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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Urbanisation in India slow, messy, hidden: World Bank -Subodh Varma

Urbanisation in India slow, messy, hidden: World Bank -Subodh Varma

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published Published on Sep 25, 2015   modified Modified on Sep 25, 2015
-The Times of India

India and her neighbors are going through a tortuous process of urbanization - slow, messy and partly hidden. This is seen in severe problems of livability and congestion, making cities unattractive for rural migrants. As a result, whatever benefits urban agglomerations could have offered in terms of economic advance are getting diluted. This is the dire analysis of a 200-page World Bank report on urbanization in South Asia, released on Thursday.

The report has some suggestions on how to set this right. Chief among them is more money for infrastructure. The report estimates that between 2010 and 2050, urban India's population will increase by about 497 million, going by present growth trends. To accommodate this additional population, nearly $600 billion (at 2004 prices) will be needed just to provide adequate water, sanitation and roads, the report suggests.

That's about Rs 40 lakh crore for forty years or about Rs 1 lakh crore per year, at current exchange rates. This does not include housing, electricity, transportation, education or health, to name a few essential requirements for a decent life. If one includes these, the costs may easily double. Going by current trends, at least a third of this gigantic amount would have to be raised by local bodies.

The World Bank argues in this report that "urbanization leads to concentration of economic activity, improves productivity and spurs job creation, specifically in manufacturing and services." This has the "potential to transform ... economies to join the ranks of richer nations in both prosperity and livability," it says.

Over 54% of the world's population now lives in urban areas, creating 80% of global GDP, consuming two-thirds of global energy and accounting for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to World Bank data not included in this report. Nearly a billion urban dwellers are poor and deprived of decent housing and basic services.

The report has some interesting insights on the growth of Indian cities. One is that the physical space occupied by cities has growing faster than the population. This 'messy' nature of sub-continental urbanization was revealed in satellite analysis of night lights, with urban areas growing by more than 5% per year compared to population growth of under 2.5% per year. This means low density sprawls at the peripheries. Night lights data also shows that multi-city agglomerations of two or more 100,000+ cities had increased from 37 in 1999 to 45 in 2010 in India.

The 'hidden' nature of Indian urbanization is something TOI has reported while analyzing Census 2011 data. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of census towns shot up from 1,362 to 3,894 due to reclassification. This contributed to nearly 30% of the increase in urban population. However, many of these census towns are still categorized as rural for all other purposes.

The World Bank report also points out that urban population growth is not driven by rural to urban migration as is commonly thought. It says that 44% of the urban population growth that India experienced between 2001 and 2011 was due to natural increase and 29.5% to the reclassification of rural settlements into census towns.

India's largest metropolitan centers (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad) saw a 16% loss in manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2005 within 10 km of their city centers. On the other hand, job growth in their immediate peripheries increased by almost 12%.

The report says that urban areas in India and her neighbors are suffering from "three fundamental urban governance deficits—an empowerment deficit, a resource deficit, and an accountability deficit." Policy makers also need to foster connectivity and planning, fix land and housing deficiencies, and plan for resilience to disaster and the effects of climate change. But the report omits any planning for control of greenhouse gas emissions.


The Times of India, 25 September, 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Urbanisation-in-India-slow-messy-hidden-World-Bank/articleshow/49098010.cms


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