Ministry Finally Discloses Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Committee Report

20 June 2016
Ministry Finally Discloses Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Committee Report
IN RESPONSE TO RIGHT TO INFORMATION (RTI) APPLICATION FILED BY CPR-NAMATI TEAM

 

The CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program has extensively worked on the Coastal Zone Regulation (CRZ) notification in India and was keen to understand the changes proposed by the Shailesh Nayak Committee, which reviewed the CRZ notification 2011. Despite the submission of the report, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) did not make it public, and Kanchi Kohli from the CPR-Namati team filed a Right to Information (RTI) application in February 2015 but the Ministry refused to share it on the grounds that the government had not approved it.

Finally, after 16 months of filing the RTI application, the MoEFCC has disclosed a copy of the ‘Report of the Committee to Review the Issues relating to the Coastal Regulation Zone, 2011‘ (from now on referred to as ‘the report’) to Kohli and the CPR-Namati team and file notings concerning the Committee.

  • The report can be accessed here.
  • The file notings can be accessed here.

This disclosure came after an order of the Information Commissioner Prof M Sridhar Acharyulu on 13.5.2016, which stated that the ministry “cannot invent a new defence or exemption such as ‘the report is under submission’, ‘file is pending consideration’ and ‘unless approved it cannot be given’, etc, which are not available under RTI Act, 2005, such an illegal refusal will amount to denial of information which would invite penal proceedings under Section 20 of RTI Act, 2005.”

The report has important recommendations on the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification 2011. It has the framework for conservation of coastal and local livelihoods through clauses of land use change, proactive conservation initiatives, and mapping of the coastal zone. Key recommendations from the 110 page report are highlighted below:

  • Proposes a ‘Conservation, Protection and Management Framework for CRZ 1 areas’ that are considered to be ecologically fragile area and with dense mangroves, coral reefs, nesting grounds etc. An important tool recommended is the declaration of Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESAs) across coastal areas.
  • Proposes the devolution of powers to state and union territory governments along with local authorities for CRZ II (built up cities and towns), CRZ III (rural areas) and CRZ IV (12 nautical miles into the sea) areas. These are for activities not covered under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006.
  • Recommends that buildings can be constructed behind existing structures and roads in CRZ II areas as per existing Town and Country Planning norms.
  • Divides CRZ III areas as ‘Densely Populated Rural Areas’ and ‘Rural Areas’ with lesser regulation for the former through the reduction of the ‘no development zone’ to 50 metres.
  • Promotes housing infrastructure and slum redevelopment activities in CRZ II and tourism in CRZ III areas based on town and country planning norms and other state regulations.
  • Recommends temporary tourism facilities in the No Development Zone (NDZ). Further if the NDZ falls on the landward side of a national or state highway, it recommends permitting construction of permanent tourism facilities.
  • Recommends the reclamation of the sea bed in CRZ IV area for ‘ports and harbour, fisheries-related activities and other infrastructure required in the larger public interest such as bridges, sealinks on stilts, roads, important national installations related to coastal security, tourism’.

The report is the outcome of a six-member committee set up in June 2014, under the Chairmanship of Dr Shailesh Nayak, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences. The purpose of the committee was to examine issues of coastal states related and also ‘the errors or inconsistencies and procedural simplification in the said Notification’.

The committee members had extensive meetings with the governments of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala and also invited representatives of state and union territory governments for a meeting in New Delhi. While the meeting details are provided in the report, the individual representations made by the states before the committee can be found here. No consultations were carried with coastal communities, fishing unions or private parties as per the information disclosed in the report. The report is yet to be made available to the public by the ministry through its website.

The Information Commissioner observed that this report is the roadmap for the amendments proposed by the Ministry. Since January 2015 when the report was submitted, the Ministry has made several amendments to the notification and five of these are related to allowing more constructions in environmentally sensitive coastal zones, laying of new coastal roads and monuments in CRZ areas. While the piecemeal amendments have sought public comment, this roadmap itself has been strictly kept out of public view. 

The timeline for the Shailesh Nayak report and RTI disclosure is provided below:

  • 17.6.2014: Constitution of six member Shailesh Nayak Committee
  • January 2015: Report submitted to MoEFCC as per disclosure by MoEFCC representative during CIC hearing
  • 22.2.2015: RTI application by Kanchi Kohli seeking copy of report and file notings
  • 18.3.2015: Refusal of information by Ministry
  • 1.4.2015 and 20.4.2015: First Appeals Filed before Ministry (9.5.2015 response from MoEFCC regarding change of first appellate officer, no action on first appeal)
  • 8.11.2015: Second Appeal before CIC
  • 3.5.2016: Hearing of the Central Information Commission
  • 13.5.2016: Order of Central Information Commission
  • 16.6.2016: Information dispatched from MoEFCC

To know more about the CPR-Namati program, its dedicated page can be accessed here. In 2015, the CPR-Namati team released the findings of a three-year-long study titled CZMAs and Coastal Environments: Two Decades of Regulating Land Use Change on India’s Coastline. The study analysed the functioning of Coastal Zone Management Authorities (CZMA) and twenty years of implementation of CRZ Notification in the country.

Ministry seeks public comments on new draft CRZ Notification

18 May 2018
Ministry seeks public comments on new draft CRZ Notification
LAST DATE OF SUBMISSION OF COMMENTS IS 17 JUNE 2018

 

A new draft Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 2018 has been put out for public comments by the Ministry. The last date for sending comments is 17 June 2018. The Ministry states that the draft is based on the CRZ review conducted by the Shailesh Nayak Committee in 2014. The recommendations and full report of the Shailesh Nayak Committee can be accessed here. The CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program has prepared a detailed comparative analysis between the CRZ Notification 2011, recommendations of the Shailesh Nayak Committee and the Draft CRZ Notification, 2018 and its implications. This can be accessed here.

CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program sent its comments to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on the Draft CRZ Notification, 2018, which can be accessed here.

Find below links to all ten blogs under CPR’s blog series on CRZ:

Ministry seeks public comments on new draft forest policy

9 April 2018
Ministry seeks public comments on new draft forest policy
LAST DATE OF SUBMISSION OF COMMENTS IS 14 APRIL 2018

 

A new draft forest policy, 2018 has been put out for public comments by the Ministry. The last date for sending comments is 14 April 2018. In an op-ed on the draft policy published on DNA India, the authors mentioned an earlier draft prepared by IIFM. The draft was uploaded on the Ministry’s website and then removed following a clarification by the Ministry. Since the authors have received the 2016 document on email for comments, they have been uploaded here and here.

Manju Menon, Shibani Ghosh and Kanchi Kohli sent their comments to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on the Draft National Forest Policy 2018, which can be accessed here.

MNREGS Reaches its 10th Year

4 February 2016
MNREGS Reaches its 10th Year
CPR SHARES PAST WORK

 

At the 10th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGs) CPR brings together its past work and analyses on the subject.

The Accountability Initiative (AI) at CPR, in particular, has produced a series of reports and articles on the Scheme, detailed below:

In 2013, Shylashri Shankar at CPR published a book titled Batting Corruption: Has NREGA Reached India’s Rural Poor? She has also written a piece on Killing MNREGA slowly in The Indian Express.

Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017: A New Paradigm for Groundwater Regulation

8 March 2019
Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017: A New Paradigm for Groundwater Regulation
JOURNAL ARTICLE BY PHILIPPE CULLET

The Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017 drafted by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation provides a new template that states can use to adopt legislation capable of addressing the fast-increasing groundwater crisis faced by many states. This Bill follows on an earlier model bill drafted in 1970 and updated several times until 2005 on which the dozen of existing groundwater acts are based. This 1970 template is unsuited to the present needs of a country where groundwater is now the primary source of drinking water and irrigation. In particular, it fails to provide for local-level regulation of what is often known as the most local source of water and fails to provide for conservation measures at aquifer level. The 2017 Bill integrates legal developments having taking place since the 1970s, such as the decentralization reforms kick-started in the 1990s, the recognition of water as a fundamental right and its recognition as a public trust. In doing so, it provides new bases for regulating groundwater as a public resource and to take measures at aquifer level, something that is crucial to address ongoing overexploitation and falling water tables.

Access the article here.

Modi in China

19 May 2015
Modi in China
A POST-VISIT ANALYSIS

 

CPR faculty share a rounded analysis of Modi’s visit to China in the media, presented below.

  • Shyam Saran shares his expertise on China, commenting on the ‘border issue’ on Headlines Today with Karan Thapar, and on the ‘trust deficit’ between the two countries on NDTV.
  • Brahma Chellaney writes in Project Syndicate that Modi’s tour to China highlights that ‘the issues that divide the demographic titans remain formidable’.
  • Srinath Raghavan, on the other hand, writes for NDTV that the visit laid a ‘solid foundation on which the two sides can now build’.

