Direction: Read the following passages carefully and answer the question that follows.
The quality of our urban life is abysmal and falling. Painfully long power cuts are a quotidian reality in most cities, barring their privileged enclaves. So it is a crippling scarcity of potable water, which forces the lower middle class household to spend 5 per cent or more of its income on buying bottled water or purifying the poor-quality water it gets from the municipal tap or, increasingly, bore wells, most of which are illegal and savagely depleting and contaminating groundwater. Most Indian cities are unsafe, especially for women , but also for pedestrians and users of non-mechanized transport like bicycles. Old people, whose number are growing rapidly, cannot possibly feel secure in negotiating our urban spaces. No Indian city is disabled-friendly. And the vast majority of our cities and towns have no pavements or footpaths worth the name. Worse, our cities are turning uglier by the day as parks and greenery are devoured.