Author: cprindia

 

At least half of Delhi’s residents are estimated to be living in informal settlements, including jhuggi jhopri clusters, resettlement colonies, and unauthorised colonies. However, there is little assessment of their day-to-day experiences and interaction with state agencies.

The Cities of Delhi project at CPR addresses this critical need through its research, and, in particular, researcher Shahana Sheikh engaged in the public debate surrounding regularisation of unauthorised colonies in the lead-up to the Delhi election. Please find below a summary of this historical media outreach:

An op-ed on the lack of transparency in the regularisation of unauthorised colonies in Delhi.
Bringing in the policy perspective during a heated debate on NDTV Prime Time discussion on Delhi’s unregularised colonies.
Discussing multiple aspects of policies related to regularisation of unauthorised colonies in an interview with Ravish Kumar
Speaking on the ambiguities in the regularisation process of Delhi’s unauthorised colonies during an in-depth coverage of Kathputli Colony in Delhi.
With the aim of informing policy, the Cities of Delhi project will disseminate its findings during a two-day conference called ‘Urban Transformations in India’. For full details, visit the dedicated page and read an overview of the project findings in this report.

Listen to the 31st episode of the CPR podcast, ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Patrick Heller (Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University) and Yamini Aiyar (President and Chief Executive, CPR).

ABOUT THE SERIES

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was recently passed in both houses of the Indian parliament, triggering large-scale protests across the country. What does the act mean for the future of Indian democracy? How do we understand the on-going protests and what are some of the political, economic and social implications of this movement?

In this mini-series curated by the CPR, we unpack these questions and shed light on what the next few months can have in store.

ABOUT THE EPISODE

The passage of the CAA led to agitations across the country. Since December 15, thousands of students, activists and ordinary people are out on the streets every day in every city. Latin American countries including Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and most recently Colombia have experienced turmoil too. What are the parallels we can draw between the two regions? What do these protests say about the state of democracy across the world? And what are some of the lessons we can learn about peoples’ movements? In this episode, Yamini Aiyar speaks with Patrick Heller who sheds light on the subject.

Watch the full video (above) of the public lecture by David Armitage where he discusses the subject of his new book, ‘Civil Wars: A History in Ideas’. A well-respected historian, he is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University,

Armitage begins the lecture, discussing how our age has normatively been referred to as ‘a long peace’ in terms of inter-state conflict, describing the 70 years since World War II, where we are said to have allegedly ‘won the war on war’ for the time-being.

He goes on to cite examples from the last few years of about 40 armed conflicts from Afghanistan to Yemen, excluding individual acts of terrorism, insurgency, and other forms of asymmetrical warfare, and talks about how, in the midst of this fragile ‘peace’, we are actually still at war.

This paper, authored as part of the New America US-India Public Interest Technologies Fellowship 2019, examines the privacy implications of drones in civilian airspaces. Though a technology with significant benefits, drones can also carry out extensive snooping and surveillance. As India transitions to a regulatory ecosystem supportive of drone technology, it is imperative that the attention of policy makers be directed to the various privacy harms that lie in store.

Here, the different kinds of harms are mapped into two: traditional privacy challenges arising from a spatial invasion by drones into private spaces, and big data risks on account of the business models that the drone industry has paved the path for. Dealing with the first category of risks, the paper argues that serious criminal enforcement, along the lines of what some States in the United States have pursued, is imperative to safeguard the private domain from the prying eyes of third parties. It also points out serious gaps in Indian constitutional jurisprudence when it comes to structural interventions like drone surveillance, and recommends an overall assessment of the impact on privacy baseline from such technologies when the judiciary evaluates their legality against the touchstone of the fundamental right to privacy. On the second kind of risk, the paper argues for privacy dashboards that help citizens evaluate the purpose of drone operations and assess whether equipments retrofitted alongside the drone are truly required to fulfil these purposes or merely meant to gather unrestricted amount of personal and community data.

The full working paper can be accessed here.

By Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash

The Big Challenge
Air pollution levels are unsafe across the country, all-year round. While pollution levels spike to dangerously high levels during the winter in north India, those in several parts of the country are poor or worse for large parts of the year. High pollution levels are not restricted to cities; several industrial areas along with rural areas across the Indo-Gangetic plain are also polluted. There are several kinds of pollutants in the air: particulate matter, carbon monoxide, ozone, oxides of nitrogen and sulphur. Fine particulates (PM2.5) form a useful proxy indicator for air pollution. The population-weighted annual average concentration of PM2.5 across the country, estimated using satellite data, was 91 microgram/m3 in 2017 – more than twice the national standards.1

Air pollution is a public health emergency. The health impacts of poor air quality are staggering and of growing concern as we discover the full range and degree of its effects with new research. Air pollution is estimated to reduce the average life expectancy of a child born in India by 2.6 years.2 In 2017, air pollution is estimated to have contributed to one in eight deaths in India.3 Cardio-respiratory diseases and lung cancer in adults, and acute lower respiratory infections in children, are the more commonly known impacts of air pollution. In addition, new research indicates a much wider range of health impacts of air pollution such as on birth weight, child growth, obesity and bladder cancer. There is growing evidence on the adverse impacts of pollution on cognitive abilities in children.

Multiple sources contribute at different regional scales. Industries, power plants, vehicles, waste burning, road and construction dust, and household sources are significant sources of air pollutions. At the national level, household burning of polluting fuels for cooking and heating purposes form the single largest contributor to average PM2.5 exposure (in addition to the exposure to PM2.5 within these households themselves).4 Industries and power plants that burn coal are the second and third largest sources of exposure at the national level. Within cities, other sources like transportation, construction dust and waste burning play an important role. Because of these different geographical scales of influence, pollution control measures need to target different sources at appropriate levels. These different sources and scales make the role of the central government critical in framing policy at regional and national scales, coordinating implementation across states, and providing necessary financial and technical assistance.

The Existing Policy Framework
The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in January 2019, looms large over the newly elected government’s policy landscape. The NCAP identified 102 non-attainment cities – which have particulate matter levels that exceed the annual standards – and set a reduction target of 20-30% by 2024. However, in its approach, the NCAP is a status quo-its document, which adheres to city-specific templates from the past, and wholly misses addressing governance gaps. It reinforces India’s policy response to air pollution, which has largely been reactive and overly reliant on administrative solutions. The existing regulatory design has proved to be entirely inadequate to meet the scale of the problem, and the monitoring and enforcement capacity of government agencies (such as the pollution control boards) is insufficient, especially for dispersed sources of pollution like vehicles, stubble and waste burning. An effective air pollution control strategy must break away from the status quo, and instead strategically prioritize key, implementable actions.

Air pollution reduction needs greater commitment from the executive. So far, pollution control has largely been driven by the judiciary. The new government should assume leadership in crafting and implementing an effective national air pollution reduction strategy. This could take different forms. One important example is empowering and giving greater autonomy to pollution control boards (PCBs) to discharge their responsibilities and act against polluters. Currently, interference in the functioning of these boards is visible in multiple ways: (i) the boards are typically led by generalist bureaucrats despite court judgments that have backed domain experts for chairpersons and member secretaries;5 (ii) their funding is often dependent on grants-in-aid by the state governments; and (iii) routine administrative decisions like hiring need approval from the environment department. State PCBs also seem to be facing a trade-off between their functions of monitoring and enforcement, and promoting ‘ease of doing business’. All of these curtail their ability to discharge their statutory mandate effectively.

The new government should also enable resolution when there are complex political and economic factors contributing to a polluting activity. For instance, consider the case of stubble burning where Minimum Support Prices, groundwater management, farm mechanization, the agrarian crisis, and unfavourable meteorology all contribute to episodic peaks in pollution in north India. Banning burning or subsidizing technical solutions such as ‘Happy Seeders’ are unlikely to solve the problem, unless some of the structural factors mentioned above are tackled through political negotiation.

