A major effort by the FAO to accelerate Indian agricultural growth in India had a story on rural-urban linkages that went largely unnoticed in the country. To set up the background, high economic growth has creates large demands for agricultural goodies. Unlike the one for white goods, this demand is fairly widespread. Rich people eat a lot more eggs and fruit than the poor, but the poor also eat eggs and fruit. A rich man?s consumption may go up from 40 to 50 eggs and a poor person?s from 15 to 19, but the growth rate is the same. FAO makes the fascinating point that India is more urbanised than it thinks and in fact has a wider spread of rural markets than other developing countries and regions. In terms of the Brazilian definition of urbanisation, where the entire district is counted as urban if it has an urban population exceeding a certain percentage, more than two-thirds of our country is urbanised. By the OECD?s even more wide-ranging definition, may be more than 90% of India is urbanised.
Many questions are now being asked of urban pessimists even within India. Last week, Gujarat announced a special ?urban? infrastructure package for 1,800 villages, many of these being so called ?large villages?. This gives me satisfaction as I have been arguing that the state has many large villages that are in fact towns even according to the Indian Census?s definition of an urban area. Census towns are non-statutory towns or rural areas that have a minimum population of 5,000, a population density of at least 400 persons per sq. km, and where 75% of the male working population is engaged in non-agricultural activity. These villages with a population of 11,27 lakhs, have not been declared towns because it takes time for our bureaucracy to declare a town a town. If they were included, Gujarat?s urban population went up by 5% rather than 2.87%.
This of course is not just a matter of numbers. In this period of global uncertainty, the more the growth potential we can garner at home the better off we will be. It is extremely likely that the rural urban continuum of small towns and villages will be much less affected by the global crisis as compared to the big metros. But we have to first recognise this phenomenon and then accelerate it.
Last week I was in Bhuj. I had been there decades ago, while walking the Sardar Sarovar canals. Later, I went only to Adipur and Maliya. What a lovely small town we have laid out in Bhuj. It would be a great small town anywhere in the world. Only, we just run down everything in India. I remember going to New Tehri and saying ?what a lovely place?, and then ducking before the NGOs got me.
As in New Tehri, the university in Bhuj has been delightfully designed by a Delhi architect. With its vast expanses, Kutch, like the cold desert in Mongolia or Ladakh, gives you a sense of getting closer to the gods. So does the university. It has only a few teachers, a colleague reminded me. I agreed that this was bad, but they will come through the decades, for narrow priorities don?t last forever. Buildings last and an uplifting one, melting into its natural environment and connecting with glass and open windows and doors rather than restricting with walls and closures, is important. As much as letting young ladies go to pubs, if they will.
A few years ago Sonia Gandhi sent me to China to chair an RGF delegation. I went to Kunming. They had spent billions of dollars on public infrastructure and the Kunming I saw in 1982 had changed dramatically. Agriculture was exploding, there were restricted access expressways, an irrigation system that worked and a lot else. The next two years look grim in any serious outlook from Delhi or Washington. But there are many possibilities out there. They are there for those who would build partnerships with the energy that abounds in India?s villages and small towns. Markets, communication infrastructure, bijli, tourism, agricultural value added services and artisanal goods, food, handicrafts and the works. We need to harvest them.
The author is a former union minister . These are his personal views. Email: yalagh@gmail.com