Govt prepares national plan for urban development

Kathmandu, July 8: The government has prepared the draft of national plan of action for 'Inclusive Cities: Resilient Communities' with special focus on urban economy, planning, governance and environment.

Prepared to present at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development – Third World Habitat Conference or HABITAT III – which is to be held in Quito, Ecuador in October this year, the draft has raised the issues like mechanisms to increase internal revenue of the local bodies, land and house pooling, urban housing financing, urban disasters, land use declaration, and urban and rural youths.

According to the draft, within five years, basic urban services delivery projects would be developed and expanded. 'Secondary Cities' development programme would be expanded outside the Kathmandu Valley and initiatives would be launched to regulate urban development and safeguard cultural heritage in the Valley.

It envisions developing planned cities at strategic locations for regional development in coherence with their comparative advantage and link economic, commercial and touristic centres in all provinces and district headquarters through road and railway connectivity.

The new plan of action for the urban development will promote use of electric vehicles and solar energy as well as environment friendly building materials, equipment and building designs.

"It has objective to promote good governance and build accountability at the level of implementation and service delivery. It also aims at promoting the role or private sector and community-based organizations and build partnership at local levels leading to integrated and collaborative action on sustainable and inclusive urban development," said Dr. Jeebagar Joshi, team leader of Technical Committee at the MoUD which was formed to prepare the draft.

In order to prepare the draft for the HABITAT III, the government had formed 30-member National Habitat Committee under the chairmanship of the Urban Development Minister, and16-member Steering Committee under the chairmanship of the secretary at the MoUD as well.

Similarly, number of vocational and skill development training institutes will be increased, institutional capacity of the municipalities for project management will be improved and Urban Land Banking will be initiated in new cities.

To ensure the increased participation of the private sector in housing sector, Land Information System (LIS) will be established and one window policy for development permission will be implemented, read the summary of the draft.

In addition to that, policies will be formulated to support local investment climate and develop local capital market.

Likewise, the draft has given equal importance to the environmental concerns, disaster preparedness and resilience, mass transportation, relocation of polluting industries, and rehabilitation of ponds through rainwater harvesting.

All the plans and projects will be executed within five to 15 years' time frame. Experts said that the time frame was insufficient to complete the plan envisioned by the draft and urged to increase the capacity in terms of implementation.

Addressing an interaction on the draft organized by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) Friday, Minister for State at the Ministry Manju Kumari Chaudhari said that the draft had greater significance in the context of expediting urbanization process in the country.

Nepal currently has 217 municipalities and 42 per cent of the population lives in those cities and towns. The proportion of people residing in the cities was 17 per cent a decade ago.

"The growing urban area and population is posing a great challenge to management and development as the government and municipal administrations lack qualified and sufficient human resources. Specially we are very poor in terms of budget implementation," said secretary of MoUD Deependra Nath Sharma.

However, Sharma said that the government had opportunity to develop integrated urban development plan in the new municipalities as they still had rural system and environment.

Om Rajbhandari, chairman of the Urban Development Committee at Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said that the government failed to retain the skills and technology of private sector in housing and urban development.

"The private sector is enthusiastic to develop physical infrastructure in the newly formed municipalities. Therefore, I urge the government to work in cooperation with the private sector and provide incentives to the latter for the same," he said.

The Habitat conference is organized every 20 years. The first conference was held in 1976 in Vancouver, Canada and second was organized in Istanbul, Turkey in 1996.