NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 14 – 214End of the chapter — Questions and activities

Book page 212 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

What are some common features of cities?

Answer

Whatever else differs between them, cities share a set of features that the chapter names in its opening definition and again in Fig. 7.6.

Feature	What the chapter says about it
A concentration of population	Cities are areas with a concentration of human populations — which is why their population density is high
Many kinds of businesses and occupations	Work in the secondary and tertiary sectors rather than farming: industries, transport, services, and a diversity of jobs — the auto driver, writer, musician, architect and security guard of Fig. 7.6
Government institutions	Offices, ministries, courts and administrative bodies concentrate in cities
Elaborate transport and communication	Often a busy transport network, including a metro in the largest cities
Elected local bodies	Urban areas have elected local bodies responsible for the development of infrastructure and other amenities — a village has a gram panchayat instead
Built form	High-rise buildings, shopping malls, and a built-up surface that leaves little open land, as the Gurugram image on p. 193 shows
Infrastructure that keeps being added	Factories, hotels, banks, entertainment and sports facilities; and cultural centres, libraries, museums and stadiums
Expansion outward	Cities expand to form metropolitan areas — as Delhi did with the NCR, taking in NOIDA, Ghaziabad and Gurugram

One more feature is honest to include, because the chapter devotes a full section to it: cities also share their problems — traffic jams, waste, poor air quality, water scarcity, reduced green spaces, monsoon flooding and slums.

Did you know? Size is relative, and the world’s biggest cities are very big indeed. Reading the bars of Fig. 7.4 (population in crores, 2025): Jakarta 4.19, Dhaka 3.66, Tokyo 3.34, New Delhi 3.02, Shanghai 2.96, Guangzhou 2.76, Cairo 2.56, Manila 2.47, Kolkata 2.25 and Seoul 2.25.
Those ten together = 2.25 + 2.25 + 2.47 + 2.56 + 2.76 + 2.96 + 3.02 + 3.34 + 3.66 + 4.19 = 29.46 crore people.
India’s two on the list, New Delhi and Kolkata, hold 3.02 + 2.25 = 5.27 crore, which is 5.27 ÷ 29.46 ≈ 18 per cent of that total. The largest, Jakarta, is 4.19 ÷ 2.25 ≈ 1.86 times the size of Kolkata.

Why these features come together: they are not a list of coincidences. A concentration of people makes varied occupations possible; varied occupations need transport and communication to link them; that many people and businesses need an elected body to run water, drains and waste; and all of them together need so much space that building goes upward and outward. Take away the first feature and the rest do not appear.

Q2.

Can you think of a city or town near you that has grown in population? What could be the underlying reasons for the urban migration?

Answer

Name a real place you can check, and then explain the growth using causes, not guesses. The chapter supplies the causes; your job is to say which of them apply to your town.

Reason people move to a city	The chapter’s evidence
Work in industry	Sakchi became Jamshedpur around a steel plant; with planned development, more factories emerged in the region, attracting people from within and outside the state for work opportunities
Work in services and IT	Bengaluru’s clusters offer jobs to skilled workers from different fields; Gurugram’s IT and BPO firms drew global companies from the 1990s
Education	New Delhi’s universities and research centres attract people for jobs and education opportunities from across the country
Administration	Ministries and government institutions concentrate employment in capital cities
Trade and tourism	Pilgrim and tourist cities such as Varanasi, Amritsar and Agra support transport, hospitality, food vending and handicrafts
Lower operating costs	Companies set up warehouses and offices in Kochi, Indore, Lucknow and Nagpur, so jobs appear in mid-sized cities too
Better connectivity	Better roads, highways and the metro rail system boosted the region’s expansion in the NCR

How to check your answer: compare two Census figures for the town, or ask three long-settled families when the newest colonies were laid out and what opened just before. Growth almost always follows one identifiable event — a factory, a highway, a college, a government office.

Sample answer: Hosur, about 40 km from Bengaluru, has grown very fast. The underlying reasons are two. First, industry: automobile and electronics units set up here because land and operating costs are lower than in Bengaluru, which is the same reason the chapter gives for companies choosing Kochi, Indore, Lucknow and Nagpur. Second, connectivity: the national highway links Hosur to Bengaluru’s Electronic City in under an hour, so people can live here and work there. Those two together pulled in workers from surrounding districts, and housing colonies, schools and shops followed them. In short, jobs came first and people followed the jobs — which is exactly how the chapter describes early urbanisation.

Q3.

With reference to the epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, who are the participants in the making of the city and what could be their contribution?

Answer

The epigraph is Jane Jacobs: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Read it carefully — it is a condition, not a compliment. A city can serve everyone only if everyone had a hand in making it; a city built by a few will end up serving those few.

