CITYZEN. The journey to urban landscapes

In one of the rare moments when panellists are actually allowed to make an argument on national television, the founder of Infosys, NR Narayana Murthy, argued that the experience of other countries teaches us that the movement from the rural to the urban was inevitable. His argument found immediate endorsement from the minister of state for finance, Jayant Sinha.

What both of them chose to gloss over was the huge social costs of these transitions. There was no mention of the many thousand deaths due to disease caused by the horrific living conditions during the industrial revolution, the near wiping out of the native Indian in the US, or the millions of lives lost in the process of Stalinisation in the former Soviet Union. Do the leading lights of Indian industry and the best educated representatives of the Centre really believe that a democratic India will be able to bear such costs?

It is possible that these two major voices of modernising India were making no more than an academic point. Since cultivated land has not really grown in India since the 1960s there are obvious limits to how rapidly, and how much, agriculture can grow. If the GDP growth rates are to reach the numbers that are being sold to the public, workers have to be moved out of agriculture to industry and services. But ignoring the process through which this transition occurs has serious consequences for policy. Indeed, it could explain the misdirection of urban policy under the UPA government, a policy that the current government has largely continued in all but nomenclature.

The argument being put forward by Murthy and Sinha has probably been best captured in a model by the Nobel prize-winning economist, Arthur Lewis. As productivity in industry (and services) increases, these activities will be able to offer higher real wages. Since agriculture cannot match this increase in productivity and wages, labour will move from agriculture to industry and services. As a rural non-agricultural economy is assumed to be impossible, this would mean a movement from the rural to the urban.

Smooth as this process may be in the abstract world economists prefer to inhabit, the real world places substantial hurdles along the way, particularly in India. As Indian cities have globalised they have to compete with low-cost economies elsewhere in the world. This limits the nominal wages they are willing to pay. At the same time, real estate prices have made it impossible for the poor to live in cities other than in near industrial revolution conditions. Moreover, at least a part of the costs of the expensive infrastructure governments tend to fancy are also pushed on to the poor. This can be done by increasing indirect taxes on products the poor consume or by charging fees such as tolls paid by public transport. The combination of limited increases in nominal wages and rising costs brings down real wages.

If the true magnitude of this crisis can still be ignored it is largely due to democratic processes. The much maligned food subsidy and the MGNREGS help prevent starvation in rural areas in even bad rainfall years. This acts as an effective safety net for workers moving to cities. They know they can return when the city turns against them. And the city can turn against them in multiple ways. People from the NorthEast evacuated Bengaluru in tens of thousands over a few days a couple of years ago when there were rumours they were becoming the target of communal attacks. This did not prevent them from returning to the city when things calmed down.

This movement from the rural to the urban and back can take a more permanent pattern when the motives are economic. Given the relative costs of living, the poor are forced to earn in the cities and spend in their villages. Workers from Bihar, for instance, may go to Mumbai for a few months every year to earn, but would be able to build their long-term assets, such as houses, only back in their villages. This creates a permanent process of temporary migration with the resultant social costs.

This process has its implications for urbanisation as well. As workers move out to work, their villages become non-agricultural. And as their population grows along with the density of their living areas, many of these villages become census towns. Such a decentralised process of urbanisation does not find much space in an urban policy that is preoccupied with modern cities of the kind that have ‘inevitably’ evolved in the West. Ignored by the government and public discourse, these little towns are prone to becoming political hotspots that can be easily mobilised by generating anger against one social group or the other.

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