Focused on improving metropolitan hubs, the approach to urban development is based on the city-village divide. Small towns that lie between the two, and where maximum growth is taking place, are either ignored or seen as mere extensions of big cities
The number of city dwellers, especially in the developing world, is continually increasing. It is believed that India will witness the highest urban population rise in the next 40 years. With the Union Government’s announcement that it will establish 100 smart cities in India by 2022, the emphasis on urban planning and research has increased manifold.
Urban research has traditionally focussed on megalopolises — the big cities which are privileged environments for production and concentration of national wealth, innovation and talent. Considering that there is an increasing amount of data suggesting that the growing share of India’s urban population lives in small urbanised settlements (not big cities), with a population above 10,000 and below 50,000, the focus on just converting big cities into smart ones seems misplaced.
The 2011 Census data suggests that the growth rate in the metros (home to 265 million people) is far less compared to that of the small towns (312 million people in urban and semi-urban settlements that have a population between 5,000 and 1,00,000). Current efforts in urban development seem to reduce the vision of urbanisation to that of metropolitanisation and competition between global cities. Such an outlook offers an acutely myopic view of global development processes.
India has a stringent definition for classifying a settlement as ‘urban’ within the Census, apart from additional criteria which varies among States, since they enjoy discretionary powers under The Constitution (Seventy-Fourth Amendment) Act, 1992. Cities in India are classified mainly on the basis of population. Census towns account for one-third of the demographic urban growth, indicating that in the politics of re-classification, the process for urban transition is as important as rural-urban migration.
The process of recognising new municipal areas is sluggish. Only 242 new statutory towns have been recognised in the last 10 years. This leads to the following questions: What is the threshold that divides the rural and the urbanIJ What must the qualification criteria be for upgradation of administrative status and improvement in the quality of life of the residentsIJ Also, how does inadequate access to urban infrastructure affect the level of social development of these spacesIJ Notably, a large number of settlements declared as ‘urban’ by the Census, and whose population is included in the calculation of the total urban population, are still governed by rural local bodies.
The big city bias is evident from the fact that nearly 50 per cent of the funds from the Housing and Urban Development Corporation ltd are directed to large cities. Development of small towns is often blighted due to neglect by the authorities. Recent researches have documented the high level of poverty in small towns. Most suffer from low per capita income, mainly due to the lack of jobs and low activity in the secondary sector.
Small towns lack infrastructure and basic urban services. They do not have the wherewithal to support migrant populations, who then move to the big cities. Human development in small towns suffers from inadequate resources.
In many towns, the 74th constitutional amendment is not being implemented properly. Small towns lack financial autonomy and access to institutional funds and capacities. This leads to skewed growth of the towns. Many of these towns do not follow their master plans — which, in any case, is often prepared after the town has come into existence.
Despite the importance of small towns in the Indian urban system, they have do not inform the dominant discourse on urbanisation in the country. Within planning and policy perceptions, small towns are seen as adjuncts to larger cities — spaces for out-sourcing low productive activities, which act as production bases and supply centres.
Although this relationship suggests no apparent discriminatory arrangement, it often results in polluting and hazardous production activities being outsourced to the smaller towns. Paradigms may naturalise such a relationship ignore the innovative entrepreneurial techniques that small towns employ to mobilise capital and secure resources to trade with the world, at times even bypassing the nearest metropolitan cities.
The social, cultural and historical capital and capabilities of small towns should be ingeniously exploited to create resilient local economies. The rural-urban linkages and the role of caste relations and networks in this regard has been brought out in important ethnographic studies. Such studies make a strong case for moving away from the urban-rural or India-Bharat binary.
Arguably, most of India’s urban population resides on the continuum between these two categories. Sub-urbanisation is a widespread form that’s left under-researched and unacknowledged due to the emphasis on such binaries. It is surprising that the Census fails to recognise suburbs as an effective component of the urban city.
Contrary to the popular assumption that most small towns are located around metros, recent studies show that many small towns are widely spread across the countryside. This appears to indicate, as eminent scholars have argued, that there may be multiple urbanisation processes at work. Keeping this in mind, it becomes imperative to question the top-down model, and research the plurality of development models that our urbanisation experience offers us.
Understanding the morphology of urban India in all its variety and differences requires concerted ethnographic studies and an acceptance of the multiple geographies of growth and development. The resilience of urban planning experiments, that have succeeded elsewhere in the developed and developing world, depend significantly on bottom-up, participatory approaches. India needs to envision such approaches, which cannot solely reflect the conclusions of the dominant economic geography approach. It needs to give primacy to the contextualised processes and practices that make India’s urban experience unique and taps into the local vision, history and experience.
(The writer is a senior research associate at the OP Jindal Global University)