So the participants are far more than the planners.

Participant	Contribution to the making of the city
Urban planners and architects	Decide where homes, businesses, parks, schools, hospitals and transport go. Vidyadhar Bhattacharya’s grid of chowkris still shapes how Jaipur works, three centuries later
Elected local bodies and municipal staff	Responsible for the development of infrastructure and amenities — water, drains, waste collection, street lighting, roads
Industry and enterprise	Create the work that brings people. The Tata family’s vision turned Sakchi into a township with modern facilities for everyone working in the factory, and Sir Dorabji Tata built a hospital in the village long before steel production began
Workers of every kind	Fig. 7.6 names the auto driver, writer, musician, architect and security guard side by side. The city runs because all five turn up
Informal workers, including slum dwellers	The chapter is explicit: they support cities through vegetable vending, domestic help, laundry services, construction work and plumbing. The buildings and the daily supplies of the city pass through their hands
Migrants from other regions	Bring the languages, customs, festivals and food that make the potpourri of a city’s culture — vaḍā pāv exists because mill workers needed a quick meal
Educational and research institutions	A close link between industries and educational institutions encouraged innovation in Bengaluru and led to new products and services
Citizens acting together	Non-profit organisations, Resident Welfare Associations and communities revived Bengaluru’s lakes by desilting, repairing bunds, clearing drainage channels, planting native species and restocking fish
Traders, shopkeepers and vendors	Make the public squares and bazaars live — Jaipur’s nine squares were built to be centres of trade and interaction
Artists, performers and festival organisers	Kolkata’s Durga Puja is made by thousands of ordinary participants — and became UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2021

Why Jacobs puts the condition that way: a city plan can only guess at what people need; the people themselves know. When residents are left out of the making, the city gets built for the ones who were included — good roads for cars but no footpath, malls but no affordable housing. The Bengaluru lakes are the chapter’s counter-example: the revival came from residents, not from a plan handed down. That is what "created by everybody" looks like in practice.

Q4.

In what ways can urbanisation affect rural areas? Do cities also depend on rural areas? If yes, how? In what ways can rural and urban areas help each other develop?

Answer

Part 1 — How urbanisation affects rural areas. The chapter’s closing paragraph makes the link directly: rapid urbanisation brings pollution, traffic congestion, inequality and the loss of green spaces, affecting not only those who live in cities but also the rural areas connected to them.

People leave. Urbanisation is defined as the population shift from rural to urban areas and the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas. Villages lose working-age adults, especially the young.
Land changes hands. Cities expand into villages and forest areas (as Q5 puts it). Farmland on the edge becomes housing and warehouses — visible between the two Bengaluru images of Fig. 7.5.
Resources are drawn away. A growing city’s demand for water, energy, sand, stone and timber is met from the region around it.
Pollution travels. Air and water do not stop at the city boundary; a river carries a city’s sewage downstream to villages.
But money and services travel too. Earnings sent home, better roads, and access to city hospitals, colleges and markets reach the villages that are well connected.

Part 2 — Yes, cities depend on rural areas, heavily.

What the city takes from the countryside	Where the chapter shows it
Food	Increased demand for food is the first pressure listed when populations pour into cities
Raw materials	Places grew into urban centres through ease of access to agricultural produce and raw materials; Sakchi’s steel plant was sited on iron ore
Workers	A city’s population grows because it attracts people from other areas (Fig. 7.6) — the workforce is rural in origin
Water	Bengaluru’s crisis is a crisis of catchments, lakes and groundwater that lie in and around the region
Land to grow into	Metropolitan expansion — NOIDA, Ghaziabad and Gurugram were not always cities

Part 3 — How they can help each other develop.

Connect them properly. Better roads, highways and rail let a farmer reach an urban market and a villager reach a city hospital or college without having to migrate permanently — the NCR’s own experience of how connectivity eases pressure.
Spread the jobs. Companies choosing Kochi, Indore, Lucknow and Nagpur for lower operating costs show that work can be dispersed. Small specialised centres — Moradabad, Ludhiana, Tirupur, Channapatna, Kanchipuram — keep skilled work close to where people already live.
Process near the source. Agro-processing and craft units in small towns give farm produce a higher value before it leaves the district.
Protect what both share. Lakes, rivers, catchments and forests serve city and village alike. The RWA and community revival of Bengaluru’s lakes increased water availability and maintained the surrounding area’s ecological balance.
Plan the edge. Where a city meets villages, decide in advance what stays farmland and what may be built, so that expansion does not simply eat the fields.

Why this matters for the chapter’s argument: a city is not self-sufficient — it is a place of consumption as well as production. Every meal eaten in a city was grown outside it, and every construction worker on its skyline came from somewhere. Treating the rural area as a separate subject is exactly the mistake that produces an unsustainable city.

Q5.

What is urban planning? What are the risks of ignoring sustainable urban planning as cities expand into villages and forest areas?

Answer

Urban planning is deciding in advance how land in a city or town will be used, so that infrastructure and the overall quality of life for residents are as good as they can be. An urban planner is the person who does this. Planning answers, before construction: how many people live here, what work they do, what transport they need and how it connects, where homes, businesses, parks, schools, hospitals, libraries, sports facilities and community centres go, and what public safety a place needs — safe streets for pedestrians and cyclists, fire stations and police stations within easy reach.

The chapter adds one word that carries most of the weight: cities must be planned as dynamic systems with evolving needs, especially considering climate change. A plan made once and never revised is not planning. That is why Singapore keeps a Concept Plan looking 40 years ahead and revises its Master Plan every 5 years.

The risks of ignoring sustainable planning — Bengaluru is the chapter’s worked example of nearly all of them:

Risk	What goes wrong, and the chapter’s evidence
Water scarcity and flooding	Bengaluru faces shortages in summer and flooding in the monsoon due to poor urban planning — overuse of groundwater, no rainwater harvesting, and encroachment of lake beds. Both problems, one cause
Loss of water bodies	About 1,000 lakes reduced to about 200 — a loss of roughly 800, or 80 per cent. Bellandur and Varthur got covered in foam, released toxic gases and even caught fire; wells dried up
Loss of green space and rising heat	Reduced green spaces and ‘heat islands’ raise city temperatures — a serious risk as climate change adds to it
Air pollution	The NCR frequently records an AQI over 400 against a safe limit of 50 — eight times the safe level, with serious health risks
Slums and exclusion	Unplanned residential areas with poor access to water, sanitation, energy and waste management; slums grow because affordable housing was not built for the people the city needs
Congestion	Narrow, poorly maintained roads and a growing number of vehicles
Loss of farmland and forest	When a city expands into villages and forest areas, it takes the land that grew its food and the tree cover that cooled it, and it destroys habitat and biodiversity

Why unplanned expansion is so hard to undo: a filled lake bed or a built-over drainage channel cannot be reopened once flats stand on it. That is why the losses show up as permanent problems — the water has nowhere to go every single monsoon thereafter. The chapter’s standard for a good city is exact: it must offer opportunities without excluding the vulnerable, and provide comfort without exhausting resources.

Q6.

Observe your own neighbourhood. What signs of good or poor planning do you notice? How do they affect daily life for you and others?

Answer

Do this as a survey, not from memory. Walk one fixed route — say from your home to your school — and score it against the things the chapter says a planner must get right. Then say, for each, who it helps or hurts and how.

What to check	Sign of good planning	Sign of poor planning
Walking	A continuous, unbroken footpath with ramps at crossings	No footpath, or one parked over — pedestrians pushed into traffic
Public transport	A bus stop or station within walking distance, connected to other modes	Long walk or an expensive auto ride to reach any bus
Water and drains	Piped supply; covered drains that carry rain away	Tanker dependence; lanes that flood after one hour of rain
Waste	Regular collection, separate dry and wet bins	Waste dumped at a corner or burnt in the open
Open and green space	A park or playground within reach of every colony	Open ground built over; nowhere for children or elders to sit
Mixed use	Shops, clinic, school and homes close together, so trips are short	Everything needs a vehicle to reach
Safety	Street lights that work; fire and police stations easy to reach	Dark stretches; blocked lanes a fire engine could not enter

Sample answer: On my two-kilometre walk to school I counted four things. Good: our colony’s park was kept when the layout was made, and every evening it holds children playing and elderly people walking — it is the one place in the locality where people from different streets actually meet. Also good: the market, the clinic and the school are within 600 m of each other, so my grandmother can do her errands without transport. Poor: the footpath on the main road stops after 300 m and becomes a row of parked two-wheelers, so schoolchildren walk on the road beside moving buses — my younger brother is not allowed to walk alone because of it. Also poor: the drain along the lane is open and half-blocked, and after heavy rain the water stands for two days at the corner where the vegetable sellers sit, so they lose those days’ earnings and mosquitoes breed. My conclusion is that the planning here got the land uses right but the connections between them wrong — which is precisely what the chapter means by interconnected transport and access for everyone.

Why footpaths and drains matter more than they look: they are the parts of a city that the poorest and the least mobile depend on most. Someone with a car does not notice a missing footpath; a child, an elderly person or a street vendor lives with it every day. That is what the chapter means by a city that offers opportunity without excluding the vulnerable.

Q7.

Imagine you are an urban planner, what are the things you would consider to plan a city? Do groups like children, the elderly, and people with disabilities get easy access to parks, toilets, and public transport? What changes would you introduce to make it more inclusive?

Answer

Part 1 — What I would consider. The chapter gives the planner’s own checklist, and I would work through it in this order:

People. How many live here, what ages, and how fast is the number growing? Everything else is sized from this.
Work. What types of jobs do they have? Homes must be planned near where the work actually is, or the city buys itself a commute.
Transport. What kind is needed, and how can it be interconnected for a smoother commute and access for everyone — rail, bus, cycling paths and walking corridors linked into one network, as in Singapore, so that people are not forced to rely on cars.
Land use. Where do homes, businesses, parks and public facilities — schools, hospitals, libraries, sports facilities, cultural and community centres — go? Keep them mixed and close, the way Marina Bay Sands and Raffles Place sit a few kilometres apart.
Public safety. Safe streets for pedestrians and cyclists; fire stations and police stations in easy-to-reach places.
Water, waste and energy. Rainwater harvesting, protected lakes and drainage channels, waste segregation — the things Bengaluru lost.
Climate. Jaipur was designed for a dry climate with reservoirs, canals and shaded market porches; Singapore’s rooftop and vertical gardens reduce summer heat and support biodiversity. Design for the climate you have, and the one that is coming.
Housing for everyone who works here. Affordable housing planned from the start, because its absence is what produces slums.
A plan that can be revised. A long-term Concept Plan with a Master Plan updated regularly, so the city can change its mind.

Part 2 — Do children, the elderly and people with disabilities get easy access today? Usually not, and the reasons are physical and specific: footpaths that are broken, blocked or too high to step onto; no ramps; buses with steep entry steps; parks with locked gates or no shade and no benches; public toilets that are far apart, unclean, or have no accessible cubicle; signage that assumes you can read fast and see well; and crossings timed for a person walking at a healthy adult’s pace. Test any of these by trying to push a pram or a wheelchair along your nearest main road.

Part 3 — Changes I would introduce.

Where	Change	Who it helps first
Streets	Continuous, level footpaths at least 1.8 m wide with kerb ramps at every crossing, tactile paving, and longer crossing times	Wheelchair users, elderly people, children, anyone with a pram
Public transport	Low-floor buses, level boarding at metro stations, lifts as well as escalators, audio and visual announcements, reserved seating that is actually enforced	People with disabilities, elderly people, pregnant women
Parks	A park within walking distance of every neighbourhood, with shaded seating, a level path around it, drinking water, and play equipment children with disabilities can use	Children and elderly people — the two groups who cannot travel far to reach one
Toilets	Clean public toilets at regular intervals, each with an accessible cubicle, a baby-changing shelf and water	Women, children, elderly people, street vendors and outdoor workers
Neighbourhood design	Mixed-use blocks so school, clinic, market and home are within walking distance; senior citizens’ housing linked to healthcare and childcare, as Singapore does	Everyone who does not have a vehicle
Governance	An online grievance redressal platform, and consulting residents — including children and disabled residents — before a design is finalised	The people a plan usually forgets

Why inclusion is planning, not charity: Singapore is counted a blue zone city precisely because its community-centred design gives people interaction, social connection and longer, healthier lives. Designing for the slowest walker produces a city that is easier for everyone — and it is the only way a city can honestly claim, as the epigraph demands, to provide something for everybody.

Q8.

Suppose your town, village or city has 100 people. Draw a rough map of the place on a graph paper. Imagine each square on the paper represents a specific area of the place, like residential neighbourhoods, parks, schools, factories, post offices and so on. Now, distribute the 100 people throughout the area. You can decide where the people will live, whether they all live in the residential areas, or some live in the commercial or industrial areas. Write this number in each of the boxes. In your depiction of the map, which areas are heavily populated and which are not? What were the reasons behind your choices of allocation of people?

Answer

How to draw it. Take a 10 × 10 block of graph paper — that is 100 squares. Decide what one square stands for; the easiest choice is 1 sq km, so your town covers 100 sq km. Outline the zones first (residential, market, industrial, farmland, park, lake, school, hospital, post office), then write a number of people inside each square. The numbers must add up to exactly 100. Leave zeros in the squares where nobody lives.

