scorecardresearch
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomeOpinionIndia must shun Nehruvian metropolis bias & turn to small cities for...

India must shun Nehruvian metropolis bias & turn to small cities for urban economic growth

India’s urban policy attributes the messiness to migrants, slums and poverty, and its preferred antidote is a Chandigarh-like order.

Follow Us :
Text Size:

Cities have the potential to become ‘engines of economic’ growth, but the Narendra Modi-led government now needs to address three significant challenges: how to move people, how to broaden the scope of urbanisation, and how to improve its quality.

A metropolitan bias

Urban policy in India since the mid-2000s has focused on transforming metropolitan areas into economic powerhouses. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission exhibited a clear metropolitan bias. Recent schemes like Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation and Smart Cities Mission have also favoured metros and million-plus cities.

Policymakers have barely paid attention to the dispersed spatial nature of India’s urbanisation, which is driven not by large-scale migration of villagers to the metropolis, as is popularly imagined, but by the natural growth of large city populations, and the in-situ transition of large and dense villages into census towns through demographic and economic transitions.

This trend indicates that India’s urban vision need not be limited to the larger cities. In fact, it might be entirely feasible to create hundreds of economic powerhouses in multiple locations that can trigger economic mobility for millions and reduce regional inequalities.


Also read: How to build future cities? The answer lies in the slums of India, Brazil & Indonesia


Neglecting labour mobility

Internal migrants constitute about 28.3 per cent of India’s workforce. Large-scale, permanent, classic rural-urban migrations are less prevalent in India. An estimated 40-100 million short-term migrants do not permanently move their residence, but power critical sectors of the industry including agriculture, manufacturing and construction.

Short-term migration is a key avenue for rural households to diversify income and access employment in more urbanised and developed regions. In this, migration is a counter balance to regional imbalances in the country.

Policy documents have acknowledged the constitutional guarantee for free movement within India. Yet, labour mobility is neglected in public policy.

Migrants are often unable to access social protection, including access to subsidised food and housing. They face political exclusion because there is no system that enables the participation of absentee migrant voters in elections. Inter-state migrants from socially backward categories stand to lose access to affirmative action provisions because the SC/ST lists are prepared by states.


Also read: 7 of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India


Cities are messy & exclusionary

Indian urbanisation is caught in a paradoxical situation where despite the attempts to address infrastructure and service gaps in larger cities, they remain increasingly unliveable as well as exclusionary.

For residents, the economic opportunity represented by the city is countered by disincentives like higher costs of food and housing, bad air quality, inefficient transport and inadequate basic services. In urban policy, however, the messiness is perennially attributed to in-migration, slums and poverty, and its perceived antidote is a Chandigarh-like order – replete with grids and single land-use zooming. This imagination neither recognises the diversity of spaces that make up urban India, nor does it acknowledge bottom-up efforts to build housing, provide services and organise transport.

There has been no serious effort to decentralise power to urban local bodies – as is mandated by the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act – or equip cities with adequate number of urban managers and technocrats. This makes it hard for governments to respond to localised problems, or tap into community initiatives.

Multiply urban growth engines

We need to replace the imagination of transforming Mumbai into Shanghai with a mission to transform hundreds of small cities across India, say in the size range of 1-6 lakh people, into economic powerhouses.

The government must re-orient central and state government schemes to include small cities, as a means of signalling their inclusion into India’s urban growth narrative. Not only will funding go much further in a small city, if designed in a non-prescriptive way, schemes could allow for solutions to emerge from the ground up, thereby encouraging entrepreneurial energies and public institutions to collaborate.


Also read: 10 fastest-growing global cities in India: Economic boom or poor focus on quality of life?


Contrary to expectations, these abound in small cities across India. In Odisha, a state government scheme to grant titles to slumdwellers is leveraging the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana to set off a mini construction boom in small towns. In Kishangarh, Rajasthan, local business elite have leveraged infrastructure like a new airport, a private logistics park and a dedicated rail freight corridor to position the city as a global centre for processing domestic and imported marble and granite.

Placed at the mobility cusp, investments in small cities can create quality jobs and develop skills, both for rural and urban workers, and build infrastructure that boosts quality of life.

With over half of India’s industries located in what is currently classified rural, industrial development, skill development and labour-related policies must also focus on transitional ‘rurban’ spaces.

Empower local governments

The rigid master plans of our cities have been ineffective in sustaining economic growth. The governance and management of metropolitan areas might require a sui generis approach, given the complexity of problems and the multiplicity of governance actors and institutions. But here too, solutions that are locally incubated must be emulated.

For instance, the secret to Kolkata’s reliable, affordable and well-connected autorickshaw system is localised legislation that circumvents the vagaries of central laws and the involvement of representatives of rickshaw unions in key decisions like route planning.

A plethora of bottom-up initiatives must also find representation in urban reform strategies. Some of these initiatives deliver lasting solutions, like the public library in Panaji, Goa that is open seven days a week to all residents to read, study and interact. In resettlement colonies like Bhalswa in Delhi, in over 15 years, residents have been instrumental in bringing in services and amenities through protests, negotiations and legal representations with elected officials and bureaucrats.

Therefore, instead of viewing the presence of informal settlements purely as failures of planning, Indian cities must leverage the investments made by residents and extend basic services to informal settlements.


Also read: Indian women confined to the home, in cities designed for men


Improve governance of migration

Finally, a focus on the portability of social protection could be key to bringing down migration barriers.

The government has the opportunity to amend legislations facilitating the registration of migrant construction workers in the schemes under The Building and Other Construction Workers Act, which has an unspent pool of nearly Rs 20,000 crore.

Similarly, a delinking of individuals from household ration cards and a digital record-keeping system would enable migrants to access PDS benefits wherever they might be. Experiments with smart card systems are underway with the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, but need strengthening.

Ramping up universalised social protection in education and health, including critical interventions like Integrated Child Development Scheme, is likely to incentivise long-term migration to cities.

The new Modi government must seize the opportunity of incubating several economic powerhouses in dispersed locations. Re-orienting investment towards small cities, pushing for decentralisation and bottom-up context-specific solutions are the need of the hour.

The author is a Fellow at CPR, an architect and urban planner.

This is the seventh in a series of articles titled “Policy Challenges 2019-2024” under ThePrint-Centre for Policy Research (CPR) collaboration. A longer version of this piece is available on the CPR website at www.cprindia.org. The full policy document on a range of issues addressed in this series is available on CPR’s website.

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

1 COMMENT

  1. Most of us think of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong while speaking of China. Consider the scores of new cities it has created since 1978 which are in the million plus category. Without necessarily thinking of metropolitan areas and smaller urban towns as an Either Or binary, it is unquestionably true that most of the incremental GDP that will need to be created for India to reach a per capita income of @ 6,000 will have to be generated in urban areas. Being a Nehruvian to the core, my heart tells me it will be the metros more than the smaller towns that will get us there. Which makes it all the more tragic that one half of Bombay’s population lives in slums. Our urban areas need not be Smart Cities but the quality of our urbanisation needs to be much better.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular