Urbanisation Policy in India

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context:

A policy is needed to guide the planning and management of cities towards enabling India’s growth 

Background:

• As India urbanises, it must ensure that its cities offer a decent quality of life and facilitate job creation. 
• These imperatives are fundamental to India’s ambitions of becoming a five trillion-dollar economy by 2025 and a 10 trillion-dollar economy by 2030.
• From a population of 377 million in 2011, Indian cities are projected to house 870 million people by 2050, according to the UN’s projections — by far the highest among all nations. 
• Delhi is likely to become the world’s most populous urban agglomeration by 2030, surpassing Tokyo. Clearly, a major demographic transformation is taking place.

Urbanisation

• In general usage, urbanization refers to the relative concentration of a territory’s population in towns and cities (i.e. relative urban growth). It may also refer to the process of being urban.
• As a demographic process, which is the commonest use of the term, urbanization involves towns and cities growing in relative size within a space economy through, first, an increasing proportion of the population living in an urban place and, second, their concentration in the target urban settlement. The end of the sequence is an almost completely urbanized society, with the great majority of the population living in just a few larger places.
• Linked to these demographic processes (with migration the main contributor to urban growth) are the structural changes in the society consequent upon the development of capitalism (i.e. structural urbanization). Cities are the foci of production, distribution, and exchange process, because of the economies of scale and scope from agglomeration. Urbanization is the necessary component of industrialization and development (though seen over urbanization)
• Finally, there is behavioural urbanization. Urban areas especially the larger ones are centres of social change. Values, attitudes, and behaviour patterns are modified in the urban milieu (known as urbanism) and new forms (which may be reflected in townscape as with architectural styles) then spread through the urban system through diffusion processes.

Major causes of urbanization

• Industrial revolution: Industrial employment catches the attention of people from rural to urban areas. In the urban areas, people work in modern sector in the occupations that assist national economic development. This represents that the old agricultural economics is changing to a new non-agricultural economy. This is the trend, which will build a new modern society (Gugler 1997).
• The emergence of large manufacturing centres.
• Job opportunities: There are ample job opportunities in megacities therefore village people or individuals from town frequently migrate to these areas.
• Availability of transportation: Due to easy transport, people prefer to stay in big cities.
• Migration: Migration is the main cause of the rapid growth of mega-cities. Migration has been going on for centuries and it is a normal phenomenon. When considering urbanization rural-urban and urban-rural and rural-rural migrations are very important. Urban-urban migration means that people move from one city to another. People may move to the city because they are forced by poverty from the rural communities or they may be pulled by the magnetism of city lives. A combination of these push and pull factors can force people to migrate to cities (Gugler 1997).
• Infrastructure facilities in the urban areas: Infrastructure has a vital role in the process of urbanization in the development of countries. As agriculture becomes more fruitful, cities grow by absorbing the workforce from rural areas. Industry and services increase and generate higher value-added jobs, and this led to economic growth. The geographic concentration of productive activities in cities creates agglomeration economies, which further raises productivity and growth. The augments income and demand for agricultural products in cities.

Problems faced by Urban Governance

• Planning

Planning is mainly centralized and till now the state planning boards and commissions have not come out with any specific planning strategies and depend on Planning commission for it. This is expected to change in present government, as planning commission has been abolished and now focus is on empowering the states and strengthening the federal structure.

In fact for big cities the plans have become out-dated and do not reflect the concern of urban local dwellers, these needs to be take care by Metropolitan planning committee as per provisions of 74th amendment act. Now the planning needs to be decentralized and participatory to accommodate the needs of the urban dwellers.

Also there is lack of human resource for undertaking planning on full scale. State planning departments and national planning institutions lack qualified planning professional. Need is to expand the scope of planners from physical to integrated planning- Land use, infrastructure, environmental sustainability, social inclusion, risk reduction, economic productivity and financial diversity.

• Finances

Major challenge is of revenue generation with the ULBs. This problem can be analyzed form two perspectives. First, the states have not given enough autonomy to ULBs to generate revenues and Second in some case the ULBs have failed to utilize even those tax and fee powers that they have been vested with.

There are two sources of municipal revenue i.e. municipal own revenue and assigned revenue. Municipal own revenue are generated by municipal own revenue through taxes and fee levied by them. Assigned revenues are those which are assigned to local governments by higher tier of government.

There is growing trend of declining ratio of own revenue. There is poor collection property taxes. Use of geographical information system to map all the properties in a city can have a huge impact on the assessment rate of properties that are not in tax net.

• Regulator

There is an exponential increase in real estate, encroaching the agricultural lands. Also, the rates are very high, which are not affordable and other irregularities are also in practice. For this, we need a regulator, which can make a level playing field and will be instrumental for affordable housing and checking corrupt practices in the Real estate sector.

Steps Taken by Government to improve urban Development

• The Constitution (74th Amendment) Act came into effect in 1993, emphasizes strengthening urban planning, regulation of land use, roads and bridges and providing urban amenities.
• National Urban Transport Policy, 2006: Its main purpose is to provide affordable, comfortable, safe and rapid, reliable and sustainable urban transport system, for the growing number of city residents to jobs, education and recreation and such other needs within our cities.
• Encouraging integrated land use and transport planning in all cities so that travel distances are minimized and access to livelihoods, education, and other social needs, especially for the marginal segments of the urban population is improved
• National Urban Renewal Mission (NURM), 2005: The primary objective of the JnNURM is to create economically productive, efficient, equitable and responsive cities. The JnNURM consists of two sub-missions Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG) and Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP).
• The Mission focuses on: Integrated development of infrastructure services; securing linkages between asset creation and maintenance for long run project sustainability; accelerating the flow of investment into urban infrastructure services; planned development of cities including the peri-urban areas, out growths, and urban corridors; renewal and re-development of inner city areas; Universalization of urban services so as to ensure their availability to the urban poor.

The Indian Express Link:

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-urbanisation-policy-quality-life-indian-economy-7556604/