For smart cities of another kind

As the focus of urban policy shifts from the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) to Smart Cities, the discussion still tends to ignore the regional dimension.

There is some talk of the emerging approach providing a greater role for states, but there is little explicit recognition of a regional pattern that is becoming increasingly obvious: the growth in urbanisation has tended to be concentrated in states to the south and west of the country.

States to the north and east, with a few notable exceptions, are noticeably less urban. And this disparity could well have accentuated a dynamic that is a major, if less noticed, challenge in Indian urbanisation.

Economists have long treated the process of urbanisation as a simple one of migration from a collapsing village economy to a booming urban one. In India, this would involve migration over considerable distances. States to the south and the west of the country have tended to grow more rapidly and often place a greater emphasis on welfare, thereby becoming attractive destinations of migrant workers.

At the same time states to the north and west often grow too slowly to provide comparable welfare schemes, even if they were inclined to do so. These states then become the sources of migrant labour.

The potential for large-scale migration from one part of the country to another has, however, not been fully realised. Despite the share of agriculture in GDP dropping rapidly, the rate of urbanisation has only grown at a sedate pace, falling far behind that of Brazil and China. And the impediments to large-scale migration have emerged from both urban and rural sources.

At one end, cities have not been particularly welcoming. The costs of living in the city, particularly housing costs, have developed into a barrier for those seeking to move out of villages. And if those migrating from across the country overcome this economic barrier by living in slums, they have to deal with the denial of social acceptance by local communities.

At the other end, political compulsions have ensured that state governments do their bit, with varying degrees of success, to ease conditions in villages. And agrarian systems that allow for the entire family to remain underemployed in agriculture, can increase the resistance to migrate.

Adding to the resistance to migrate across a large and culturally diverse country is the absence of security for migrants. The potential for ethnic violence is something migrants have to come to terms with. In 2012, residents in Bangalore from the northeast of India were threatened with violence.

Since there was no real incident, most other citizens of the city did not pay much attention to these threats. But there was an exodus back to their villages. These social and economic impediments to migration have their effects on urbanisation patterns. The size of villages begins to grow.

Studies have shown the emergence of large numbers of settlements with populations over 10,000. They play a prominent role in the increase in urbanisation seen in the 2011 Census. And this is an underestimation of the problem.

When these 10,000+ settlements have few employment options other than being grossly under-employed in agriculture, they continue to be classified as villages.

This has sometimes led to demands to drop the requirement for settlements to be predominantly non-agricultural to be classified as urban.

But this is essentially an issue of nomenclature. The real challenge is to find work for those who find migration to large cities daunting. Agriculture cannot support an increasing number of persons, especially when its share in national income is declining so rapidly.

The search then has to be for non-agricultural employment. And achieving this through low-skill jobs is made difficult by the fact that the end products have to compete with global goods and services that are available locally, even in remote parts of the country.

The challenge, then, is to create production networks that will link this multitude of small settlements to large manufacturing or services chains.

This seemingly impossible task would become just a little less difficult if it were possible to create dispersed urban centres that could act as local growth engines. Improving mobility between these nearby settlements could then help the emergence of a growth centre without dramatically altering the patterns of residence.

The growth centres would then be Smart Cities in a different, but much more relevant, sense.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore