Urbanisation is possibly the most visible change happening in the country as India leapfrogs through growth rates. But that doesn?t make it easy for Aromar Revi to make the policymakers understand and put in place schemes to make the process congruent with poverty eradication and employment generation programmes. The director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements is planning to fill that gap by training a cadre of town administrators and researchers through his planned National Innovation University that will specialise on urban issues, he tell Subhomoy Bhattacharjee. An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Revi is willing to talk animatedly on this topic for hours, articulately and logically.
You have talked about the missing elements in urbanisation. In any case, we seem to have lurched into the present phase without much thinking before hand…
I wouldn?t say so. Lets go back a bit to the 1980s. The current PM was then the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission when urbanisation in India began coming up. Rajiv Gandhi, as the Prime Minister, picked up the gauntlet thereafter. There was a national commission on urbanisation under Charles Correa, so there was a good deal of ferment around these issues, but people tend to forget those things. Around the same time, there was the UN declaration making 1987 the international year of the homeless. Politically then, it did seem it would be very advantageous to look at housing and urbanisation together. Yet, since then, the late 1980s till about the 2000s, there was a complete hiatus till JNNURM came along. I guess here, too, there was a political reason.
In the VP Singh regime, deputy PM Devi Lal began talking about the fact that rural India was getting less than 50% of GDP. The point that came up was that rural India was getting sort of short-changed. The discourse shifted along those lines to rural issues and then Narasimha Rao in his time was busy addressing the question of poor employment growth. The focus stayed on in the political and, therefore, policy imagination for a long time.
There were a few chief ministers who picked up the urban theme but, unfortunately for them and the country, they were punished in the hustings. Chandrababu Naidu and, to some extent, Digvijay Singh. So the political class took its lessons from the mandate that the country resided in the rural areas. This was also pushed by exercises like the delimitation of constituencies, for instance, which is heavily biased towards a rural-based enumeration.
But till the last decade, that is 2000 onwards, the pace of urbanisation was slow in India…
Yes, our urban structure had not changed for a very long time?even stretching back into history. That structure was based on agro-surplus and trade. But in Europe and Latin America, that model changed in the 20th century. There came a period of hyper-urbanisation. But, in our imagination, if we want to get there, we notice that the reality does not correspond to it. So, there is a big problem here. We have about 6 lakh-odd villages and only about 8,000 urban centres. Now, obviously the villages are not going to vanish, though as our studies show, the small village is disappearing.
Even then, while the numbers will change, the order of magnitude is going to remain the same. The question is, therefore, is this under development or this is an opportunity?
When you pose it that way, that?s interesting…
This may be a tremendous opportunity that we have not realised. The urban sprawl that is opening up could be the base to develop a national market, but with a decentralised structure of production and consumption. The US, too, does not have this advantage, which we could build upon instead. Neither the EU nor China has this advantage. Why? Because if we look at these three big regions, the urban sprawl is mostly coastal. Incidentally, this opportunity opening up is not just for India, but also for countries like Bangladesh. About half of our population?even as far ahead as in 2050?will be living in these disaggregated areas. After that, the numbers start declining in rural areas. So, is this a constraint now or an advantage to be harnessed?
There are two elements to this expansion. Most urban centres will be far smaller than the megacity concept we often carry in our minds, and harnessing that advantage could mean achieving several national goals at once. As a starting point, the decentralised national market model will work extremely well to decide about issues like water and energy consumption. You will have to move from a highly centralised system of production to a decentralised model.
You talked about the disaggregated urban model. How does that work?
If we break up the habitation map of India, you will see there are about 200 million people who are living in settlements that range from above 5,000 people to about a lakh. These people are then basically living in urban areas, but are classified as rural. These numbers, incidentally, are not public yet as part of the census figures. But this category has gone up in the last 60 years from 5% of the population to over 17%. The reason they are classified as rural is because most of the male workers here work in agro-allied sectors. But if you look at the buildings, the living styles and the aspirations, those are urban.
Let me explain a bit more. At Independence, about a quarter of our population lived in hamlets with about 500 or less people. Those in settlements with a population of less than 5,000 accounted for 40% of the population?the village republic of India. Now this category is less than a tenth of the population, where the panchayati raj story plays out. The areas above this threshold is the opportunity zone. If you start building infrastructure here, you create a distinct impact on the urban development graph, but more than that you create a more stronger footprint on poverty reduction. Both urban and rural. Also on employment.
These centres have to be manufacturing driven, they are not fit areas for service-led growth. What does that mean? It means you must have better transport facilities to these centres, a better and more reliable electricity system for manufacturing to take off and, of course, housing. The provision of these services is not just a quality of life issue, but to open up manufacturing opportunities. Looking at the new technology space too, it is apparent that these are distributed models, like solar and water stuff which fits these areas perfectly.
So what are the challenges?
The challenge here is building up institutional capacity, which is not available. The administration has to be in place, the technologies have to be in place. Money is not a problem. We are not a capital constrained economy. Even with a third of JNNURM money, you could do a lot more in these places. The question is one of directing the private sector to invest into the right place like these. Remember the growth of the population is happening here too, but at this point with these centres it is easy to do the right things. Fixing water and fixing housing standards are all so manageable here, and not rocket science, and there is local capability available to do those, provided the institutions are rapidly set up to deliver those.
The first set of guys who do this will reap political dividends. It requires a sharp set of political minds to realise the opportunity building up, but its happening in places like Western UP, Haryana or parts of Tamil Nadu, for example.
But it?s not a question of doing this or that. Not do JNNURM or this?
Certainly not. Unfortunately we are now spending all of JNNURM money on 65 cities that are at the top, letting the smaller centres get derelict. So the political question we are trying to open up is, look guys, this is great and important, but let?s think of widening the challenge. Growth in big cities is slowing down as the economies of scale are starting to fall off. Many of the sub-markets are not working there?the land market is in a mess, also the labour market, essentially a lot of externalities are creeping in. But at the same time, I will agree that these megacities are still under-invested. That?s the frightening story that comes from these places.
But again, to fix one, don?t look at the problems of the large cities and the small ones as one or the other types. Do both. The big cities provide 40% of the national GDP. So you can?t not invest in these places. But, at the same time, they will not be creating jobs.