A New Policy Agenda
Strengthening the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP)
NCAP was a missed opportunity to outline a systematic strategy. Beyond the national outreach and the reduction targets, it is a compilation of ongoing efforts, and leaves the details of new efforts to future action plans. Specific gaps include:

NCAP is largely a continuation of the traditional policy approach of developing long lists of unprioritized action points. It does not put implementation capacity at the heart of designing our mitigation policies, thus risking non-implementation.
The programme is urban-centric, focusing on a limited group of cities, and following the National Capital Region template by relying on city action plans. However, air pollution is not restricted to cities, and air quality in cities is typically influenced significantly by sources from outside. Addressing this problem requires moving the conversation towards addressing pollution at regional ‘airshed’ levels, and having more flexible system boundaries for air pollution control. The NCAP does not outline a road map for defining these airsheds and developing processes that cut across jurisdictions and departments.
NCAP misses addressing governance gaps directly. It introduces new committees at the central and state levels, and declares that individual ministries will ‘institutionalise’ action points in their charge. However, it does not specify what institutionalizing entails, and who would be held responsible if targets are not met, and what legal or financial implications would follow.
To strengthen the NCAP, there is a need to focus efforts on a prioritized shortlist of solutions in the short term, improve the enforcement capacity of the PCBs while increasing their accountability, and begin extensive consultations about governance reforms needed in the longer term. We elaborate on these below.

Prioritizing concrete actions
Given the number of sources that contribute to the problem, and the many mitigation efforts needed (several of which are included within NCAP), how do we prioritize policy efforts? Prioritizing solutions needs active consideration of the implementation capacity needed to introduce measures and enforce them. In addition, we need to ensure that the programme does not adversely impact vulnerable groups.

In particular, with dispersed sources of pollution, such as transportation, households, waste burning and construction dust, administrative solutions that require monitoring and enforcement are likely to fail. Instead, enforcement could work better for policy changes targeted at higher, more centralized levels, where possible. For instance, with vehicles, although there is a pollution control mechanism in place, several issues inhibit inspections from being a reliable way to keep the on-road fleet within standards. These include low rates of compliance among vehicle owners in getting tested and compromised inspections (poor calibration of testing equipment and corrupted inspection results). Policy changes aimed higher up in the manufacturing process, such as the requirement to comply with Bharat Stage VI norms, are likely to be better implemented.

Keeping these factors in mind, three key priority areas within the NCAP are identified below.

Power plant emission norms
India’s formal regulatory infrastructure has traditionally focused on ‘point sources’, with good reason. Industries and power plants burning coal are the second and third largest sources in India (only behind the numerous but highly dispersed household sources of emissions), in terms of contributions to average national exposure to air pollution and the resultant burden of disease. Power plants are the largest source of sulphur dioxide and a major source of nitrogen oxide. Sulphur and nitrogen oxides are key precursors that react with other substances to produce secondary particulate matter. MoEFCC introduced new emissions standards for power plants in 2015, which required the installation of pollution control equipment. Although the power plants were required to comply with these standards by 2017, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) later announced that the compliance date had been pushed to 2022, as per a timeline prepared by the Central Electricity Authority. Ensuring that these standards are complied with, and the requisite control equipment installed by this revised timeline, if not at an accelerated rate, is critical.
Revamp Ujjwala to increase LPG use
The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (Ujjwala) is an important initiative. While primarily an energy access programme, it has also tackled household solid fuel use, which is the largest contributor to pollution exposure in India. Ensuring universal continued usage of clean cooking fuels should therefore be a critical pillar of our air pollution control efforts. To facilitate continued usage of LPG, the government needs to ensure that prices are affordable for the beneficiaries, and in parallel, run campaigns to change behaviour and attitudes. This is unlikely to be a rapid transition, but some important first steps have been taken. ​
Invest in public transportation
Reducing transportation emissions would require a combination of ensuring easy access to affordable public and non-motorized transport, while simultaneously working on reducing emissions from the vehicles on the road. Investments in clean public transport can reduce transport emissions as well as make mobility easier and cheaper, thereby improving the quality of life in cities. Planning the public transit strategy for the long term is key.

