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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Stop blaming rural migration for urban ills: Study by Devika Banerji
-The Economic Times
 
Rapid urbanisation of villages and expansion of urban areas pose a more pressing challenge to Indian policymakers and administrators than migration of people from rural areas to the cities, a new report has said. 

"A commonly held perception is that explosive rural to urban migration is the primary cause for the state of India's cities. This is not borne out by evidence," says 'Urban India 2011- Evidence', released by the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Human Settlements. 

According to the report, the surge in the number of new towns and expansion of urban areas has added about 30 million to India's urban population over the past decade, higher than in any previous 10-year period. The figure is also more than a third higher than the 22 million people who have migrated from the rural to urban areas since 2001. 

While the contribution of migration has gone up to 24%, up from 20% in the previous decade, the rate of growth of urbanisation is much higher at 33%, up from 18.4%. Natural growth of urban population added the largest chunk of 40 million to the number of inhabitants in the urban areas, even as the decreasing birth rate reduced its share in the overall growth compared with the previous decade. 

The report notes that there is often a massive resistance to cling to the tag of rural areas, which attract a much larger share of welfare funds from the centre and escape higher taxation. This results in poor infrastructure development and administrative chaos, partly explaining why a large majority of urban poor continues to be concentrated in newly-developed small towns. 

Bigger cities, with a million-plus population, have a higher number of slums but account for just a fifth of the country's urban poor, the report says. "This does have obvious and possibly unfortunate consequences for urban governance, regional planning and the sustainability of India's cities," the report says. 

"These findings should have criticalimplications for national policies on urban reforms, particularly those targeting urban poverty, as most of urban expenditure is concentrated on bigger cities," said Isher Ahluwalia, eminent economist and chairman of a government-appointed high-level committee on urban infrastructure services. 

This committee had in April recommended scaling up urban development funding by at least 15% per annum in the 12th five-year plan (2011-17) to meet the challenges of rapid urbanisation. "This has become a political economy matter as the expenditure on rural areas is much higher than in urban areas," said Rajya Sabha member NK Singh, adding that this prevents smooth transformation of rural areas with increasingly urban needs. He said policymakers should also note that the increase in migration is marginal. 

Though the expenditure of rural areas is 20 times more than urban areas, Indira Rajaraman, member of the 13th Finance Commission, said the difference is far less in per capita terms. It is assumed that urban local bodies will be able to finance their expenditure through higher taxation, she said, which is why they receive less support from the government. 

The Census 2011, which reported the largest increase in new towns, also pointed to the movement of large villages into the grey zone of urban classification. 

The Census considers any settlement to be urban if the area has a municipality or a corporation, or if it has a population of 5,000 or above with a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre. Administrative recognition, however, lags in several cases due to political resistance.