Sample allocation — each square = 1 sq km, so ‘people per square’ is directly the population density:

Zone	Squares (sq km)	People	Density (people per sq km)
Old residential neighbourhood, beside the market	4	42	42 ÷ 4 = 10.5
New colony along the highway	3	21	21 ÷ 3 = 7.0
Market and commercial street (shopkeepers living above shops)	2	11	11 ÷ 2 = 5.5
Industrial area with workers’ quarters	2	9	9 ÷ 2 = 4.5
Around the bus stand and railway station	2	7	7 ÷ 2 = 3.5
Farmland and orchards on the edge	6	9	9 ÷ 6 = 1.5
Hospital, school and post office	3	1	1 ÷ 3 ≈ 0.3
Park, playground, lake, forest patch, empty land	78	0	0
Total	100	100	1.0

Checking the map before you hand it in:
Squares: 4 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 6 + 3 + 78 = 100 ✔
People: 42 + 21 + 11 + 9 + 7 + 9 + 1 + 0 = 100 ✔
Town’s average density = 100 ÷ 100 = 1 person per sq km
Densest zone = 10.5 per sq km, which is 10.5 ÷ 1 = 10.5 times the town average

Which areas are heavily populated, and which are not. The four squares of the old neighbourhood hold 42 of the 100 people — nearly half the town on 4 per cent of its land. Add the new colony and the market and 74 people occupy 9 squares, while the remaining 26 are spread over 91. The parks, lake, forest and open land hold nobody at all.

Reasons behind the allocation:

People live near work and services. The densest zone is beside the market and within walking distance of the school and hospital, so no vehicle is needed for daily needs.
Farmland must stay thin. Cultivation needs land per household, so the six farm squares carry only 1.5 people each — the same reason Asadpur Khera looks empty from a satellite while Gurugram does not.
Transport nodes attract some settlement — tea stalls, repair shops, loaders — but not families, because the noise and traffic make it a poor place to live.
Some squares are deliberately left at zero. The park, the lake and the forest patch are not wasted land. They absorb rain, cool the town and give people somewhere to go — and once built over, as Bengaluru found, they cannot be got back.
Nobody lives on the hospital or school square, apart from a caretaker’s family, because those buildings serve the whole town and need room to expand.

Try this: redraw the same map with 200 people instead of 100 and no extra land. You will find yourself either stacking people upward in the dense squares, or building on the park and the farmland. That choice, made a thousand times over, is urban planning.

Q9.

Observe the satellite view of Mumbai and Gangtok, respectively. Find out their population density and likely reasons for the difference.

Answer

What the two images in Fig. 7.31 show. On the left, Mumbai fills the frame with a continuous grey built-up surface, broken only by water — the creeks, the bay and the sea. The labels crowd on top of each other: Andheri, Bandra West, Dadar, Byculla, Sion Koliwada, Navi Mumbai across the water, an international airport, a port. It is flat, and every part of the land that is not water has been built on. On the right, Gangtok is a dark green frame of steep, forested Himalayan hillside; the built-up area is a pale pink ribbon threading down a single ridge and valley, with Ganesh Tok and Bakthang Waterfall on the slopes above and a road curving away to the east. Most of the picture is not built on at all — it is mountainside.

How to find the density. The book asks you to find out the figures, so use the formula and current sources rather than a remembered number:

Population density = total population ÷ area (in sq km)

1. Get the population and the area of each city from the Census of India report or the city’s own municipal corporation website — the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai and the Gangtok Municipal Corporation both publish them.
2. Divide. Keep the units the same and say clearly which boundary you used (city or metropolitan region) — the answer changes a great deal with the boundary.

Worked illustration of the method only — suppose a city had 40 lakh people in 500 sq km:
40,00,000 ÷ 500 = 8,000 people per sq km
which is about the density the chapter gives for Singapore.

Likely reasons for the difference — and they are mostly about land, not just numbers.

Terrain. Mumbai sits on flat, low coastal land; almost all of it can be built on. Gangtok is on steep slopes where construction is limited by gradient and by landslide risk, so buildings can only follow the ridges and the roads. That is why the green in the right-hand image stays green.
Land is finite in Mumbai, so building goes upward. Hemmed in by the sea on both sides, the city adds people by adding floors rather than area, which drives density up sharply.
The size of the economy. Mumbai is the country’s financial capital — the Bombay Stock Exchange since 1875, banks and corporate offices at the Bandra Kurla Complex, a port, and a film industry flourishing since the 1930s. That volume of work has drawn people for over a century. Gangtok’s economy is administration, trade and tourism, on a far smaller scale.
Migration follows jobs. Every new job in Mumbai brings a household that has to live within the same limited land.
Infrastructure sustains density. Piped water, sewerage, suburban rail, the Bandra–Worli Sea Link and the Coastal Road let millions live close together; a hill town neither has nor could build that at the same scale.

