Tathagata Chatterji and Souvanic Roy

Envisioning a Humane Urban Policy for India

India’s urban policy should encapsulate a people- and ecology-centric approach rather than engineering-centric.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs is in the process of formulating the National Urban Policy in consultation with state governments. Since India is at the cusp of a major urban transformation, this is an opportune moment to ponder over some of the critical issues plaguing our cities and explore their bearing in urban policy.

With the neoliberal development model firmly entrenched in the policy narrative, urban transformation since the early 1990s has been propelled by the quest for economic growth. Cities are increasingly being envisaged as engines of economic growth. A McKinsey study has projected that by 2025, urban areas will contribute 75% of global growth. In the national context, Barclay’s report has projected that by 2020, urban areas are will contribute 70-75 percent of India’s gross domestic product. The Centre’s flagship programmes such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Smart Cities focus on big infrastructure and digital technology to make Indian cities ‘world class’, but they have had little impact on the quality of life.

The WHO’s polluted cities index features 14 Indian cities in the global top 20, with Kanpur topping the list. While stocks on Dalal Street keep rising, an hour of downpour brings the rest of Mumbai to a halt. In Delhi, traffic gridlocks have become as much a part of the daily life of millions of aam admis as the gridlock in parliament has in the life of millionaire netas. Clean roads and safe drinking water, which much of the developed world takes for granted, continue to elude us, barring a handful of exceptions such as Indore, Surat and Visakhapatnam.

So what is failing in Indian cities? What are the systemic deficiencies that make cities dysfunctional? How can urban policy address this? Here are three major issues that need to be addressed:

Urban informality

Informality is part and parcel of India’s urban fabric, and its importance cannot be overlooked. The informal sector accounts for 70% of the workforce and over 60% of the city economy. Between a quarter and a third of the residents in big cities live in slums and informal settlements. No urban mission can succeed if this reality is not acknowledged and the informal sector excluded from the city-building process.

People associated with the informal city continue to face issues of low wages and adverse service conditions, and are located outside the purview of social safety nets. Administrators and the urban middle class are visibly hostile towards the urban poor. Consequently, large-scale evictions linked to city beautification and infrastructure projects in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Mumbai have become integral to the new urban strategy to lure private capital. Slum rehousing projects being carried out by public-private partnerships, and are dislodging people towards the periphery to free up prime real estate.

Such disruptive practices that adversely affect livelihoods and social ties should be replaced by a people-friendly approach that focuses on in-situ solutions, such as creating shelters near the place of work. Similarly, the new urban policy should sensitise the civic authorities regarding proper implementation of progressive legislations like the Street Vendors Act to safeguard the livelihood of the urban poor and integrate them in ward-level municipal governance rather than pushing them away using police action.

John Haslam/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Degeneration of the inner city

Metropolitan cities have been witnessing a change in their economic geography since the mid-1990s. City peripheries, such as Gurgaon and Noida in the NCR, Rajarhat New Town adjoining Kolkata and Whitefield in Bangalore, have become gateways to the international market, overtaking old, established city centres. The aspirational middle class is relocating to such peripheral cities. Meanwhile, inner cities are experiencing a decline in their residential population, increasing commercialisation and petty trading, dilapidation of housing stock, acute traffic snarls and overstretching of infrastructure. Public health is a major concern in these dense, ill-governed and spontaneously transforming areas. Fragmented governance, ambiguity in land records and the absence of coordinated land management are the causes of perpetual decay in these high-value lands. It is essential to revitalise these inner city areas as the livelihood of millions of city residents is associated with the bazaar economy.

Crisis of urban resilience

Urban missions like JNNURM and AMRUT fund capital-intensive and engineering-focused solutions, without much regard for the ecological contexts of cities. The practices of decentralised and natural solutions of stormwater management, rainwater harvesting or wetlands for sewage treatment are disregarded. Bangalore, once a city of 2,500 interconnected lakes, is at the mercy of nature due to a ten-fold increase in its built-up areas in a laissez-faire manner. Mumbai invests hundreds of crores in the development of roads, waterworks and storm drainage, but kills its life support system of 300 canals and mangroves through the indiscriminate sanction of real estate. Shimla, the ‘queen’ of the hills, is facing its worst ever water crisis for disturbing the hydrological regime due to the unregulated growth of tourism and urban sprawl.

