Town Planning in Ancient India c11.1

c11.1

IN case civic requirements outgrow the capacity of the town, that is to say, when its principal thoroughfares become too narrow or insufficient for the volume of its traffic, or when their narrowness threatens to prove deleterious to the sanitation of the buildings and hamlets overhanging and adjoining them, or when considerations of civic beauty and civic art demand the extension and the widening of the main streets, or when the town becomes too small for its population, the improvement of the town becomes imperative, even at the risk of onerous financial liabilities and of encroachments on personal properties caused by demolition of the old houses and buildings. Towards this end, of late, there has been set up in almost every important metropolis a separate board under the name of Improvement Trust which systematically carries on its improvement and extension according to the best town-planning codes. These Improvement Trusts and the like bodies are very recent institutions. Two or three decades back, a town was allowed to grow in the most haphazard way possible; lanes and roads cropped up by the side of hamlets, which conformed to no plan, while its suburbs were left uncared for in the most unsalubrious condition with the result that the sanitation of the town deteriorated with its growth and development; and the town presented a very squalid appearance. Naturally enough, this amorphous state of affairs had an adverse effect upon its traffic. It is only in recent times that the municipal authorities have begun to realise the importance and desirability, both from economic and hygienic view-points, of co-ordinated and far-sighted efforts in this direction which the art of civics requires.