A case of rise and sprawl
When Duraisamy Balasundaram was a teenager, his south Indian home town of Coimbatore had just 120,000 people, with factories set along wide roads amid big open spaces. In the 1980s, his 8km commute to his automotive components factory took just 12 minutes and he regularly went home for lunch. Today, the 65-year-old industrialist’s once pleasant town is a congested, chaotic mess, with snarled traffic, housing shortages and a frenzied edge. Lured by factory jobs, rural migrants have poured in, swelling the population from 816,000 in 1991 to an estimated 1.7m and saturating the city core.
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