Read the passage carefully :
Urban Decay
Many cities in India accurately mirror Fredrich Engels’ description of the urban centres in the nineteenth century in England and even today. “Streets that are generally unpaved, rough, *****, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead”, wrote Engels on the living conditions of the working class in that country.
The depths of urban decay in India came to global notice during the pneumonic plague of 1994 in Surat; it epitomised the *** of governments in the post-Independence era and exposed development policies that ignored fundamental public health issues inherited from the colonial rule. There is a little evidence to show that policymakers assimilated the lessons from the Surat public health disaster. State and municipal governments did not pursue reform in waste management; though civic conditions in Surat itself underwent change in the plague aftermath. During the past decade, many cities pursued development agendas - often with the help of massive international loans to project ‘modernization’ at the cost of basic civic reform.
There is, thus, a continuing challenge before the current mission to enable and also compel local governments to abide by the provisions of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules by which they are legally bound.
Post-liberalization policies have tended to largely disregard other key factors that affect the quality of life in cities and towns; **, lack of sanitation, water shortages, **** undersupply of affordable housing and traffic chaos generated by automobile dependence, in turn created by the neglect of public transport.
In the absence of a hygienic environment and safe water supply, chronic water-borne **** such as cholera and other communicable **** continue to stalk the poor in the biggest cities.
It must be sobering to the affluent layers of the population that nearly 14 million Indian households (forming 26 percent of the total) in the urban areas do not have a latrine within the house, as per the Census of India 2001; some 14 percent have only rudimentary ‘pit’ facilities. The number of households without a drainage connection stands at 11.8 million (representing 22.1 percent of households). Migration to cities continues and infrastructure to treat sewage is grossly inadequate to meet the demand even where it exists. It is unlikely that the quality of the urban environment can be dramatically improved therefore, if such fundamental questions remain unresolved.
Urban transport receives scant attention from policy makers. Policy distortions have led to rising automobile dependency, higher safety risks for road users, and land use plans that are based not on the needs of people, but primarily designed to facilitate the use of private motorized vehicles.
It comes as no surprise therefore, that pedestrians and bicycle riders, who form 30 to 70 percent of peak hour traffic in most urban centres, also make up a large proportion of fatalities in the road accidents. A paper prepared by the Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP)of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, says pedestrian fatalities in Mumbai and Delhi were nearly 78 percent and 53 percent of the total, according to recent data, compared to 13 percent and 12 percent in Germany and the United States.
Such alarming ***** rates - and an equally high injury rate-should persuade policy makers to revisit their urban planning strategies and correct the distortions. But many cities such as Chennai have actually done the reverse - reduced footpaths and areas for pedestrian use to facilitate unrestricted use of motorized vehicles.
Fill in the blanks with ‘one’ word only :
Urban transport gets little (a) ………… from the policy makers. Wrong policies have led to rising (b) ……….. on the automobiles. Our land use plans that (c) ……….. the use of private motorized vehicles rather than the (d) ………… of the people.
