Mega-regions in industrialisation, urbanisation & infrastructure development: The Indian experience for Asia-Europe-Latin America dialogue

Abstract

Connectivity and competitiveness have merged as principal universal underpinnings to processes of industrialisation, urbanization and conjoining infrastructure development, prioritizing the values of size and scale of the entity in operation. As developed societies meet saturation, the aspirations of the swathe of developing and emerging socio-economic spaces, sought to be satiated through proliferation initiatives at industrialisation, urbanization and attendant infrastructure-build, encapsulated in the evolving concept and phenomenon of Mega-Regions, morphing from City-centric agglomerations to Corridor-driven integrating-continuums, have become cynosures of attention. Notwithstanding their curated specificities in their respective locales, the dominant emerging nations of China and India within a rising Asia, an expansive Latin America beholding region of promise, and the countries of Central, East and South East Europe, share similarities in terms of deficits on the aforesaid triad dimensions to people centric and participatory development and governance, which can optimally be addressed through information sharing and experiential learning from each other. The Paper informs extant stakeholders of the Indian approach, in terms of its uniqueness and comparative contrasts with the peer performer China, unfolding lessons for the Latin American and East and South East European socio-economic spaces, in terms of determining the requisite model for radiating physically capacitive based economic growth, creating platforms for magnetizing investible surpluses, facilitating mobility of labour and human skills, engendering a salubrious quality of life, and inducing competitiveness and resilience within such milieus.