Yet the eighth largest city and metropolitan area in India is Pune. Admittedly, before January of this year, when I applied for SME, I had never heard of Pune. Pune has over 5 million inhabitants, and is about the size of Houston, though it is overshadowed by its much larger Maharashtran neighbor to the northwest, Mumbai. Yet Pune is a distinctive in its own right, a growing metropolis with a rich history.
The city of Pune (Poona) was founded well over a thousand years ago, and gained prominence in the 18th century as the capital of the Maratha Empire. The British took control of the city and made it the monsoon capital of the Bombay Presidency. Since India gained independence, it has established a reputation as "Motor City" and a center for Information Technology. Not only that, but Pune boasts more schools, universities, and colleges than any other city in the world. The University of Pune is perhaps the most well-known here, and we were able to visit it briefly last week (pictured).Pune is located in the state of Maharashtra, where the local language is Marathi (not Hindi). In terms of food, Maharashstran cuisine is more similar to northern India in nature, with of bread and some rice as the staple. The state is the second largest in India, and is the most urban in nature. This is mostly due to the limited agricultural ability of its montainous regions, most notably in the Western Ghats, the highlands separating the Deccan Plateau from the Arabian Sea. Pune sits comfortably in the foothills of those mountains, somewhat protected from the intense monsoon season that Mumbai experiences.
As Pune continues to grow, the majority of major industry and residential growth seems to be to the northwest, roughly in line with the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. Because of the massive growth Pune has experienced (and indeed, continues to experience), it is not hard to imagine the city of Pune recentering itself around these brand new technology corporations. After all, Pune lacks a recognizeable downtown, at least in the same sense as other major cities. There is simply the new section and the much older section.
India has experienced rapid urbanization in recent years, which helps explain the population explosion in Pune. Indians are better educated, drawing them towards the industry and technology present in cities like Pune. The same is true in Mumbai, whose urban area population is expected to grow to well over 20 million in the next 15 years. Since Mumbai sits on the Arabian sea, it has nowhere to grow save for inland, in the same direction of the Mumbai-Pune expressway. As the two largest cities and Maharashtra continue to grow over the course of the century, it does not seem inconceivable that the two cities will form a single urban megalopolis, with the Mumbai-Pune Expressway serving as the main artery serving this area of India. Indeed, it may ultimately prove to be very similar to the I-95 corridor between northern Virginia and Boston or the Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki conglomerate in Japan.The economy of Pune is certainly moving towards high-tech industry, yet it will take significant initative to develop the infrastructure necessary to maintain that industry and the burgeoning population that has come with it. Its upper class has money to spend, and that will certainly benefit the regional economy in years to come, but much of the population still lives in squalor, and the future of Pune lies in how they will sort through the social problems in their continually expanding economy.
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