Modi’s Visit to China

14 May 2015
Modi’s Visit to China
ANALYSIS IN THE RUN-UP

 

Narendra Modi’s visit to China is under close scrutiny. CPR faculty provide insightful analysis on different aspects:

  • Srinath Raghavan in the Economic and Political Weekly deconstructs Modi’s opportunity in China—on how the prime minister has the political capital to push for a settlement of the border dispute, thus strengthening bilateral ties and expanding India’s political space on multilateral stages.
  • Shyam Saran in this piece in The Wire explores the “out of the box” solution to the long-standing border dispute between India and China.
  • In The New Indian Express, Bharat Karnad writes that Modi’s visit to China will be marred by bad geostrategics and even worse policy.
  • Embedding Indo-Chinese relations historically Sanjaya Baru in The Hindu talks about how relations between the two countries will be shaped by whether China wishes to be a global hegemon or “truly believes in the creation of a multipolar world”

Monitoring Open Discharge-free India: A Comprehensive Sanitation Matrix

20 July 2017
Monitoring Open Discharge-free India: A Comprehensive Sanitation Matrix
RESEARCH REPORT CO-AUTHORED BY KIMBERLY M NORONHA AND SHUBHAGATO DASGUPTA

 

This research report is the product of an effort to develop an assessment framework or matrix to measure sanitation outcomes in India. It traces the international policy instruments on Open Defecation (Free) [OD (F)], the genealogy of the term, and then compares India’s policy environment with the other top contributors to global open defecation in 2012 (Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan). It outlines the challenges in terms of defining OD(F) and using existing survey instruments available to India to develop such a framework.

The report presents a proposal for a matrix to measure sanitation outcomes in India covering nine sanitation outcomes, making a case for the full sanitation chain, especially open discharge free (ODF2) environs. Finally, it evaluates the emerging monitoring framework of Goal six of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and suggests the consideration of this framework as part of the on-going efforts globally to evolve a monitoring framework for sanitation.

It was released at the Networking Event at the UN-Habitat III: Think Small, Go Big.

The nine sanitation outcomes with indicators for rural and urban settlements, that measure critical results indicative of processes in place for successful and sustainable sanitation service delivery in urban and rural areas, include:

  • Defecation is not visible;
  • Solid waste is safely managed;
  • Residents have access to a toilet in residential and/or public spaces;
  • Residents and floating population are using toilets in residential and/or public places;
  • Human faecal and liquid waste is safely treated;
  • Solid waste and faecal waste is safely handled;;
  • Human settlements (cities and villages) are not water-logged;
  • Hygienic behaviour is adopted;
  • Women access safe menstrual hygiene management.

The matrix is flexible in that, it allows for changes in the choice and measurement of indicators for comparison within states and across the country. It also allows researchers to look at habitations of different sizes, densities and geographical characteristics and provide comparisons beyond just governance boundaries (of urban and rural).

The matrix also combines multiple sources of data and methodologies beyond the traditional questionnaire survey methodology; this allows for observation of characteristics of the settlement to be factored into the determination of outcomes.

Further, it goes beyond the presence of infrastructure and covers issues of equity of access, access of sanitation to all members of the household within and outside the premises of the house, and issues of health (disease burden as a result of poor sanitation), hygiene, and menstrual hygiene management

More details of the conference can be accessed from here.

The full research report can be accessed here.

More priorities, more problems? Decision-making with multiple energy, development and climate objectives

28 November 2018
More priorities, more problems? Decision-making with multiple energy, development and climate objectives
NEW OPEN-ACCESS JOURNAL ARTICLE CO-AUTHORED BY ANKIT BHARDWAJ, MADHURA JOSHI, RADHIKA KHOSLA, AND NAVROZ K DUBASH IN ‘ENERGY RESEARCH & SOCIAL SCIENCE’.

 

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement pose new conceptual challenges for energy decision makers by compelling them to consider the implications of their choices for development and climate mitigation objectives. However, they have relatively few tools to pragmatically consider these implications.

This paper reviews how multi-criteria decision approaches (MCDA) are used by decision makers globally to consider multiple social and environmental objectives. Based on a collation of 167 studies, the authors find that multi-criteria approaches can be used by policy makers to:

  • distil a finite set of objectives from those of a large number of actors. This process is political, and objectives are often aligned with vested interests or institutional incentives;
  • build qualitative and quantitative evidence to capture the implications of energy choices across economic, environmental, social and political metrics; and
  • identify and manage synergies and trade-offs between energy, social and environmental objectives, and in turn, make explicit the political implications of choices for different actors.