Strengthening regulatory capacity
The formal air pollution regulatory architecture in India is built around the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and rules and notifications issued under these. As per existing law, the state PCBs have very limited flexibility to take action proportional to the polluting activity.7 Currently, they can send show cause notices, shut down industries through a closure notice or by shutting access to utilities, cancel regulatory consents, or initiate criminal prosecution by taking the industries to court. With court cases taking several years to reach any meaningful conclusion, PCBs rarely pursue this route, and restrict themselves to either a rap on the wrist through show cause notices, or shut down the industries – making enforcement expensive and ineffective.

Strengthening the ability of the PCBs to tackle point sources could provide a pathway to a broader reform process. In the long term, India needs a modern environment governance structure with teeth, nimbleness and resources to plan and drive a multi-sectoral strategy. NCAP is largely silent on how this structure could look, and on a road map for reforms. We outline below near-term and long-term milestones to strengthen regulatory capacity.

In the near term, PCBs must be resourced better, and in parallel, be made more accountable through disclosure efforts.
Increased resources of PCBs: Human resources currently available in PCBs are not sufficient to meet their mandate. There is a need to rapidly expand their capacity, particularly on the technical side. In the short term, existing vacancies in the CPCB need to be filled with qualified people. Working with CPCB and the states, filling up vacancies in the state PCBs should be another area of priority. Increased staff resources should translate to increased inspections and monitoring.
Increased accountability through public disclosure of regulatory data: The operations of the PCBs are extremely opaque, and it is unclear to the public where the big polluting sources are, and whether they are compliant with regulatory norms. Ensuring that PCBs release regulatory information (details of consents granted, inspections, online monitoring data, enforcement actions, etc.) into the public domain would make the industries and state PCBs more accountable to local communities, civil society and the media.
Longer-term reforms will require extensive dialogue; therefore, it is important for the government to start deliberations early. We outline below three broad elements for change that should be considered in the reforms process.

Remove legal barriers for effective enforcement: There is a need for statutorily empowering PCBs so that they can initiate systematic and proportional responses to polluting activities. Amending the law to allow for a more diverse regulatory toolbox, which includes both existing powers and additional ones such as levying financial penalties, would increase the flexibility of the PCBs and make them more responsive.
Institutionalized airshed-level management: Tackling air pollution effectively requires looking beyond administrative boundaries and focusing on reducing emissions across the ‘airshed’ over which pollutants disperse. This will need new modes of coordination across city and state administrations, and across line departments; it may also require the creation of new authorities with wider jurisdictions. Airshed level regulation will require a regulatory rethink and would involve extensive consultations which should commence on priority.
Development of a sector airshed approach: The long-term strategy will need a careful application of sectoral approaches at the airshed level, or the national or state level, which utilize an appropriate combination of administrative, technical, economic and behavioural solutions.
Concluding Remarks
Air pollution is a complex problem, with multiple sources operating at different regional scales, under the jurisdictions of disparate agencies, and requiring a variety of mitigation measures. We need to unambiguously acknowledge the terrible impacts of air pollution on our health, move beyond the urban-centric approach, and tackle each of the big sources with a sense of urgency. The policy for tackling air pollution needs to shift from the reactive approach we have taken so far to one that is more systematic: focusing on some efforts in the near term, and beginning the process to reform our environment institutions to make them better resourced as well as more nimble and effective in the longer term.

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

The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
Schooling is not Learning by Yamini Aiyar
Protecting Water while Providing Water to All: Need for Enabling Legislations by Philippe Cullet
1 Health Effects Institute, ‘State of Global Air 2019’, http://www.stateofglobalair.org/.
2 Ibid.
3 K. