With Assembly elections just round the corner the MCD on Monday, made another populist announcement. According to the civic agency, a self-occupied residential property of any original owner in the rural or urban villages would be exempted from paying property tax.

Ashok B Lall, Architect

As China continues to boom in the coming decades, it would be well advised to think big. Big cities, that is.

BEIJING: The fear of failing to grow enough corn, wheat or rice to feed its people has spurred China into action this year, but Beijing may be doing too little, too late to overcome the powerful forces of urbanization. Just as global grain markets grapple with ultralow stocks and record-high prices, China is battling to stem the destruction of its arable land due to urban sprawl, the growing scarcity of water and the exodus of labor to its booming cities by directing tens of billions of dollars to rural areas.

Dhaka to rank 4th among largest cities by 2025 New Age Desk Dhaka, now ranking 15th with 11.9 million people, will be the fourth largest city in the world by 2025 when the population would reach 22 million, predicted Forbes.com. The number of urban dwellers is expected to hit 5 billion globally by 2025

As of last year, Delhi may have overtaken Mumbai as the country's largest city in terms of population, as per a recent study. For over two decades now, the Census reports have pegged Mumbai as the country's biggest metropolitan area. But two demographers from the Washington DC-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB) have found that if the same definition for measuring the populations of Mumbai and Kolkata is applied to Delhi, then the national capital's estimated population for 2007 is much more.