A New Book Explores Urbanisation in India and Its Different Facets

(The following is an excerpt from Changing Paradigms of Urbanisation: India and Beyond by Om Prakash Mathur, Visiting Senior Fellow at CSEP, published by Academic Foundation.)

The book, Changing Paradigms of Urbanisation: India and Beyond, is a collection of papers on urbanisation and its different facets authored by Om Prakash Mathur over the years 1983-2023. These years have witnessed worldwide and in India, extraordinarily important shifts in the way urbanisation has unfolded itself, in the way it has come to be understood and perceived, and in the way public policy responses have evolved to address the opportunities and challenges that urbanisation has led to. Urbanisation has emerged as one of the most powerful and immutable forces across the developing and developed countries. According to the United Nations (2019), there is no country that has registered a dip in the proportion of population living in the urban areas since the 1950s. 

The world has simultaneously come a long way in acknowledging the demographic and economic importance of urbanisation. The world’s urban population has risen from 1.5 billion in 1975 to 4.6 billion in 2023 and that of the less developed region from 816 million to 3.6 billion over the same years, at annual rates ranging between 1.3 percent and 5.8 percent. Another aspect of this shift relates to the links between urbanisation and economic growth. These links have been explicitly acknowledged and widely applied in measuring the economic importance of cities and urbanisation where the question is not whether cities are productive but how productive cities are. 

The papers in the book represent many of these shifts and challenges. 

On Urbanisation 

Urbanisation is one of the major transformations of the twentieth century. Parallel to the global trends in urbanisation and the fact that the world has already sailed through the demographic threshold of 50 percent with no evidence of any country having succeeded in arresting it, urbanisation in India has come to be seen  as given, evident, even irreversible. India’s urban system has, in recent decades, expanded in terms of the numbers and size of urban settlements and registered important shifts in the structure of the urban share of the country’s gross domestic product. It is complex in that it has registered high urban population growth under depressed economic conditions as indeed was the case in 1971-81, while low urban population growth rate has not proved to be an impediment  to high economic performance. Urban policy frameworks too have unfolded in ways that represent the temporality of the dynamics of urbanisation, focus moving from the development of small and intermediate-sized cities to slowing down the growth of large cities, to maximising agglomeration economies for stimulating growth. 

Is India’s Urbanisation a Demographic Transition or a Geographic Change? 

Is India in the midst of a demographic transition involving a shift of population from the rural to the urban areas, or a geographical change where settlements acquire an urban status upon meeting certain urban characteristics? The unprecedented rise in the number and populations of census towns during the 2001–11 decade, reversing the trends of the past three decades where the share of census towns in urban population increase dipped from 16.6 percent in 1971–81 to 12.6 percent in 1981–91 and further to 9.7 percent in the subsequent decade, with the share of rural-urban migration staying within a narrow range of 19.9-22.6 percent over these decades, has raised vital questions about the nature of India’s urbanisation. What has fuelled the emergence of census towns as a key factor in the country’s urbanisation process? In what way is their emergence linked with rural–urban migration and what implications does it have for the future of urbanisation and a host of other aspects like growth, governance, and finance? Has geography come to play a greater role in defining India’s urbanisation process? 

Asian Perspectives on Regional Planning 

Since the 1970s, Asia has seen a major socioeconomic transition of its economies. In parallel, Asian countries have experienced moderate to high growth rates of urban population. Irrespective of the level of urbanisation or the rate at which urban populations have risen, most Asian economies have pursued policies which aim at reducing primacy, such as deconcentration of population from large metropolitan areas, development of small and intermediate-sized cities and towns, and development of special - purpose regions such as export promotion zones. It has been done through interventions such as: development of counter-magnets for countering primacy; setting up of growth poles to develop backward regions; development of existing small and intermediate cities to provide rural-urban linkages and to absorb migrants that may otherwise go to larger cities; and metropolitan-regional planning for orderly development of the region. In fact, most of these are universally proclaimed goals in developing countries, regardless of whether the population is small or large. The unanimity of these goals as Harry Richardson points out, often reflects "imitation, and herd instinct rather than a rational response to analysis of the specific problems of each country". 

Governing Cities

The importance of urban governance has increased enormously in recent years. The explanation for its increasing importance is seen in a number of factors, the foremost being the broadening of the concept and meaning of governance in the context of cities. It is generally recognised that governance is not to be equated with the delivery of certain social goods such as water supply, conservancy, and sanitation services, street lighting, basic health, etc. It is a broader concept that involves the entire process of governing urban areas. It refers to the relationship of governments with society and other stakeholders. Governance refers to the transparency of the system and accountability to stakeholders by those to whom governance has been entrusted. The issue is: how can the future growth and development of cities be directed to fulfill these new norms? 

Decentralisation and Municipal Finance

Decentralisation and municipal empowerment are a long- term, dynamic, and ongoing process. They need a multi-pronged strategy aimed at moving away from generalised solutions to strategic, bold interventions, creating capacities and data bases, establishing interdependence between own revenues and transfers, introducing protocols on setting revenue-raising benchmarks, and focusing on output-based strategies. India’s decentralisation and municipal finance systems are in an experimental stage where many constituents are new and have no precedent. For municipalities to take on tasks envisioned for them, the sphere of experimentation needs to be simultaneously expanded to include ‘autonomy for municipalities’ (how much autonomy is optimal); ‘fiscal responsibility for municipalities’ (no transfer system can be sustained without minimum performance standards for municipalities); and ‘accountability for municipalities’ (the municipal space is burdened with parastatals, special-purpose vehicles, public-private joint ventures, franchises, ward committees, area sabhas, etc., all aiming to improve service delivery). 

Informality in Cities  

The developing countries have come to terms with the existence of the informal sector, as well as with the fact that it constitutes part of the solution to a multitude of urban problems rather than being a problem itself. The most important gain of this period is that countries have overcome the earlier prejudice to both the informal sector’s existence and its continuing growth and expansion. There is increasing recognition that the economic benefits of this sector, which contributes directly to urban employment and output, far outweigh its costs. The issue that now confronts governments of developing countries is not whether the informal sector exists—that is "now taken as empirically given," but rather what should be done to make it more efficient and productive and to integrate it into the mainstream of economic development processes. The questions are: where do the future actions lie? Is institutionalisation of this sector a prerequisite for its further growth? Are formal actions appropriate for a sector whose main strength lies in its informality?