Rapid urbanization is placing significant stress on the budgets of India's local governments and more must be done to improve their financial status to enable them to fund infrastructure projects and delivery of essential services. To address the issue, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has agreed to a request from the Government of India to support a study to assess the state of India's local government finances and identify key...

THE ongoing negotiations with the World Bank provide an opportunity to urban policymakers to reinvent the present form of JNNURM (called v1.0). Thus far JNNURM v1.0 has focused on upgrading macro-level dimensions of city’s environment, ignoring the social and economic diversity (e.g., mixed uses and building types) prevailing in urban areas. The top-down urban ‘renewal’ model underlying the present version of JNNURM is largely founded on the planning practices of...

The Centre, for the first time, has undertaken a nation-wide survey of slums to profile urban household poverty and the nature of jobs held by those living on society's fringes. The survey will profile slum-dwellers by caste and religion "for properly allocating development schemes, policy-making, project formulation and implementation, and monitoring", according to an official at the Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation (Hupa). The survey, being conducted under Hupa,...

What’s more important to a hungry child? Food now, or future environmental worries? I know I’m on sticky ground here, but it would be hypocritical not to ask the question when the world is mourning the death of one person who, literally, helped save millions in the developing world — in our part of it, especially — from hunger. In his lifetime, Norman Borlaug was hailed as the father of...

To help the poor, there must be one agreed way of identifying them first. If perceptions differ regarding who is poor and, thus, how many poor people there are, it will be difficult to select the right institutional measures and the amount of money to be spent on poverty eradication programmes. The differences between the findings of the N.C. Saxena report and and the Planning Commission’s assessment of the below-the-poverty-line...