Category Archives: Relevant Publications

The Urbanisation of Rural China

China Perspectives 2013/3, Special Feature

For the first time in history, more Chinese people now live in towns and cities than in rural villages. Reaching 51% in 2011, urbanisation in China is accelerating. Convinced that this holds the key to the country’s ongoing social and economic development, China’s leaders recently announced an urbanisation target of 70% (approximately 900 million people) by 2025. However, leaders including Premier Li Keqiang have emphasised that future urbanisation would be characterised not by an expansion of megacities (dushihua 都市花), but by growth in rural towns and small cities (chengzhenhua 城镇化). The Party is essentially seeking to take the cities to the rural populace rather than bring the rural populace to the cities. Following the policy announcement at the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, a group of national ministries has been tasked with developing guidelines for promoting the urbanisation of rural China.

Size matters

By R B Bhagat in infochange (full article here)

Size clearly matters in the hierarchy of urban agglomerations. Most programmes including JNNURM are directed at the big cities. Basic civic services including electricity, sanitation and clean drinking water for the poor in small cities and towns are abysmal, and hardly better than rural areas. The widening gap in income levels between rural and urban areas cannot be bridged without developing small cities and towns.

Exclusionary cities: The exodus that wasn’t

By Amitabh Kundu in infochange (full article here)

Yes, the urban population increased more in absolute terms during 2001-11 than rural population. But, no, this is not because distressed agricultural workers are pouring into cities. It’s because census activism has tripled the number of urban centres in Census 2011. In fact, exclusionary policies are discouraging the inflow of rural poor into the mega cities.

Transition towns

By Kalpana Sharma in infochange (full article here)

The 74th constitutional amendment has on paper devolved power to urban local bodies. But even a cursory look at small towns reveals that elected representatives have little knowledge of their powers or responsibilities, cannot read or frame budgets and fail to generate local resources for planned development. Many of these towns are still transitioning between large village and town, with even basic public services absent, particularly for the poor.

The challenges of urbanisation may be even greater in small towns

 

by Jayati Ghosh, The Guardian, Tuesday 2 October 2012

Global urbanisation has prompted a focus on megacities that overlooks the needs and vulnerabilities of smaller settlements.

Most of the policy discussion concerning global urbanisation has focused on megacities. And certainly, these huge and historically unprecedented agglomerations create a whole host of new requirements and vulnerabilities that have to be addressed creatively and equitably. But if we are too focused on this single issue, we may lose sight of another emerging problem likely to explode in the coming years.

Increases in urban population reflect three separate forces: the natural rise in population within urban areas; the migration of rural dwellers to urban areas; and, as settlements expand and become more densely populated, the reclassification of rural settlements as urban. All three forces have been at work to varying degrees. But where the third factor is significant, it creates a particular problem, because the administrative machinery for urban areas seldom exists for such settlements.

Slumdogs and small towns

By Kalpana Sharma in infochange, Urban India, April 2009

Little is known or written about the 2,000 small and medium towns of India. The one characteristic that defines them all, says this report from towns such as Madhubani, Jhunjhunu and Sehore, is the absence of planning. Many of these towns do not even possess an accurate town map. And up to a quarter of their population lives in slums.

In Madhubani town in North Bihar, the longest lines are outside one of the four ATM machines dispensing instant cash.  In Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, many people keep their own cows or buffaloes for milk because they do not trust the local milk supply.  In Narnaul, Haryana, there are dozens of beauty parlours and one of the women nominated to the municipal council is a trained beautician.  In all three, the most popular advertisement is for mobile phones.

 

India’s small towns – symbols of urban blight

By Kalpana Sharma in infochange, Urban India, October 2008

68% of India’s urban population lives not in the metros but in towns with population of less than 100,000, many of which get water for a few minutes once a week or every alternate day. No one even talks about the appalling absence of infrastructure in these towns Most of us have a stereotypical image of small-town India.  Pitted roads, piles of garbage, open drains, stagnant pools of water, overhead electric wires, long power-cuts, acute water shortage etc.

That image is now changing with the success stories from small towns that the media is celebrating.  So Bhiwani in Haryana is suddenly in the news for having produced Olympic medal winners and other towns are home to amazingly talented young people who win television reality shows.  Dozens of our cricket stars come from smaller towns and cities, bringing to them a touch of glamour that they have never seen before. Of late there is also a touch of notoriety attached to small towns with a place like Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, once known for being the home of distinguished writers and poets like Kaifi Azmi, now being given the ‘terror’ tag and Bhatkal in Karnataka being mentioned as the home of the ‘mastermind’ of the Indian Mujahideen.

Emerging Consumer Demand: Rise of the Small Town Indian

This White Paper from Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Nielsen India, titled Emerging Consumer Demand: Rise of the Small Town Indian (2012) takes a closer look at how the smaller Indian towns are leading the demand surge and shopping like metros. I believe, one of the inherent strength of the Indian economy – private consumption expenditure, will continue to remain the strongest pillar of the Indian growth story. Sustaining this consumption story is the rise of the small town consumer.

The Indian consumption landscape in the small towns is dramatically changing – higher disposable income, demographic dividend of a younger generation, heightened aspirations, increasing urbanization resulting in a growing number of nuclear families – all important and key factors leading this development.

