Urban India: could small be beautiful?
Do you know the population of Asansol? Or Meerut? Or, for that matter, Jabalpur, Dhanbad or Rajkot? These are all million-plus cities. That makes each one bigger than world-famous centres like Stockholm, Frankfurt or San Francisco.
India is teeming with cities and towns. Over 5,000 of them as per the 2001 Census are spread across the 600 districts of the country. There is a website with a composite image of the world's night-skies, called "Earth lights" (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=1438). The brighter spots show the urban centres, with their higher power usage. For instance, America has blazing lights across its entire eastern corridor, indicating the urban saturation on that coast. While this is as expected, what is surprising is the even light distribution in India. The constellation of India's towns and cities are spread out remarkably evenly across the entire country.
This is because the spotlight so far has been on mega cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. And although we have started to see a shift to the second-tier cities, even these are still mostly the familiar names. But there is enormous potential in towns that are below the radar of the top thirty cities in the country.
The website http://www.mongabay.com/cities_pop_03.htm ranks the world's cities by population, and it glows with Indian gems. For instance, Jaunpur, Nagercoil, Kakinada and Muzaffarpur are all towns with populations between two and three lakh, and thriving.
These cities are growing outside the pale of the public spotlight, fuelled by a quiet energy. They represent a potent force that could shape India's urban landscape in many ways: first, to release the increasingly unbearable burden on the country's mega cities; second, to act as the flywheels of a distributed and diversified economic model; third, as the lynchpins of a national rural-urban partnership programme built on a hub-and-spoke strategy that links each town to its rural hinterland. These are competitive advantages that few countries have: vibrant cities can't be built overnight.
However, they need help. Our smaller cities and towns have been pretty much on their own so far, growing chaotically, with little municipal governmental capacity, urban planning or infrastructure. A few more years of this, and the potentially virtuous cycle can implode.
Fortunately, there seems to be timely help, with the Jawarharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). While much of the focus of the mission has been on the top 63 cities-called the Mission Cities-there is a sister programme called UIDSSMT (Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns). UIDSSMT is focussed on the 4000-odd towns and cities that house 58 per cent of India's 280 million urban population. Importantly, it provides 80 per cent financial support for basic urban infrastructure creation: water supply, roads, parking, drainage, solid waste management, sewerage and so on.
Most government flagship programmes start with large allocations, but leave sizable dollops of unutilised funds at the end of each year. UIDSSMT has started off like a rabbit. From its inception in December 2005, the programme has met with tearaway demand from urban bodies. Last year, while the initial budgetary allocation was Rs 700 crore, this had to be raised by an additional Rs 500 crore to meet demand. This year, over 50 per cent of the budgeted sum of Rs 900 crore has been disbursed in the first quarter itself. "We have been overwhelmed by the demand," said M Rajamani, JNNURM Director in the Ministry of Urban Development, as he explained the programme's intent, "We started UIDSSMT because we wanted to make sure that we didn't leave the smaller towns behind. Clearly, we have struck a chord."
There is no mistaking the interest. States are queuing up to submit projects on all the permissible sectors. As one example, Rs 47 crore was sanctioned to improve the civic conditions of Hamirpur, Mandi and Dharamshala towns of Himachal Pradesh. Hamirpur would be using its money for repairs and strengthening of the drainage system, prevention of soil erosion, development of solid waste management system and re-development of old city areas of the town.
Hundreds of cities across the country are getting similar support. By the end of July 2007, total assistance amounting to Rs 1,728 crore had been released to 329 projects in 269 towns in 16 states. But with the money, there is also another interesting outcome: there is a growing awareness of the challenges these cities are facing.
For instance, there is precious little by way of skills in these municipalities, with few technical staff and less money. The danger is that state governments-in their eagerness to deploy the new-found funds-establish special development authorities, or have state-run institutions take up the running of the cities. This will debilitate the small urban bodies, placing them permanently under the yoke of state supervision. What is really required is a balanced and pragmatic approach to build appropriate infrastructure through innovative means, while simultaneously investing in a sustained effort to build municipalities' own capacities. In the long run, city governments will have to be the ones defining their cities' destinies.
We seem to be waking up to the potential of our smaller towns at the right time. If we get it right for a change, we might-just might-have discovered one area where we don't have to fix a problem after the situation has gotten irreversibly bad. The economy will ensure that India's urban clusters continue to thrive. The challenge for our policy makers is to stay on mission mode, so that these cities provide decent quality of life for everyone: sensible planning, good infrastructure, acceptable services.
(Ramesh Ramanathan is the founder of Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based NGO focussed on public governance, and national technical adviser for JNNURM)