Tip: when you compare two densities, always state the boundary and the year. ‘Mumbai’ can mean the island city, the municipal corporation area, or the whole metropolitan region — and the three give three very different answers for the same real place.

Q10.

Find out how the city of Beijing, China, tackled the problem of air pollution. Prepare a report outlining measures that can be taken in India to mitigate air pollution in cities.

Answer

This is a research task, so the report matters more than any single fact. Here is how to find the material and what the report must contain.

Step 1 — Find reliable sources. Use the World Health Organization’s air quality pages, the United Nations Environment Programme’s assessments of Beijing’s air programme, and news archives. Note the year for every figure you quote and check it in a second source before you put it in your report — air quality numbers change every year, and an old figure quoted as current is a mistake.

Step 2 — Sort Beijing’s measures into the four categories every city’s air plan uses. These are the kinds of action to look for and verify:

Category	What to look for in Beijing’s programme
Energy	Moving away from coal for household heating and power within and around the city, and switching to gas and electricity
Industry	Closing, upgrading or relocating polluting factories, and controlling construction dust
Vehicles	Stricter emission standards for new vehicles, taking the oldest vehicles off the road, restrictions on how many cars may be driven, and heavy expansion of the metro and buses
Monitoring and greenery	A dense network of monitoring stations with the readings published for the public, coordination with the whole surrounding region, and large-scale tree planting

Step 3 — Write the report in five sections: (i) the problem, with India’s own evidence; (ii) what Beijing did, by category, with dated figures; (iii) what is transferable to Indian cities and what is not; (iv) recommended measures; (v) how you would measure success.

The problem, using this chapter’s evidence: the National Capital Region frequently records an Air Quality Index over 400, against a safe limit of 50. That is eight times the safe level, and the chapter says plainly that it poses serious health risks to residents. The AQI itself folds particulate matter (PM2.5, PM10), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants into one number, so a high reading means several problems at once.

Measures for Indian cities — each tied to a cause the chapter names:

Cut vehicle emissions — the chapter lists a growing number of vehicles on the road as a cause. Expand metro and bus networks and connect them so that a whole journey can be made without a car, as Singapore does with rail, buses, cycling paths and walking corridors; build safe footpaths and cycle tracks; retire the oldest and most polluting vehicles; move public fleets to electric.
Control dust from the rapid, often unplanned construction the chapter describes — cover material, wash wheels, sprinkle water at sites, and pave road shoulders.
Fix waste — open burning of waste is avoidable pollution. Segregate at source, compost wet waste and stop landfill fires.
Restore green space — reduced green spaces and heat islands appear together in the chapter. Trees and parks trap particulate matter and lower temperature.
Clean household and industrial energy — cleaner cooking fuel, and stricter emission limits on industry within and around the city.
Plan at regional scale — air does not respect a municipal boundary. The NCR was created because Delhi’s problems could not be solved inside Delhi alone; air quality needs the same regional approach, including crop-residue burning in the surrounding countryside.
Publish the data — real-time public AQI displays and an online grievance platform let citizens see the problem and demand action. The chapter itself recommends ICT such as intelligent traffic systems and online grievance redressal.

How to measure success: do not report only the average AQI. Report the number of days in the year above 100, above 200 and above 400. A city can improve its average while its worst days stay just as dangerous, and it is the worst days that send people to hospital.

Q11.

Talk to a family or community member who has moved from a village to a city. Ask them the reason for the same and their experience, challenges and opportunities. How does city life compare to rural life?

Answer

How to conduct the interview. Ask permission first and explain it is for a school project. Sit somewhere unhurried, ask open questions, and write the answers in the person’s own words — a quotation is worth more than your paraphrase. Ten questions is plenty:

When did you move, and how old were you? Did you come alone or with family?
Why did you move — was it work, education, marriage, health, or something that happened in the village?
What was the first week like? Where did you stay, and how did you find work?
What was hardest — rent, water, transport, language, food, being away from people?
What opened up for you here that would not have in the village?
Do you send money home, or visit? Has the village changed since you left?
What do you miss most, and what would you never give up now?
Would you advise someone from the village to move today? Why?

What a good answer must contain: a clearly stated reason for migration, at least three specific challenges and three specific opportunities, and an honest comparison at the end — not a verdict that one life is simply better.