Eight thousand towns, 630,000 villages, over eight million stores and 1.2 billion people! In such a diverse consumer universe, how do you measure demand, where is it strongest? North vs. South, the metros vs. Rural – the choices are endless. Nielsen has found that despite current inflationary environment, tier II and tier III towns are showing strong momentum with an improved demand appetite.

Rural-Urban Dynamics, poverty and smaller towns

Global Monitoring Report 2013:  Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

 Key message of the GMR 2013:

In the past two decades, developing countries have urbanized rapidly, with the number of people living in urban settlements rising from about 1.5 billion in 1990 to 3.6 billion (more than half of the world’s population) in 2011. The report finds that urban poverty rates are significantly lower than rural poverty rates and that urban populations have far better access to the basic public services, such as access to safe water and sanitation facilities, even though within urban areas asymmetries in access are large. If the forces of urbanization are not managed speedily and efficiently, slum growth can overwhelm city growth, exacerbate urban poverty, and derail MDG achievements. As the GMR points out, however, people are located along a continuous rural-urban spectrum, and large cities are not necessarily places where the urban poor are concentrated. Smaller towns matter greatly for urban poverty reduction and service delivery. GMR 2013 calls for an integrated strategy to better manage the planning – connecting – financing formula of urbanization.

Panchayati raj: Failing the urbanization test

Lack of decentralization means municipalities lack power, resources to meet rising aspirations of ‘middle’ India.

An article of Live Mint, Tue, Apr 30 2013, by  Elizabeth Roche  |  Liz Mathew   |  Shamsheer Yousaf.

“A corporation is difficult to deal with,” Hamid says. “There is a long procedure to get projects sanctioned. And then, you have to give bribes for projects that you want to undertake to various officials in the hierarchy. It’s only 35 paise out of every rupee that gets spent for the people and development, 65 paise goes as bribes. It is just a whole lot of trouble to be a part of the corporation.”
In contrast, a panchayat president is better empowered to do things for his people, says Hamid. “There is also a direct interface with the people, this is a very important position.”
Both Othakadai and Silaiman are listed as so-called census towns by the Tamil Nadu census commission website. By definition, they are populous areas—in between officially urban and rural India— where farming has been replaced by other professions or businesses as the main source of livelihood.
And Tamil Nadu is one among six states that have seen a proliferation of census towns, putting pressure on infrastructure and civic amenities. Other states where census towns have proliferated include West Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
“Tamil Nadu is most urbanized state in India, according to the 2011 census,” says Karen Coelho, assistant professor for urban governance and reforms at the Madras Institute for Development Studies. “With 44% urbanization, Tamil Nadu has beaten Maharashtra which was at the top in 2001.”

 

The devolution deficit

By KC Sivaramakrishnan (CPR)

The Indian Express, Wed May 01 2013

Why we need to revisit the 74th Amendment

The National Panchayati Raj Day to mark the enactment of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment was observed on April 24 with due ceremony but little hype. Whatever the reasons for the celebration, even those are not available for the 74th Amendment dealing with municipalities.

Power of the rurban

An article of  The Indian Express, Mon Apr 22 2013

The fast expanding grey area between India’s urban and rural segments — you could call it semi-rural or rurban — is increasingly determining the shape of India’s democracy as well as market economy. This aspirational segment has grown faster than you could imagine and the people here are consuming and voting robustly. The 2009 National Election Study by CSDS found that the much touted “urban voter apathy” was a misnomer in the semi-rural areas with urban characteristics. This segment not only recorded, on average, 10 per cent higher voting than metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore, it also saw higher voting than the rural constituencies.

Urbanisation beyond municipal boundaries

World Bank. 2013. Urbanization beyond Municipal Boundaries : Nurturing Metropolitan Economies and Connecting Peri-Urban Areas in India.

The report is organized into three chapters: chapter two looks at the pace and patterns of India’s urbanization, providing a 100-year perspective on demographic shifts and a 20-year perspective on the spatial distribution of jobs across India’s portfolio of settlements. The review is based on a careful, spatially detailed analysis of data from economic and demographic censuses, annual surveys of industry, national sample surveys, and special surveys of freight transport. This chapter provides diagnostics on whether Indian industry is adequately exploiting agglomeration economies and whether there are hints of specific barriers to the natural tendency of standardized industry to reshuffle from large metropolitan areas to smaller urban areas. Chapter three examines specific policy issues and investment bottlenecks that are curbing the pace and benefits of urbanization in India. The policy issues relate to land markets and housing, connectivity (within and between cities), and access to basic services. The purpose of this analysis is to unravel the specific distortions that may be preventing India from reaping the entire range of benefits of urbanization. Chapter four provides some options for policy reform, distilling lessons from relevant international experience. It provides options for establishing the ‘rules of the game’ that can define the workings of land and property markets as well as coordination of land use and infrastructure in cities. This chapter also provides a framework for policy makers to identify the role of regulatory and price reform in expanding infrastructure services and to make investments that enhance capacity.

Urban India 2011: Evidence Report

A report by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements

India’s urban transition, a once in history phenomenon, has the potential to shift the country’s social, environmental, political and economic trajectory – a transition to be reckoned with. IIHS originally produced this book for the India Urban Conference: Evidence and Experience (IUC 2011), a series of events designed to raise the salience of urban challenges and opportunities in the ongoing debate on India’s development. The Urban India 2011: Evidence also marks the initiation of a series of thematic Urban Atlases in collaboration with leading scholars and practitioners.