As the figure above shows, most of the applications of MCDA have been used in academic settings and in the Global North. As pressures to implement international pledges such as the SDGs and Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement grow, decision makers may increasingly seek productive ways to engage these political contexts, and make them tractable. The paper argues for a mainstreaming of such a multi-criteria and deliberative approaches for energy policy decisions in developing countries where trade-offs between energy, development and climate mitigation are more contentious while recognizing the data, capacity and transparency requirements of the process.

The complete open-access paper in Energy Research and Social Science can be found here.

Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy

Image Source: News18
7 June 2019
Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy
AS PART OF ‘POLICY CHALLENGES – 2019-2024: THE BIG POLICY QUESTIONS FOR THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND POSSIBLE PATHWAYS’

 

By Mukta Naik

On the cusp of its demographic dividend,1 India seeks to boost economic growth by transitioning large numbers of its working age population out of low productivity agricultural work, which currently absorbs 44% of the country’s workforce.2 While farm productivity is vital, urbanization remains a key opportunity for large-scale employment transitions to the relatively productive non-farm sector. Moreover, cities have the potential to be ‘engines of economic growth’ for national economies, powered by an increase in productivity and innovation that emerges from the clustering of firms and labour, and tacit information spillovers between them.3

Key Urban Challenges

To leverage the urban opportunity, India needs to address three significant challenges: how to move people, how to broaden the scope of urbanization, and how to improve the quality of urbanization.

Migration mitigates poverty, yet barriers to long-term migration persist. Internal migrants constitute about 28.3% of India’s workforce. Another estimated 40-100 million short-term migrants do not permanently move their residence, but power critical sectors of the industry including agriculture, manufacturing and construction.4 Moreover, short-term migration is a key avenue for rural households to diversify their income and access employment in more urbanized and developed regions; in this, migration is a counterbalance to regional imbalances in the country. Worryingly, the urban wage premium exists only for well-educated migrants. For less educated rural migrants in the city, the wage premium kicks in only when they find regular employment; until then they remain casual workers likely to move through rural and urban locations without putting down roots.5

Policy documents have acknowledged the Constitutional guarantee for free movement within India and recognized that the unfettered movement of human capital to where it is required is fundamental to India’s economic development.6 Yet, labour mobility remains a neglected area of public policy. Migrants are often unable to access social protection, including access to subsidized food and housing. They face political exclusion because there is no system that enables the participation of absentee migrant voters in elections. Moreover, inter-state migrants from socially backward categories stand to lose access to affirmative action provisions because SC/ST lists are prepared by states. State-level domicile provisions continue to keep migrants out of higher education and formal employment. Moving people, therefore, requires attention to economy, society and institutional design.

India’s urbanization is dispersed, but metros get most of the attention. Urban policy in India since the mid-2000s has focused on transforming metropolitan areas – large urban spaces that sprawl across districts and incorporate multiple municipal (and rural) entities – into economic powerhouses. This has reflected in the Government of India’s urban schemes over time. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) exhibited a clear metropolitan bias.7 Recent schemes such as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Smart Cities Mission have also favoured metros and million-plus cities.

Policymakers have barely paid attention to the dispersed spatial nature of India’s urbanization. It is driven not by the large-scale migration of villagers to the metropolis, as is popularly imagined, but by the natural growth of large city populations, and the in situ transition of large and dense villages into census towns through demographic and economic changes.8 This trend, which is likely to continue,9 indicates that India’s urban vision need not be limited to the larger cities. In fact, the growth of small towns beyond the economics of large agglomerations is a key emerging trend in India that needs to be understood and valorized.10 Given the scale, diversity and spatial spread of urbanization processes in India, it might be entirely feasible to create hundreds of economic powerhouses in multiple locations that can trigger economic mobility for millions and reduce regional inequalities.

Cities are messy and exclusionary, and urbanization processes are top-down. Indian urbanization is caught in a paradoxical situation where, despite the attempts to address infrastructure and service gaps in larger cities, they remain increasingly unliveable as well as exclusionary.11 For residents, the economic opportunity represented by the city is countered by disincentives like higher costs of food and housing, bad air quality, inefficient transport and inadequate basic services. In urban policy, however, the messiness is perennially attributed to in-migration, slums and poverty; its perceived antidote is a planning regime that seeks to indiscriminately transpose Chandigarh-like order – replete with grids and single land-use zooming – on cities and even transitional rural spaces. This imagination does not recognize the diversity of spaces that make up urban India, nor does it acknowledge the need for bottom-up efforts to build housing, provide services and organize transport.