The comparison, as the chapter frames it:

	Village	City
Work	Largely agriculture-based; fewer businesses	A diversity of jobs across industry, transport and services — and steadier cash income
Community	Close-knit; everyone known	Larger and more varied, but people begin as strangers; networks have to be built
Services	Fewer schools, hospitals and transport links	Hospitals, colleges, banks, libraries and public transport within reach
Housing and cost	Usually a family house and some land	Cities can be crowded and expensive; if affordable housing is short, families end up in slums
Environment	Open land, cleaner air	Traffic, waste, poor air quality and water scarcity

Sample answer: My father’s cousin, Shri Mahesh, moved from a village in Jaunpur district to Surat when he was nineteen, in 2004. He came because there was work: two men from his village were already in a powerloom unit and told him a job was waiting. His first year was the hardest — he shared one room with five others, worked twelve-hour shifts, and could not follow Gujarati for months. Water came for one hour in the morning and the whole room’s routine was built around it. What the city gave him, he says, is a wage that arrives every month, which farming never did; he learnt to service the machines and now supervises a section; and both his daughters study in a school with a science laboratory, which the village school did not have. He sends money home every month and goes back for Chhath. What he misses is the open air and knowing everyone’s name; what he would not give up is the hospital ten minutes away, which he says saved his younger daughter when she had dengue. His own summary was this: "In the village I had space and no money. Here I have money and no space." That is a fair statement of the trade the chapter describes — cities are crowded and expensive, yet they offer social and economic value because so many resources are concentrated in one place.

Q12.

Learn about urban planning in other cities around the world. In what ways can some of those aspects be adapted for a city near you?

Answer

Start with the example the chapter has already given you — Singapore, which planners study precisely because it is dense and still liveable: over 8,000 people per sq km, a Concept Plan looking 40 years ahead, a Master Plan revised every 5 years, mixed-use districts, an integrated transport system, and rooftop and vertical gardens on high-rises. Then look up two more cities and note, for each, the one idea it is known for and the condition that made it work there.

How to adapt rather than copy. An idea transfers only if the conditions behind it can be reproduced. Ask three questions of every idea: does our climate suit it, can our municipal body afford to run it every year, and who in our city would actually use it?

Idea worth adapting	How it would work in an Indian city	What it would fix
Integrated public transport (Singapore)	One ticket and one timetable across bus, metro and cycle hire, with footpaths connecting stops so a whole journey works without a car	Traffic jams; poor air quality
Mixed-use neighbourhoods (Singapore)	Allow shops, clinics, offices and homes in the same block, so daily trips are short enough to walk	Congestion; long commutes
Rooftop and vertical gardens (Singapore)	Require green roofs on large new buildings; they cut summer heat and support biodiversity	Heat islands; reduced green spaces
Rolling plan revision (Singapore)	A long-term city plan reviewed on a fixed cycle rather than left untouched for decades	Plans that no longer match the city
Pedestrian-only high street (Gangtok’s M.G. Road)	Close one busy market street to vehicles; it is already known for cleanliness and a vibrant atmosphere	Unsafe streets; poor air in market areas
Riverfront as public space (Sabarmati, Ahmedabad)	Promenades, parks, markets and a pedestrian-and-cycle bridge blending ecology with public utility	Lost public space; neglected water bodies
Climate-first design (Jaipur, 1727)	Shaded market porches, water storage through reservoirs and canals, streets aligned for sun and air — designed for a dry climate three centuries ago and still working	Heat; water scarcity

Why adaptation, not imitation: Singapore’s density and its budget are not most Indian cities’ density and budget. But the principle behind each idea travels even when the form does not. The principle behind the Master Plan is that a plan must be revised; behind the garden city, that green surfaces cool a hot place; behind Jaipur, that you design for the climate you actually have. Copy the principle; design the form locally.

Sample answer (one paragraph of the kind expected): For our district town, the single most adaptable idea is Gangtok’s pedestrian-only M.G. Road. Our main bazaar is already too narrow for the two-wheelers that push through it, and shopkeepers say customers leave rather than fight the traffic. Closing 400 m of it to vehicles, adding shade and seating and moving parking to the tehsil ground behind would cost little, needs no new technology, and would give the town the one thing it does not have — a place where people can simply stand and talk.

Q13.

Explore and suggest action points with respect to urban planning in cities to mitigate the challenges below and write a report. Two have been completed for you. Waste Management: Conducting a ‘Segregate at Source’ awareness drive in residential areas with demos on dry/wet waste disposal and composting. Traffic congestion: carpooling, high taxes on vehicle purchase, etc. Inadequate safety of residents · Poor mobility within the city · Expansion of slums · Heat waves during summers

Answer

Follow the pattern of the two worked examples: each action point names a specific thing to do, not a wish. Here are action points for the four remaining challenges.

