India has over 5,000 cities, whose populations vary from about 5,000 in Rampur in Himachal Pradesh to up to 20 million in Mumbai in Maharashtra.

The Indian Secretary for Urban Development, M. Ramachandran, told a panel in Berlin that the Indian government still needed to equip many of these cities with basic facilities, such as clean drinking water, modern sewage systems and draining facilities, as well as sustainable solid waste management, and better transport systems.

In order to provide people with these civic amenities, a new project -- the Jawaharlal Nehru Renewal Mission -- has been launched. Secretary Ramachandran said this programme would also help reduce the number of slums in cities and would provide decent housing to slum dwellers.

"The basic idea is to improve the face of cities, improve urban and civic amenities and make the cities worth living in," he explained.

Finding housing in Andhra Pradesh

Pushpa Subramaniam, Secretary for Urban Development in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, also gave a presentation about the challenges faced by her government to upgrade the living standards of the people in the state.

"The current priority of the government is to provide housing to all those who do not have permanent houses. We are looking for cheap technology solutions. We have just posed the problem. We are looking for some international support on the best solutions for housing."

Andhra Pradesh is India’s fifth largest state and has a population of around 75 million. According to Pushpa Subramaniam, 1.2 million people in the urban areas of the state lack permanent housing. And in rural areas, this figure goes up to 5.2 million.

"There were some interesting presentations on the technology solutions, the institutional mechanisms in solid waste management in particular. There were some very good presentations from successful countries like Singapore. So I will take back a lot from that," the minister said after the conference.