The last of the great United Nations conferences is upon us: the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Istanbul, 3-14 June). It follows on the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing.
As with those other great tamashas, this time, too, the preoccupation of civil servants and NGOs is to get the sponsorship in order to attend. For Istanbul, too, mayors, municipal workers, NGOs and civil servants are doing the rounds of donor agencies. And if the lacklustre South Asian summit of mayors held in Kathmandu in April was any indication, there is not much to be said for South Asian representation in Istanbul.
Perhaps the mayors and NGOs would do better to stay home and mull over the figures. In its March issue, Himal coined the term "The Subcontinent of Sub-Saharan Africa" to refer to the socio-economic tailspin that our region is experiencing. The data presented was stark, and showed that the quality of life in significant areas had begun to trail behind the Sahel—in child mortality, primary education, public health, and so on.
Data provided by the United Nations agency Habitat indicates that in urbanisation, too, South Asia scrapes the bottom. A host of problems pressurise the Subcontinent´s urban dwellers, and it can only get worse: toxic pollution, dust in the lungs, distance from nature, lack of green space, absence of mass transit. The architectural loss of the old cities, be it Lahore, Kathmandu or Gwalior, is a thing to wonder about. All in all, South Asian cities are losing their character to concrete, while migrants from the countryside continue to be attracted by the city lights and jobs.