the harappans were city dweller know their city planned
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This section of the Pragati Manifesto lays out how to plan for our urban future. Read the other pieces here.
In the run up to the 2019 national elections in India, the conversation is dominated by concerns over agricultural distress. This is no doubt a crucial issue, but given the declining state of urban infrastructure and service delivery, one wonders why urban distress isn’t a larger political issue.
Over the years, there has been persistent policy neglect of our cities. Some of this stems from the post-Independence narrative that India lives in her villages. Even with the introduction of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and the Smart Cities Mission, financing and policy attention remain disproportionately skewed to rural areas.
Official estimates uphold this narrative. India defines urban areas using two official definitions – the statutory definition and the Census definition, which are determined using different thresholds. According to the statutory definition, India is 26% urban. By the Census definition, India is 31% urban. It is important to note that only statutorily notified cities have a municipal government. Census towns – that is, settlements recognised by the Census but not by their state government as urban – are governed by panchayats. In a country with our population, this 5% gap represents 55 million people (approximately the population of South Africa) that live in dense-urban like settlements but have a local government with no mandate to provide basic services, such as fire safety and sewage lines.
There is no global definition of what constitutes an urban area. But there is now ample evidence to show that if one uses alternate definitions of urban, we would get very different outcomes. At IDFC Institute, we picked between various global definitions and used two of the most common ones: using Mexico’s definition for instance, India is 65% urban; using Ghana’s definition, it is 47% urban. Others have undertaken a similar exercise. The World Bank’s Agglomeration Index, which uses a mix of factors to determine how urban an area is, put India at over 50% urban in 2001.
The key point is not that there is a singular way to measure urbanisation, but that the metrics we use could be obscuring the reality beneath our eyes. Hence, while there is no absolute number that can be attributed to India’s current urban areas, it is evident that India is certainly more urban than we think.
Why does this matter? For one, a large share of the population (at over 50% urban this could be ~250 million people) is forced to live without urban basic services and is grappling with inadequate public service delivery. The slums and informal settlements in most of our cities are direct outcomes of failing to cater to migration at an earlier point in time. Even while we close our eyes to the reality of urban growth, cities and peri-urban areas are continuing to grow, leading to urban sprawl that goes well beyond administrative boundaries. This growth is haphazard and unregulated. Consequently, the quality of the urban fabric – measured by the share of land in streets, access to open space, formally subdivided plots and so on – declines. Down the line, it is both difficult and expensive to retrofit this growth with wider streets and development infrastructure. For instance, in Kozhikode in Kerala, between 1991 and 2014, the share of narrow <4 metre roads rose by 18% but the share of wider roads has remained the same or reduced. Road infrastructure has not been able to keep up with urban growth, leaving the city with very little space for mobility.
Urban realities matter because, above all, cities are the drivers of growth. Cities allow for economies of scale and agglomeration, which in turn enable greater productivity and growth. According to the World Bank, globally, over 80% of GDP comes from cities. Urbanisation and growth have been correlated over time. Yet, more recently, there is evidence of urban.
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