PLANNING FOR INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT OF ROURKELA TOWN

Abstract

The industrial towns in the Post-Colonial era in India were envisioned in order to achieve a modern town, which would look forward to the future that lies ahead of it, and which would be a message to the world that we are ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in this world. However, some things have gone horribly wrong in the past sixty years after planning of these few industrial towns in various parts of the country. One look around the towns today and you can easily see and comprehend that this was surely what our forefathers did not imagine out towns to be. Slums, informal settlement, high pollution levels, low sex ratio, the list is long. What is more worrying is that there is no updating of the master plans in many of these towns, so the authorities responsible for its development have no idea where the town is heading to. This thesis was taken up surely due to the motivation of changing things in one such industrial town in India, Rourkela. It was necessary to collect a lot of data and then put it to paper to address each problem and then connect the dots, in order to achieve a better planned town in the future. Over the course of this report, there has been a lot of secondary data analysis and primary survey analysis, based on which various spatial suggestions have been given using GIS tools. The solutions will reflect on how it is absolutely important to have a holistic approach to solving the issues in the town, rather than having short-sighted vision of bettering a road or rehabilitating a slum.