 I'm Andy Altman as the spoke yesterday, the former planning director in Washington, D.C. And with me is my co-chair to introduce. Hello. I'm Ratnagar Gaiquart, Metropolitan Commissioner, MMRD. As you can see on the agenda, we have a very congested session that we're going to plan to move through as to get as much done as possible. Because we have a very, very rich set of presentations and experiences that we're going to share about planning how cities are planned, both here in Indian cities, not only in Mumbai, but much of the research that you'll hear from Philip Rota, about the other Indian cities, participants here from a variety of cities, and international experiences. So we're going to try to stick pretty strictly to the time, and I guess I get to start out very briefly for a moment to just make an opening comment about the planning of cities, because in a way I get to connect what the session yesterday, which was about the vision for cities and how they're actually planned, and then later we'll hear how they're actually governed and what gets implemented. So there's a very nice connection between these two that we can draw. The connection I like to draw between vision and planning, which often are seen as completely distinct. We know planning is often seen as a more technocratic exercise, regulatory exercise, but at its heart is simply fulfilling a vision. This is based on a significant amount of research you're going to hear about that Philip Rota has done about planning and to begin to understand the planning challenge. Interestingly, as he went around, as you'll hear, 40%, 7% of people interviewed throughout the different exchanges we've had in India with government and other officials have said that planning is one of the most critical challenge as growth begins to overtake planning and outdated plans can't keep up with the pace, velocity, and complexity of planning. These are just some of the very brief quotes that I think will help to frame this discussion. I'm not going to read all of these, but I think the one that says it is growth which overtakes all of our planning, which really raises the question of what is the relevance of planning? How does one plan an environment of so much complexity and change? The second area is city shaping, which is from big planning to the idea of what is master planning? I think it's a very interesting quote that says, is master planning in fact a good way to plan for urban growth at all given its dynamism? This final one that says, is there something wrong with planning if 90% of the people are outside of it? In other words, what again, how do we plan in this kind of environment? And finally, the whole question of linkage, which is how do we move out of the silos that characterize much planning, housing, transport, land use? We're dealing with a city that is a completely intertwined organism. How do we link these? And we just begin to see some quotes that people say, how do we just woken up to the enormity of the issue of land use and planning? We heard that yesterday. So I think some of these quotes which come from people here begin to set, I think, the stage for this debate about how planning actually operates, how can be made relevant, and to hear from international experiences what we can learn. So with that, I'm going to turn over to my co-chair who's going to make a brief statement and then we're going to begin our presentations. Good morning. Hello. Good morning, everybody. I think we are in for a very exciting session, how cities are planned. I may sound a bit cynical if I say, are cities really planned? Amartya Sen rightly said that I am not interested in knowing what is your GDP, what is your per capita income, what are your human development indices, what is the infant model rate, what is the school dropout rate, what is the level of nutrition, that is most important. In the Indian context now take city like Mumbai, 60% of the population in abject poverty, slum areas with unhygienic conditions. Are we planning for them? In our planning process, we do mark certain plots for economically weaker sections, but then encroachments come on that because we do not provide housing for the poor. Now such inhuman conditions prevailing and urban poverty issues are not being understood in proper form, what is the nature of urban poverty, what is the extent of urban poverty, what is the impact of lack of portable water on absence of health facilities. I think all these will go into planning for cities. Unfortunately, my little experience while working in Pune and Mumbai Corporation shows that there is a lack of willows, there is a mindset also. In Pune I was surprised that lakhs of people near Pune railway station squatting on the road in Nalas, we found that sanitation was so much neglected, that the ratio of population to one seat was in many pockets, one is to 800. So we used to say that if you stand in the queue at the toilet side, you may have to wait for 15 days for your turn to come. Now this is the state of affairs, not only in Maharashtra but in most of the cities, not only in India but in most of the underdeveloped countries. So when we talk about planning for the cities, I think this aspect of urban poor has to be taken into consideration, which unfortunately is not taken into consideration. Now let us look at this side of urban infrastructure. There also precious little has happened. Our roads were not been able to widen, in Mumbai, east-west links were not been able to build with the result that, from here to the other, which is just about 10 kilometers, takes more than one hour to reach. Now this is the scenario of traffic, transportation, then water supply, drainage we have neglected for years and years, and we could witness the calamity in July 2005. So I think we need to have a more holistic approach while planning for the cities and the implementation is very important where all stakeholders have to come together. Gone are those days where government was provided, government has to only facilitate and all the stakeholders including public-private partnership, all that has to come together very, very quickly. There's hardly any time otherwise we'll be running out of time. So thank you very much for these initial remarks and let us look forward to exciting session. Thank you.