Need for a paradigm shift

Growth is the mantra to fast-track urban transformation in India. The discourse of development is centred on creating a first-world experience in cities steeped in wide-ranging diversity. The existing urban scenario is a collective of divergent development patterns, multiple norms and conflicting priorities of numerous stakeholders inherited from indigenous, colonial, socialist and neoliberal political orders. These layers interact with a diverse natural and socio-economic landscape, inducing a complex heterogeneity in cities. Public works and land monetisation – two main pillars of the ongoing rejuvenation efforts – are inadequate to address the complex issues of informality, inner city decay and vulnerability to natural hazards. These are inevitable consequences of the laissez-faire interplay of market forces, the absence of strategic vision to manage growth and a silos-based approach to infrastructure development.

Dawn Danby/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Here are the key points that emerge vis-à-vis the National Urban Policy:

First, coexistence of formal and informal sectors needs to be accepted and integrated creatively without affecting the living environment in cities. Since slum relocation is a highly contentious issue with a history of large-scale evictions, in-situ community-based slum-upgrading with secure tenure and infrastructure augmentation appears to be a humane alternative. Odisha has undertaken a bold initiative to confer land rights to slum dwellers, a move that could benefit one million urban poor people across the state. Other states can initiate similar measures.

Second, inner cities warrant a strategic vision and long-term roadmap to revitalise their economy, built environment and crumbling infrastructure. This calls for a careful policy, drafted on the basis of specific strengths and weaknesses. The regeneration of old housing stock and retrofitting this with open spaces and basic amenities should be the priority, so as to ensure public health and safety. Working solutions depend on the convergence of multi-pronged actions, streamlining land records and conflict resolution between diverse stakeholders so that no one is left out. Success depends on putting in place an appropriate institutional mechanism and the right kind of incentives to ensure community engagement in the rejuvenation effort.

Third, the problem of resilience in Indian cities has its roots in the process of growth disregarding local and regional ecosystems. Cities have grown by accretion and subsequently been retrofitted with infrastructure. The geographical area and population of large cities have crossed the ecological thresholds. The resilience of cities will depend on replacing the urban engineering mode of growth management with urban ecosystem-centric solutions. For large cities, infrastructure problems may be solved through the principle of subsidiarity – exploring possibilities of decentralised solutions by replacing capital-intensive, centralised approaches.

Current approaches of public works and land monetisation will not provide an answer to the present systemic disorder. Issues of informality, inner city decay and crisis of urban resilience can be addressed through a well-knit policy programme – projects conceived within an overarching framework of three ‘E’s – economy, equity and ecology.

Will the National Urban Policy be just a perpetuation of the status quo or become a game changer in this direction?

Souvanic Roy is Professor of Urban Planning at IIEST, Shibpur. Tathagata Chatterji is Professor of Urban Management and Governance at Xavier University, Bhubaneswar. Views expressed are personal.

The National Urban Policy Is a Great Opportunity for Course-Correction

The chaotic and haphazard way India is moving raises several questions about our ability to manage the complexities involved in urban transformation.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has recently formed a committee to draft India’s National Urban Policy. The move is in accordance with the requirements of the New Urban Agenda of UN Habitat, signed by 193 countries in Quito in October 2016.

This policy initiative is coming up a quarter of a century after two landmark events: the economic liberalisation of 1991; and political decentralisation of 1992, defining new institutional arrangements of urban governance through the 74th Constitution Amendment Act. Framing of the National Urban Policy thus offers a unique opportunity to reflect on how urbanisation had been unfolding in the post-liberalisation era, recalibrate the bearings and steer our urban transformation in a more efficient direction.

Time is running out.

Over the next 12 years, 18 Bangalores or 180 Bhubaneswars need to be built, to accommodate 145 million additional city dwellers between 2018 and 2030. And by 2050, the urban population would increase by 416 million – 50 million more than the population of the US and Canada combined.

With 14 Indian cities being ranked amongst the world’s 20 most polluted by a WHO report, ‘a business as usual approach’ towards urban management could be catastrophic.

