The making of a city

The urban challenge in India is usually addressed in policy circles by focusing on cities alone.

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) began by selecting cities that were believed to be important enough to require additional resources.

In the process, the rural backdrop against which urbanisation is taking place has been largely ignored.

Apart from the problems this creates for our understanding of rural India, it severely limits our response to the crisis facing our cities.

A sharp focus on cities alone may be acceptable in the developed world where the process of urbanisation has stabilised, often at least a century ago, and the rural areas account for a small share of the population. In this relatively unchanging rural-urban equation there are few new effects that rural developments have on cities.

In contrast, the process of urbanisation in India is still far from complete. Rural land is being transformed into urban spaces across the country.

Census data tell us there is a steady, if not very rapid, migration from rural areas into the urban. And this does not include the temporary migration that fails to meet the Census requirement of having been in the city for six months.

The whys of migration

This process of urbanisation, both through migration and the transformation of land, is not independent of the change in rural areas. Indeed, the nature of this change affects the urban challenge in several ways.

The most obvious of these influences is the type of change in rural areas that causes the migration to urban centres. A part of this migration is caused by economic and social distress in the village.

Individuals and families that are forced out of the village by poverty come to the city seeking whatever space they can find. More often than not, this leads to the development of slums in the city.

An equally important, but often less recognised, feature is that of those who leave the village due to education. This is not just those who seek education in the cities and then continue to live there.

Education can also cause migration lower down the learning ladder. The child of an agricultural labourer who has managed to reach high school often believes it is now below his or her status to accept manual labour.

Such youngsters then move to urban centres seeking skilled employment at a level that is above the poverty line, even if not by much.

The demands this migration makes on the city, including that for housing, are not the same as those who are willing to live in slums.

What is less obvious, but is now gaining recognition, is that the nature of land ownership in rural areas can also influence the road these areas take to becoming urban centres.

Land ownership

In a thesis recently defended at Harvard University, Sai Balakrishnan has revealed the working of this process.

In areas around the highways in Maharashtra that had a history of large landowners setting up agricultural cooperatives that small landowners felt inclined to join, a similar cooperative-led process was extended to the creation of new urban centres.

This process could even be bureaucracy-led in areas where bureaucrats had played a role in the effective functioning of the agrarian system.

In contrast, in areas around Bangalore that had agriculture based on relatively small land holdings, the same pattern extended to urbanisation as well. There was a tendency among the landholders to try to develop their land individually.

This led to a large number of real estate initiatives of varying sizes that have proved difficult to control. The breaching of norms has been so widespread that the State government periodically considers converting the illegal into the legal, though this would have disastrous consequences for urban planning.

The diversity of the rural causes that are pushing people towards urban centres is reflected in the substantial variation in the urban challenges faced by different cities.

Migration due to extreme poverty generates intense population pressure at the lower economic end of the city. This can be seen not just in the metropolises but also in the smaller towns which are already under an economic strain.

The migration to cities of those educated to varying levels generates, among other things, a rapidly growing demand for land.

Since these groups can only find space outside the city centre, land prices at the periphery of our growing cities tend to shoot up much faster than that of land in the city centre.

A meaningful urban strategy must then take into account that part of the diversity of our cities that is caused by the variation in the nature of rural change. It could be argued that the JNNURM takes care of diversity by getting each city to make its own plan. But city plans rarely take into account the rural processes that affect the character of the city. In order to do so effectively we may well require a shift from an urban policy to a policy of urbanisation.

(The author is Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.)

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