that is 1950 to 2000, there's four times that is about 2 billion people and the expectation by the United Nations is that from 2000 to 2030 there will be another 2 billion. In other words, the addition to urban population in the world from 2030 will be similar to what happened in the previous 50 years. But the point I want to make about that is that what is remarkable about this phenomenon is how well we have done, not how badly we have done. That is, the absorption of 2 billion people in 50 years in urban areas has really been done with a great deal of comfort that people actually are much better off than they were before in urban areas and in fact from wherever they came from. One point that I would like to make going on from that is that with the globalisation of trade and both goods and services, the relative productivity of cities that will determine the comparative advantage of countries more and more because everything else is equalised. With more and more people living in cities, it's also incumbent on us to make our cities livable and people friendly. When we talk of urban development, we always talk of bricks, mortar and even more these days of bitumen. What we really need to think about is how to unleash the potential of urban growth and one quote I would give is from a very recent report from the United Nations Population Fund that says, people intuitively perceive the advantages of urban life. This explains why millions flock to the cities every year yet many planners and policy makers in rapidly urbanising nations want to prevent urban growth. I would say that this applies particularly to policy makers in India and we have to get out of that kind of thinking. As it happens, urbanisation growth has actually been slowing down in India for the last 20 years. I'm looking forward to Amitabh Kundu telling us whether it will further slow down next 20 years or whether it will accelerate. The likelihood however I do hope is that it will accelerate over the next 30 or 50 years. We must therefore concentrate on facilitating this growth and this transition. Apart from the traditional areas of hard infrastructure which Mr Patak mentioned, water, sanitation, sewage, urban transportation, power, communication, something that the globalised cities will have to concentrate on much more on the softer areas of infrastructure, that is knowledge generation, schooling, vocational education, health and urban amenities. We really do need to make our cities much, much more people friendly which this city of Mumbai is not. The legendary Mayor of Bogota, Enrique Panellosa is here. He can tell us much more about how to make cities livable. I'm particularly attracted by his notion of using public spaces for common consumption. The demand for urban amenities has gone up tremendously all over the world. The rich are providing for themselves in gated communities in many of the growing cities. We also observed that particular phenomenon in India. It is important that this trend be arrested and that it be planned for the usage of public spaces for the provision of the best urban amenities for all and not just for the rich. To the trans millennial, Enrique provided Mercedes buses for the common people to travel in Bogota rather than for the rich. He provided streets for walking by narrowing down roads and streets in the city rather than broadening them for cars. He provided public libraries of international quality for everyone to use all across the city of Bogota. I'm just giving these examples because there's something very striking and counterintuitive. So I do hope that I look forward to this conference on providing some clues on how we can make urban growth much more inclusive, how we can facilitate urban growth, how we can welcome urban growth and accelerate it particularly in this country so that we can make our cities grow and make cities livable. This session I'm looking forward to Enrique Badet, Saski Assassin and Amitab Kundu speaking on my hope on all of these issues. Thank you very much.