That need not be. Urbanisation could potentially generate millions of jobs for the growing youth population. There are strong correlations between urbanisation and economic growth. Productivity increases when rural farmers become urban factory workers, as has happened most spectacularly in China.

Between 1978 and 2018, China’s urbanisation rate jumped up from 18% to 58%. In the process, over 500 million people were lifted out of poverty and the country attained middle-income status. India’s present level of urbanisation (34%) is far lower than China (58%) or even Indonesia (55%). Naturally, there is huge scope for growth.

But the chaotic and haphazard way India is moving raises several questions about our ability to manage the complexities involved in urban transformation.

Shadow urbanisation

In public perception, rapid urbanisation is associated with large-scale migration of the rural masses to the cities. But the Indian reality is rather different, and migration accounted for just about 20% of urban growth over the past two census decades. Much growth is happening in the shadows, through in situ processes, and without any significant movement of people.

Between 2001 and 2011, the number of ‘census towns’, had jumped from 1,362 to 3,894 and account for 32% decadal urbanisation rate. These are essentially big villages, which had crossed the Census criteria to define what is ‘urban’ in terms of population size, density and occupational structure of the people – but are yet to be reclassified by the state governments.

The denial of ‘urban’ status deprives a large segment of our population of basic civic services, and absence of civic regulations encourages chaotic construction. Burdwan (Bengal), Krishna (Andhra Pradesh) and Ludhiana (Punjab) – districts famous for their high crop yields – have been urbanising faster than the national average since 2001, through haphazard conversion of agricultural land.

Rural-urban disconnect

Connections between agriculture, livelihood and urbanisation are seldom discussed in the policy circles, and our developmental policies are neatly pigeonholed into rural-urban binaries.

It is important to recognise spatial structures and settlement hierarchies, which link rural and urban areas through flows of people, products, money and knowledge.

Mandi towns, such as Sri Ganganagar (flour and mustard oil mills) or Machlipatnam (fishing), are the nodal points of the rural economy. These are the places which provide market access to the farmers for their agricultural produce, where tractors are sold and serviced, where cooperative banks, credit societies, colleges and clinics are located.

Strengthening supply-chain linkages between these mandi towns, their rural hinterlands and bigger market towns can stimulate growth at the grassroots and ought to be part of any local economic strategy Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns (IDSMT) – India’s first major urban initiative launched during the socialist seventies attempted just that – albeit with a minuscule budget.

The 74th amendment envisaged establishment of District Planning Committees, to coordinate urban and rural plans. Many states had constituted such committees, but barring Kerala, integrated planning had remained a non-starter.

Urbanisation beyond urban boundaries

Outer peripheries of big cities are growing faster than inner cities. Areas once considered distant suburbs, such as Whitefields and Electronic City of Bangalore, and Gurgaon and Noida in the NCR, have now become hotspots of the globalised economy.

A fragmented landscape is emerging at the outer edge of the cities – where the lives of the globally mobile software elites, locally rooted farmers and the uprooted construction labourers daily intersect. Intelligent business parks, smart residential condominiums and luxury hotels are sprouting up on fields which produced crops till just the other day. Speculative real estate investment is rapidly expanding its concrete footprint, engulfing peri-urban lands and lakes.

Bangalore’s municipal limits had expanded ten-fold: from 69 square km in 1949 to 716 square km in 2007. Jurisdiction of the Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority now covers 8,000 square km – more than five times the size of the Delhi state and twice that of Goa.

Delhi NCR – already amongst the largest urban agglomerations of the world – is still expanding along two axes: one towards Jaipur and the other towards Chandigarh. The growth pole around the megacity of Mumbai is also expanding, the southeastern spine towards Pune, and a northern spine towards Surat. Down south, growth spillovers of Bangalore and Chennai are expected to be connected in a decade’s time – to form a continuous urban corridor.

A view of Udaipur. Credit: Pixabay

A quarter-century of market-led economic growth had profoundly changed the economic geography of India. Growth is being concentrated around certain urban clusters and corridors, stretching not just municipal limits, but state boundaries as well. A McKinsey study had projected that by 49 urban clusters, with metro-cities at their core, would account for 77% of India’s incremental GDP between 2012 and 2025.