Driven from the top, urban development schemes have shaped cities in particular ways; there has been no serious effort to decentralize power to urban local bodies – as mandated by the 74th Constitutional Amendment – or equip cities with adequate numbers of urban managers and technocrats. Cities are struggling with providing basic services and raising revenue. Instead of being handled by the directly elected government that runs the municipal corporation, critical planning functions related to land use and zoning; infrastructure and design interventions that can respond to local needs for public space, improved transport and safe streets; and economic functions related to industry and employment are carried out by state government-run institutions (development authorities, industrial development corporations and transport corporations). This makes it hard for governments to respond to localized problems, or tap into community initiatives.

Policy Recommendations 

India needs an integrated approach to urban policy, which recognizes the diversity of urban spaces in India, focuses on strengthening city governance systems, and is migrant-friendly.

Multiply urban growth engines. That India is moving towards a spatially dispersed urban system is good news, as it offers an opportunity to intervene in places that are yet to replicate the mistakes of large cities. We need to replace the imagination of transforming Mumbai into Shanghai – an onerous task – with a mission to transform hundreds of small cities across India, say in the size range of 100,000-600,000 people, into economic powerhouses. We must draw confidence from the successes of such cities the world over, which have been hotbeds of innovation and transformation.

The government must reorient central and state government schemes to include small cities, as a means of signalling their inclusion into India’s urban growth narrative. Not only will funding go much further in a small city, if designed in a non-prescriptive way schemes could allow for solutions to emerge from the ground up, thereby encouraging entrepreneurial energies and public institutions to collaborate. Contrary to expectations, these abound in small cities across India. In Odisha, for example, a state government scheme to grant titles to slum dwellers is leveraging the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) to set off a mini construction boom in small towns. In Kishangarh, Rajasthan – a city of 150,000 people – local business elite have leveraged infrastructur (such as a new airport, a private logistics park and a dedicated rail freight corridor) to position the city as a global centre for processing domestic and imported marble and granite, generating work for both migrants and locals.

A focus on small cities also helps villagers, given half of India’s rural-urban migration is to smaller cities. Placed at the mobility cusp, investments in small cities can go much further than basic infrastructure to create quality jobs and develop skills, both for rural and urban workers; they can also build infrastructure that boosts quality of life (transport systems, street lighting and public spaces).12 With over half of India’s industries located in what is currently classified as rural,13 policies related to industrial development, skill development and labour must also focus on transitional ‘rurban’ spaces. This would call for an integrated response to urban and rural development that recognizes spatial diversity and responds to the wide variety of settlements across the country.

Un-think rigid planning regimes, empower local governments. The rigid master plans of our cities – and not all of them have plans – have been ineffective in strategically coordinating service provision and market forces to sustain economic growth. The governance and management of metropolitan areas might require a sui generis approach,14 given the complexities of their problems and the multiplicity of governance actors and institutions. But here too, solutions that are locally incubated must be emulated. For instance, the secret to Kolkata’s reliable, affordable and well-connected auto rickshaw system, is localized legislation to circumvent the vagaries of central laws and the involvement of representatives of rickshaw unions in key decisions like route planning.15 Certainly, a serious attempt to devolve power to urban local bodies and activate district planning committees is a necessary prerequisite to planned urbanization.

Beyond the logics of planning, a plethora of bottom-up initiatives must find representation in urban reform strategies, with the key objective of making cities efficient and pleasant places to live, work and socialize. Some of these initiatives deliver lasting solutions, such as the public library in Panaji, Goa, that is open seven days a week to all residents to read, study and interact, or South Canara’s privately operated bus system that transports thousands every day within and between the towns and villages of the coastal region. In other cases, they narrate a story of continuing struggle. In resettlement colonies like Bhalswa in Delhi, residents have been instrumental in bringing in services and amenities through protests, negotiations and legal representations with elected officials and bureaucrats over 15 years. Their resilience and persistence eventually resulted in partially mitigating the deep failures of the resettlement policy.

