"IT'S TIME WE HAD A NATIONAL DEBATE ON URBANISATION"

The man who envisioned the Millennium City-perhaps, the only city built in free India by a private enterprise-is now a nonagenarian. Yet, he has not stopped dreaming big. A couple of days after a lifetime achievement award was bestowed on him at the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award ceremony, BW Businessworld's Editor-in-Chief Annurag Batra engaged Chairman Emeritus of the DLF Group, Kushal Pal Singh, in a long conversation. 

What should be the role of the private sector in developing cities at scale? What should be the roadmap for urbanisation? Mr K.P. Singh, you’ve won many awards, including the latest EY Lifetime Achievement Award. What does an award at the young age of 93 mean to you?
Well, awards like this frankly, do give you an inspiration and recognition of something that others had found impossible (to do), and I tried to make it possible. So it’s a great satisfaction that a very prominent institution like E&Y has recognised this and given me this honour.

You embarked on your journey of building Gurgaon and the DLF City in Gurgaon many decades back. Has your dream been fulfilled?
Frankly, if you ask me, am I fully satisfied? No. But, am I fully satisfied with what we have done, keeping in view the constraints we have on the town planning regulation? Yes, I’m satisfied. But that’s not the way Gurgaon was envisaged. Gurgaon was envisaged to be as good as any city in the world, particularly those in South-East Asian countries like Malaysia and Korea at that time. Unfortunately, the town planning regulations were so archaic (now they have been amended), that you could not build what you wanted to (in India).

For instance, to build a city, you had to be a visionary. You don’t see how a city is going to come up in 10-15 years, you see how it’s going to be 50-100 years from now. Posterity will judge you. So, in this regard, when you look back, the whole planning was wrong.