Balanced regional development cannot happen without strong state-led planning. Meanwhile, the competitive advantages of the mega-urban regions are hard to ignore in the global age. For firms and businesses, mega-urban regions offer agglomeration advantages in terms of economies of scale, supply-chain logistics, market access, skilled labour supply and knowledge transfer.

The Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region, spread over 39,000 square km and comprising Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou urban systems, had been pivotal to China’s growth story. Similarly, the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto conurbation was central to the post-war rise of Japan.

But to leverage the competitive advantages of such hyper cities, the issues of seamless mobility, forward planning and coordinated decision making are crucial at a regional scale.

Need for Centre-state coordination

Two takeaways emerge from the issues discussed above in the context of the National Urban Policy.

First, planning should be done at a regional scale and not constrained by administrative boundaries to effectively address bigger issues, such as rural-urban linkages or mobility in mega agglomerations. Apart from strengthening existing institutional mechanisms for regional planning such as District Planning Committee and Metropolitan Planning Committees, we also need to have state and national level spatial planning framework.

Second, state governments need to be taken on board. Urban development is a state subject under the constitution. The role of the Central government is primarily direction-setting. Therefore, for effective implementation of the urbanisation roadmap, the Centre should take the lead to sensitise states and encourage them to frame their own urban policies. The state policies – informed by their specific demographic and economic contexts – could then be plugged into the overarching national framework.

Sadly, however, at the present juncture, there is not much evidence of Centre-state collaboration on taking forward the development agenda.

So, the question remains, are we going to seize the opportunity or let our urban future drift?

Tathagata Chatterji is professor of urban management and governance at Xavier University Bhubaneswar. Souvanic Roy is professor of urban planning at IIEST Shibpur. Views expressed are personal.

How Indian Cities are Squeezing the People out of Public Spaces

Areas where people engaged as citizens are gradually being replaced by spaces of consumption, dividing our cities even more and shrinking the realm of public discourse.

The recent controversy over the disruption of namaz in several public places in Gurgaon raises questions about the rights of the people over public spaces and their utility in modern Indian cities.

Great cities across the world have historically been defined by the quality of their public spaces more than the architectural beauty of individual buildings. We have now come to terms with the Manhattan skyline devoid of the Twin Towers, but can we imagine New York without the hustle and bustle of Times Square? Or Delhi without people enjoying ice-cream on the India Gate lawns? Or, for that matter, Varanasi without its majestic river ghats? A city cannot be experienced without imbibing the publicness of it.

European cities, influenced by classical Greek and Roman urban design, often have charming paved plazas at the centre, surrounded by impressive public buildings. While large uncovered paved plazas are not suitable for India’s hot climate, neighbourhood chowks, bazaars and streets in Indian cities have for long been functioning as public spaces, where people gather not just to buy their daily necessities, but also to pick up the ‘gossip of the day’.

Egyptians attend an anti-military council protest at Tahrir Square in Cairo November 18, 2011. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih

The best public spaces in the world are multifunctional and multicultural, much like the river ghats of Varanasi. Here, tourists take selfies, young couples find anonymity in the crowd, the elderly savour the evening breeze, devotees experience salvation through the spectacle of sandhya-arati and chaiwallahs earn their livelihood.

The public realm is embedded in our vernacular urban fabric – where we encounter the ‘other’, the people who are different than ourselves. This diversity enriches our everyday experience of life.
Vibrant public spaces draw crowds from all walks of life and have also been vital platforms for political discourse since the ancient times. Greek Agoras and Roman Forums were places where discussions and debates were held. Political scientist John Parkinson, who extensively studied public spaces in 11 major cities across the world, notes that ‘safe’ and ‘accessible’ public spaces are vital for participatory democracy. As ‘physical sites’ of politics and legitimate protests, these are the places where rallies are held, dharnas and morchas are organised, and civil society activists light candles in protest.

A Left Front rally in Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground. Credit: PTI Files

Political communication has a ‘dramatic’ or ‘performative’ aspect, and public spaces are anchors that bring political actors and audience together. Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground, with the iconic Shaheed Minar as backdrop, is one such grand venue, as is Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. The tallest political leaders – from the Left, Right and Centre – have ‘performed’ here to a thunderous applause. At a more intimate, neighbourhood level, parks and street corners often take the shape of a stage for such performative political communication.

