India’s urbanisation is as much a story of its large megacities as it is a story of the in-situ transformation of its rural population, not just in the periphery, but also beyond. The new Narendra Modi government and state governments must keep this in mind while designing schemes. Managing urban expansion is a major policy challenge.
A rurban story
In India, very large cities co-exist with a dense network of small towns. The six major urban agglomerations – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai – constituted about 74 million inhabitants in 2011. They are followed by a series of secondary metropolitan areas, which are state capitals and other big cities, and all these million-plus cities constituted a little under a third – 31 per cent – of the urban population in 2011.
The urban growth in past decade is not concentrated in large cities but actually evenly distributed across various urban categories and locations. One-third of the fastest-growing cities are small towns, which have less than 100,000 population.
Not all these towns are administratively ‘urban’ or statutory towns (STs), but they are counted as urban by the Census since they are above the demographic and economic threshold of being ‘urban.’ These settlements are known as census towns (CTs), and together with smaller STs, they bridge the gap between India’s large cities and rural areas, as nodes that supply essential goods and services to the hinterland.
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There are also many villages that do not cross the census threshold but show visible non-agricultural functions. These new ‘rurban’ spaces provide two main kinds of crucial linkages between rural and urban: spatial and economic.
Spatial periphery: The peripheries of large cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata are growing at a faster rate than the core cities. For example, Malappuram, which used to be a small municipality of 10,000 people in Kerala during Census 2001, grew to an urban agglomeration of 1.7 million people by 2011. This growth came from Census towns around the city.
Spatial corridor: Beyond urban peripheries, rurban areas are also emerging along industrial corridors, combining cities of different sizes and villages between two separated city clusters, to create an extended urban region.
Economic: Economically, non-agricultural activities are spatially diffused, much of it outside the larger cities. As per the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18, about 45.8 per cent of the manufacturing employment in India is rural. Stringent land-use regulations and urban-density policies can push firms beyond the formal city boundaries.
These places are also not very different from smaller towns in terms of consumption levels or investment in private assets like septic tanks or two-wheelers. Neatly classifying such settlements as urban or rural biases our understanding of India’s structural transformation and its associated welfare outcomes.
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Dichotomous governance
Yet, our administrative structure valiantly attempts to govern India’s settlements across clear administrative boundaries of rural and urban. The Constitutional framework of rural and urban governance, introduced by the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment, reflects this dichotomy.
Only the statutory towns are administrative urban areas, and are governed by an elected urban local body (ULB) constituted by the Article 243 P & Q of the Constitution. The criteria to designate (or declassify) a place as a ULB is a prerogative of the state governments and it varies across states.
CTs and large villages, which constitute the rural-urban gradation, are not designated as administratively urban by the state, and continue to be governed by gram panchayats.
The 11th Schedule of the Constitution places important functions like agriculture, irrigation and housing under the ambit of Panchayats, while the 12th Schedule places urban planning, land use, water supply, roads, bridges, health sanitation and slum improvement under the purview of municipalities. This functionally distinct structure of rural and urban means that a panchayat may not be able to pursue policies that respond to the changes happening in its jurisdiction.
At the Union level, the government has given preference to rural over urban in centrally sponsored schemes (CSS). In 2004, Tamil Nadu switched the classification of over 500 urban areas to rural, to obtain more funds from the Union.
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The dissonances
Gap in services: Differences in governance across the formal urban (ULBs) and rurban settlements are responsible for the gap in public services like piped sewerage or in-house water connections across them, despite a private demand for these services.
Resistance to reclassification: One consequence of this ‘denied urbanisation’ is that citizens resist state government proposals to reclassify them to ULBs. Absence of property taxes and higher subsidies in rural areas can drive strong local interest to retain the rural-urban binaries.
Resistance to integration: In large metropolitan areas, where public services may be the responsibility of a parastatal agency like metro water boards, people prefer to be in smaller municipalities where levels of taxation are lower.
Employment: These unequal service provisions across the rural-urban spectrum affect the economic transformation of rurban areas. While some specific labour-intensive manufacturing industries are moving out of the municipal boundary, growth restrictions prevent significant employment growth in such districts.
Transport: The movement of labour and spatial distribution of jobs in urban peripheries are linked to the availability of multimodal and intermediate public transport like three-wheelers, but there is no clear functional domain in the rural governance framework to regulate this. As a result, despite having a low cost of operation, these modes are pushed to the fringes rather than becoming an integral part of the public transit system.
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Policy recommendations
The onus is both on the Union and the states to overcome these rural-urban binaries in the governance framework and integrate a variety of interlinked rural-urban functions.
State
At the state level, the effort should be to make the functional domain flexible in case of rurban spaces. Even within the prevailing framework of the 11th and 12th schedules, it is possible to make such provisions. Using this flexibility, states can transfer functions like permitting building licenses, readjusting land for variable uses, or regulating permits to the rurban areas.
The size-insensitive character of the urban governance framework can be also be used to functionally empower smaller ULBs or empower panchayats to provide “urban services” to citizens in CTs and other rurban spaces.
There is also a role for mechanisms like the District Planning Committee (DPC) and Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) to institutionally co-ordinate between rural and urban local governments.
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Union
At the Union level, there is an urgent need to break out of the hardcoded definition of rural and urban. Neither forcing rurban areas into binaries, say through categorical conversions to STs, nor tasking the centrally sponsored schemes with location-specific objectives will address their situation. Scheme design should permit states to provide fit-for-purpose services in these areas to leverage urban characteristics.
Another approach is to allocate specific funds to fill the gap in key infrastructure and bridge the service vacuum between rural and urban, as in the SP Mukherji Rurban Mission.
Throughout South and Southeast Asia, cities and their associated economic engines are beginning to be viewed, not in isolation, but as connected to their peripheries. This is a good time for the Modi government to introduce an integrated approach to urbanisation, bridging the artificial divides of the 11th and 12th schedules.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the inputs of Kanhu Charan Pradhan while writing this article.
Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, is an architect and urban planner. Sama Khan is research associate at CPR. Shamindra Nath Roy is working as a Senior Researcher with CPR from September 2015.
This is the twenty-sixth 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.