It has been reported that during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, the Government of India plans to establish 2,000 PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas) projects spread all over the country.
Considering how dynamic Mr Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Development, is, that programme will probably happen.
However, what his Ministry can do is only a pale imitation of what the ideal PURA project ought to be.
That is neither the Minister's fault nor a failure of his officials. PURA cannot happen because the Ministry of Rural Development doesn't have the remit to develop rural areas as a whole; its authority is so severely truncated that even with the best will on earth it can only touch on the fringe of rural development but cannot develop rural areas fully the way the concept PURA envisages.
ESSENCE OF PURA
PURA is a project that will install in villages all the services that a town with a population of fifty to hundred thousand is expected to offer. The accompanying figure illustrates a radar map of twelve of them. The Rural development Ministry is so severely handicapped that it can barely touch a few of them, and that too, only minimally, and not of a quality that modern towns should have.
The culture in our government has several flaws: Firstly, it prescribes in minute detail what a project should be; that top-down approach doesn't work. Secondly, there is next to no periodic inspection to check that the projects are maintained properly. Thirdly, all rural development projects are perforce assumed to be inferior to similar urban ones.
Not surprisingly, villages are dwindling. The latest Census reports that, for the first time, urban population grew faster than the rural one. It is also a fact that our villages — all villages all over the globe — are too small to support commercially the twelve types of services that they should offer.
As a remedy for small size, I suggest that rural development should be designed for a cluster of villages with a total population of at least 50,000 — large enough to offer successfully all twelve services. In that case, affordable, high-quality mass transport interconnecting all the villages in the cluster becomes crucial.
APPLY 80-20 RULE
Ideally, transport should be free. Applying the 80-20 rule (the top half spends 80 per cent and the bottom half only 20 per cent), half the population could be offered seats and pay 80 per cent of the costs and the bottom half may have only standing space but pay only 20 per cent of the costs.
The problem is that the Ministry of Rural Development doesn't have the authority to organise transport systems.
Also, standards should be the same in villages as they ought to be in cities. Then, as explained in my previous article (Business Line, December 17, 2011), roads should be for through traffic only, while streets should be designed for easy access by pedestrians (and vehicles) to property on either side.
For instance, there is, in Uttar Pradesh, a 70-km-long beautiful road bypassing the cities of Meerut and Muzaffarnagar. Unfortunately, it isn't isolated from houses and businesses on either side. It will not take long for it to become a congested street. We will then need a bypass road to bypass the bypass road! In fact, this bypass road bypasses a bypass road built barely a few years ago.
SAY NO TO RESTRICTION
Sir Alfred Tripp, a former Police Commissioner of London, wrote forty years ago, “Never have a restriction where a construction will do.” Hence, I suggest that all inter-village roads should be wide enough for through traffic and have at least 2.5-m-high compound walls on either side. Likewise, all new streets should be at least 15 m wide.
How may this be done? I suggest that NABARD, the ministry's own bank, offer term loans for at least twenty years at very low interest rates of, say, 1 per cent or so. Similar loans may be offered for local water harvesting and for sanitary services. The Ministry may be permitted to offer similar low-cost loans for schools and hospitals — but only to the extent they obey the 80-20 rule.
Under the same restriction, it may offer loans for real-estate developers too. If the richest city in the country, namely Delhi, can offer such loans for its Metro, there is no reason why our villagers shouldn't get a similar benefit.
INSPECTORATE
All this will work only when the system is regularly inspected. PURA should, therefore, have an inspectorate that will cut off interest subsidy the moment the rules are violated, and will be restored only after the system obeys the rules. The Ministry may go even further: offer low-interest loans for all investments, even purely commercial ones, in the PURA area — to the extent their employees reside in areas where houses obey the 80-20 rule in streets of approved design.
Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas will fructify only when the Ministry ensures roads and streets of correct design, supports mass transport of good quality at a price the rural poor can afford, and insists on local water harvesting and local recycling of all waste. It would do well to support schools, hospitals and real-estate projects to the extent they obey the 80-20 rule.
It would be ideal if even commercial projects are supported to the extent their staff reside in areas where houses conform to the 80-20 rule.
Can Minister Jairam Ramesh do so? Let us hope he can.