But, how relevant are such forms of communication in the age of social media, when people spend more time on Facebook rather than talk face-to-face?

Today, one can build a movement through WhatsApp, propagate it through Twitter and document it on Instagram. The Arab Spring movement of 2011 was mobilised through smart phones. “But they [angry Egyptians] still needed Tahrir Square” argues Parkinson, just as the angry Chinese students needed a Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Closer home, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s highly effective electoral campaign in 2014 buttresses the point. The BJP fully exploited the potential of social media for political communication. But that did not diminish the importance of ‘chai-pe-charcha’ in community spaces. Cyber space has stepped in to co-exist and complement public space, not to replace it, just as online shopping or shopping malls have not eroded neighbourhood kirana stores.

However, the moot point about public space is how it is constructed and controlled. This brings us back to the Gurgaon episode and its contradictions.

Without any discernible centre or visible urban structure, Gurgaon is a most unusual city – rather a motley collection of privately developed gated enclaves that stretch endlessly along the Delhi-Jaipur highway, separated from each other by old villages. It is a landscape of glaring inequalities between manicured private lawns and messy slums. The concept of public realm has been squeezed out of this privatopia.

For lakhs of those who live outside the gated enclaves of aspirational new India – the rural folks, whose villages have been engulfed by the galloping pace of urbanisation, or the new migrants trying to make ends meet through the informal economy of the millennium city – community life revolves around the leftover spaces between buildings.

Tamil Nadu farmers during their protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in April. Credit: PTI

Roads and pathways in such amorphous organic settlements are not just for motorists to drive past, but for trading, festivities and occasionally playing cricket. These are vibrant community spaces in the true sense of the term for people to congregate, deliberate and celebrate, as opposed to the sterile homogeneity of ‘people like us’ within the compound walls.

Tensions and conflicts in such in-between areas are, therefore, inevitable, but most of these are usually negotiated and settled within the community. The traditional Indian spirit of accommodation prevails. But, interventions by external vigilante groups to impose majoritarian will and forcibly deny prayer space to other communities weakens the neighbourly space relations, threatening to turn mixed neighbourhoods into urban ghettos.

It is, however, not sufficient to limit the discussion to the civic dysfunctionality of Gurgaon, or even to the motives of vigilante hoodlums to sow social discord at the behest of their political masters, without addressing the bigger issue of changing space relations in Indian cities.

There are two interrelated points here.

First, authoritarian state agencies are attempting to reduce the scope of civic protests in central areas, such as Jantar Mantar in Delhi or College Square in Kolkata. In the garb of public interest (to prevent noise pollution or traffic congestion), the state agencies are trying to dislocate public demonstrations, a lawful civic activity, from the spaces in the heart of cities to places of insignificance – away from the masses they seek to mobilise.

Second, the urban pattern in India in the neo-liberal era is getting more and more fragmented. The urban middle class is moving away from cities to gated communities on the outskirts. The ‘Gurgaon model’ of developer-driven consumerist urbanism is being actively replicated across the country. Devoid of accessible and pluralistic public spaces, this new urban pattern is dividing our cities more and more.

Social Scientist Richard Sennett attributes the gradual shrinking of public realm in neo-liberal cities to the fall of the public ‘man’. Spaces where people engaged as citizens are being replaced by spaces of consumption. Spaces of everyday political discourse are disappearing. Parallelly, there are growing attempts at place-making. The Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad and the Ganges (Hooghly) Riverfront in Kolkata are two such examples. Token beautification exercises – devoid of linkages with the larger urban fabric of the city – are being showcased as new public spaces.

The very idea of the urban public space as a forum for democratic deliberations, discussions and debates rests on the notion of acceptance of the ‘other’, pluralism, multiculturalism, and the rights of the people over the city. The decline of meaningful public spaces, therefore, weakens opportunities for participatory democracy.

Tathagata Chatterji is Professor of Urban Management and Governance at Xavier University Bhubaneswar. Souvanic Roy is Professor of Urban Planning at IIEST Shibpur. Views expressed are personal.