Twenty years ago Rajiv Gandhi said Kolkata is dying. But now all of our cities are on the brink of death. Mumbai is almost dead. We have to do something about them. Fast, says Dr Jayprakash Narayan, a physician by training and a man who has the pulse of people with his NGO, Loksatta. He points his finger at greed. A greed driven by needs of the poor, facilitated by the crafty lawmaker, the flexible planner and the corrupt politician.

Which areas were affected when our big cities sank this year? Not George Town, not South Mumbai, not the old Bangalore, but the new and the unplanned parts built with greed and without town planning. How this greed is gobbling up land and hurting our cities has to be seen in the Deccan Plateau. Between the neighbourhoods of Banjara Hills and Jubilee hills is the natural valley that connects a series of lakes. The separatist Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) is building its offices right in the valley. The kind of impact this will have on the environment is anybody's guess.

In Bangalore, the city bus terminus has been built on the Dharmambudhi tank. A part of the Sampangi tank has given way to the Kanteerva stadium and the remaining to a housing colony. Another lake was filled up to house the city market. So, when it rained big this year all the areas of the city, which were part of natural drainage system, got flooded. The result: I am pregnant. I live here. The ambulance cannot come. What do I do? sort of posers by people who happily bought apartments without knowing the impact their greed has on environment.

In Mumbai, it was different a sort of greed that got people. Official greed. As ignorant politicians and planners got together to choke the Mithi river by developing Bandra, they were joined in by pollution entrepreneurs who let out an oil brew that killed off the natural ecosystem of the wetlands and mangroves. In Chennai, Chitlapakkam was a 100-acre lake. Now it is spread over just 60 acres and is fast disappearing. Not just Chitlapakkam, the suburban areas of Adambakkam, Ambattur, Nanganallur, Tiruneermalai, Velachery, Villivakkam and Vyasarpady had lakes, which have now been encroached upon to accommodate the growing population.

Bangalore, for instance, had nearly 250 lakes till a couple of decades ago. Now there are less than 64. Over the years the land mafia has encroached upon these lakes for new construction. As a result, the city gets flooded even with a quick downpour as the catchment areas and storm water drains have vanished.

The corruption is formulaic - keep the floor space index (FSI) low, so that builders are forced to violate them, extort bribes, and then okay them. Use British era land records to make moolah (even when detailed contour and topography maps are accessible on desktops with earth.google.com).

A few days ago before Chennai sank, police arrested a deputy collector R Shanmugham for selling two acres of a lake at suburban Kolathur, valued at Rs 6 crore. The official had helped two persons to convert 'Ryotwari patta' into 'settlement patta', police said. What R Shanmugham did wasn't wrong; he was only unfortunate to get caught. This sort of transactions are not so rare in the rapine of our cities where the bureaucrats have ganged up with real estate sharks and builders to create the cesspools of our cities. In a country where 65 percent of the people depend on agriculture, why is the FSI so low in India? We still invoke British-era fire laws. So a tall building will not get clearance. This is factored in town planning leading to the urban sprawl where commuting takes ages, says Dr M V Rama Seshu, a Cornell-trained architecture professor at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University.

This low FSI norm leads to a sprawl where the cities spread to unwieldy sizes with high economic cost in terms of infrastructure. And it is robbing our cities of green cover and they are gobbling away highly productive land, says Rama Seshu. The plan to keep the FSI low is a high stakes gamble, says a former town planner. If this law was rationalised (New York has an FSI of 15, Indian cities have 3) our cities would become compact, livable and green cities. The land prices would plummet and become real,says a former town planner.

It used to take 45 minutes for K Madhusdan Rao to commute from his Marathahalli house to his TCS office in St Marks Road. Now, it takes his son-in-law three hours to commute the same distance. The environmental costs of a vehicle running for three hours are astronomical. Which brings us to the question of failure of transport in an increasingly urbanising country. There is no integrated approach to public transport which can be very efficient in contrast to private transport. This forces people to live within the cities in sub-human conditions, says Dr Narayan.

The Rakesh Mohan Committee on Urban Infrastructure pegged the cost of breathing life into our cities at Rs 2,50,000 crore in 1996. With cost escalation, this would require us to put all the state and central budget monies to fund them. We get the infrastructure we want and we deserve, is the laconic answer of Rakesh Mohan to the problems of urban blight. His politically unpalatable but pragmatic recipe: User pays. Get things moving and people will become interested in paying for improving the quality of their lives. He identified a vicious cycle of low infrastructure, low service level, low maintenance, low capacity to pay, low recovery, low investments.

Unless we break the cycle by bringing in more money nothing is going to change except hand wringing after every urban disaster. London was built hundreds of years ago keeping the topography and the natural drainage system. Our idea of town planning is: have a plan and then pay a bribe to get the deviation you want. This disaster is the making of flexi-corrupt bureaucrat,says Dr Narayan.