This is practically impossible in a democracy like India. Tearing down a city and rebuilding it will take longer than the term of any elected representative/official. The displaced people will vote him out before the plan comes to fruition.
The only way forward for us is to do things gradually. Every step must preserve citizens' liberty and rights, and remove government regulations so the people can create wealth.
If infrastructure is the problem then you must at some point face the music and pay the infrastructure debt. Otherwise you are basically not serious about moving forward. If one city gets rebuilt and becomes an economic magnet, then that should provide enough political/social capital to roll out more new cities.
I think tier 2 cities like Pune and Bangalore are good candidates. They are both expanding like crazy. It will be easy (not really, but easier) to build out the new developments with next-gen infrastructure. Once the new areas are built up and show their superiority over a few years, the older ones will be upgraded due to public pressure.
For starters I honestly believe to have genuine upgrade of infrastructure and living standards, you need to increase people's income levels. While there's steady upwards income mobility in Bangalore, it's still no where near to cause leap frog progress.
The remainder of reasons go beyond the scope of discussion of a small HN comment. They have lots to do with insane levels of corruption, and socio-economic attitudes of people. Enough money already exists, is sanctioned and spent to leap frog infrastructure to DisneyLand levels. But nearly negligible actually gets spent, needless to say the dishonesty in quality of work done.
Beyond this we just need to acknowledge nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone.
The other part just continues. Bangalore is not even a city, its really more like a mix of at-least 4 districts, gradually absorbed in to the original 'Bangalore' city. People will keep coming into the city, and jobs keep arriving. Since the already dismal state of spending, and progress. No new cities can be built in other places, so people continue to arrive. Real estate prices go up, there is no where near Sanitation infrastructure, or Electricity or even roads. But investors keep buying out lands a decade in advance. And people with no discipline or inclination to play this game just have to pay up high rents or pay 2 - 5 times the cost of a home. All this for access to schools, hospitals, career etc.
I agree with most of your comment, but I refuse to believe this is true. Almost everyone I have personally met in the city (from the auto drivers to shopkeepers to policemen to businessmen) was well-meaning and well-behaved, with an intelligent, nuanced outlook and understanding of common problems we all face.
The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
For example, a common conundrum I've heard about is that in any restaurant that serves alcohol, the customs/excise dept requires there to be only one exit/entry. However, fire safety code calls for multiple exits. So what is the restaurant owner to do?? He has to bribe the safety inspector, or the customs inspector, or more commonly both. The owner is not a bad, corrupt person. The inspectors are not bad, corrupt persons. The people who drafted the various codes did not draft them with an aim to encourage corruption. But combined together, all this causes the problems we see.
>>The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
No. Actually people are bad. Parents line up their kids for civil services exam cram schools, because civil services have ...err... bribe income potential
You know people are genuinely evil when they want their kids to grow up and become corrupt, cheat and steal.
Basically people don't want their kids to be pick pockets in a bus. They want them to dress up well, sit on a table and pick pockets in a sub registrar office or while approving a road tarring contract.
But they aspire their kids to become thieves nevertheless.
It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.
It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.
Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.
Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.
Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.
I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.