Challenge	Action points
Inadequate safety of residents	Light every street and lane, and audit the dark stretches at night with residents rather than from a map. Place police stations and fire stations in easy-to-reach locations, as the chapter’s planning checklist requires, and keep lanes wide enough for a fire engine and an ambulance. Design streets with shops and homes facing them, so there are always eyes on the road. Install emergency call points and CCTV at bus stops, subways and markets, with a published helpline. Keep public toilets and transport stops well-lit and staffed. Address the causes too — the chapter links higher urban crime to density and economic inequality, so schooling, skills and jobs for young people belong in a safety plan.
Poor mobility within the city	Build a connected network rather than separate services: integrate metro, bus, cycle tracks and footpaths on one ticket and one timetable, the way Singapore links rail, buses, cycling paths and green walking corridors. Guarantee a continuous, level footpath on every main road with ramps at crossings. Provide safe last-mile links so a bus stop can actually be reached on foot. Plan mixed-use neighbourhoods so daily trips are short. Add bus lanes and signal priority so public transport is faster than a car. Use ICT — intelligent traffic systems and real-time arrival information.
Expansion of slums	Attack the stated cause: there is not enough affordable housing for everyone migrating to the city. Reserve land for affordable housing in every new layout before plots are sold, and use schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Aawaas Yojana. Build that housing near where people work, since residents earn from informal work — vending, domestic help, laundry, construction, plumbing — that only exists in the city. Meanwhile, upgrade existing settlements in place: piped water, toilets, drainage, electricity, waste collection, and paved lanes. Improve housing, health and education infrastructure together, which the chapter calls a key urban challenge. Provide rental housing for seasonal workers, and secure tenure so families can invest in their own homes.
Heat waves during summers	Restore green cover — trees along every major street, protected parks, and no further loss of open ground, since reduced green spaces and ‘heat islands’ are listed together. Require rooftop and vertical gardens on large buildings, as in Singapore, which reduce heat and support biodiversity. Use cool or reflective roofs on schools, hospitals and low-income housing. Revive water bodies, as the RWAs and communities did with Bengaluru’s lakes. Learn from Jaipur: shaded market porches, streets aligned for air movement, and stored water for a dry climate. Add a heat-action plan — public drinking-water points, shaded bus stops, adjusted school and outdoor-work hours, and cooling shelters on the worst days.

Writing the report. Use five short sections for each challenge: the problem in our city (with one observation of your own), why it happens, action points, who must act — municipal body, state government, residents, RWAs, schools — and how we will know it worked. That last section is what turns a list into a plan.

Tip: give every action point a measurable target. "Plant more trees" is a wish; "1,000 trees along the four main roads before the next monsoon, with survival counted after one year" is an action point.

Q14.

Find out about a slum rehabilitation program where people moved from slums to proper housing in your city. What do you think its possible benefits could be for the communities there?

Answer

How to find one. Ask at the municipal corporation or the state housing board office, look up your state’s slum rehabilitation or housing authority, and search for projects under the Pradhan Mantri Aawaas Yojana, which provides affordable housing to economically weaker households. Record five things for the project you choose: where the families lived before, where they live now, how many households, what the new home has (rooms, tap, toilet, electricity), and how far it is from the work people were already doing.

Possible benefits for the community — organised by what actually changes:

Area of life	What improves, and why
Housing	A pucca home that keeps out heat, cold and monsoon rain, replacing housing the chapter describes as poor and overcrowded
Water and sanitation	A tap and a toilet in or near the house instead of a limited shared supply — this is the single biggest daily change, and it saves hours of queuing, mostly done by women and girls
Health	Fewer illnesses from crowding, standing water and poor drainage; fewer working days lost to sickness, which for a daily-wage family is directly income
Education	Light, quiet and a permanent address make regular school attendance possible; children are not moved when a settlement is cleared
Safety	Lit lanes, a lockable door and a legal home reduce risk, especially for women, children and the elderly
Recognition	A permanent address makes it easier to open a bank account, get a ration card and gas connection, and receive government schemes
The wider city	Better housing, health and education infrastructure for these families is described in the chapter as a key urban challenge — solving it improves the whole city’s public health and lowers its inequality

What decides whether it works — say this in your answer. The chapter is clear that slum dwellers support cities by performing informal work — vegetable vending, domestic help, laundry services, construction work, plumbing. That work exists at particular places in the city. So a rehabilitation project succeeds when the new housing keeps families within reach of that work, of the school the children already attend and of the transport they use. If people are moved far out, the house improves but the livelihood weakens, and the family pays for the new home with a longer, costlier journey. Location, transport and livelihood are part of the housing question, not separate from it.

What a good field report contains: the project’s name and year; the number of households; a description of the old and new housing; two or three things residents themselves say improved; one thing they say became harder; and your own judgement, with reasons, on whether the project met the chapter’s test — offering opportunity without excluding the vulnerable.

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