Therefore, instead of viewing the presence of informal settlements purely as failures of planning, Indian cities must leverage the vast amounts of investments residents have already made through auto-construction by extending basic services to informal settlements. Further, cities must amend statutory planning documents to include a variety of tenure typologies that promote mixed-use, mixed-income neighbourhoods and include rental housing. Similarly, in order to find context-specific solutions to house the homeless, ensure spaces of livelihood for street vendors, treat faecal sludge from septic tanks, and transport women safely to places of work, cities need to un-think the rigid plan and partner with communities, civil society and entrepreneurs to find workable models.

Enable labour mobility and improve governance of migration. Finally, a focus on the portability of social protection could be key to knocking down barriers for migration, enabling rural workers to reduce risks as they find regular employment and social acceptance in the city. Immediately, the government has the opportunity to amend legislations so as to facilitate the registration of migrant construction workers in schemes under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act. This programme has an unspent pool of nearly INR 200 billion for social benefits of this highly mobile and vulnerable group.16 Similarly, delinking individuals from household ration cards and a digital recordkeeping system would enable migrants to access Public Distribution System benefits wherever they might be. Experiments with smart card systems are already underway, with the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), but need strengthening and improvement. Overall, ramping up universalized social protection in education and health, including critical interventions like Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), is likely to incentivize long-term migration to cities over time.17

Key Takeaways

With the thrust of urban change occurring in small towns and densifying villages, the incoming government must seize the opportunity of incubating a large number of economic powerhouses in dispersed locations. A reorienting of investments towards small cities, a push towards decentralization, and keen attention to bottom-up context-specific solutions will provide pathways out of rigid planning and governance models that have not delivered. As cities become better places to live and work, dismantling barriers to migration will become imperative for the equitable distribution of economic opportunities and benefits.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:


 1 See pages 30-34 in the Economic Survey 2016-17 (New Delhi: Economic Division, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2017).
 2 Modelled International Labour Organization estimate for 2018,  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.agr.empl.zs.
 3 G. Duranton, ‘Cities: Engines of Growth and Prosperity for Developing Countries?’, Working paper no. 12 (Washington D.C.: Commission on Growth and Development, 2008); World Bank, ed., ‘Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1991).
 4 P. Deshingkar and S. Akter, Migration and Human Development in India (2009); R. Srivastava, ‘Labour Migration in India: Recent Trends, Patterns and Policy Issues’, Indian Journal of Labour Economics 54(3) (2011): 411-440.
 5 P. Mukhopadhyay and M. Naik, ‘Moving from Principle to Practice’, in People on the Move: Advancing the Discourse on Migration & Jobs (JustJobs Network, 2018).
 6 MoHUA, ‘Report of the Working Group on Migration’ (New Delhi: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, 2017).
 7 S. Khan, The Other JNNURM : What Does It Mean for Small Towns in India?, Working Paper No. 4 (CPR: 2014).
 8 Pradhan 2013
 9 Roy and Pradhan predict that in Census 2021, the share of India’s urban population will continue to grow beyond municipal limits in census towns, both under the influence of metros and also in more localized forms away from metros.
10 E. Denis and M.H. Zerah, Subaltern Urbanisation in India: An introduction to the Dynamics of Ordinary Towns (New Delhi: Springer, 2017).
11 Indian cities rank poorly on the Mercer Quality of Living Survey 2019. See https://www.mercer.com/newsroom/2019-quality-of-living-survey.html; A. Kundu, and L. Ray Saraswati, ‘Migration and Exclusionary Urbanisation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 47(26 & 27) (2017): 219-227.
12 M. Naik and G. Randolph, ‘Migration Junctions in India and Indonesia: Re-imagining Places, Re-orienting Policy, Policy brief (JustJobs Network and Centre for Policy Research, 2018).
13 E. Ghani, A.G. Goswami and W.R. Kerr, ‘Is India’s Manufacturing Sector Moving Away from Cities?’ (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012).
14 See Partha Mukhopadhyay and Mukta Naik’s op-ed titled ‘For equitable growth, India must unthink the urban’, Hindustan Times, 17 December 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/for-equitable-growth-india-must-….
15 Arora et al., ‘Integrating Intermediate Public Transport Within Transport Regulation in a Megacity: A Kolkata Case Study’ (New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research, 2016).
16 S.N. Roy, Manish and M. Naik, ‘Migrants in Construction Work: Evaluating their Welfare Framework’ (2017).
17 Mukhopadhyay and Naik, ‘Moving from Principle to Practice’.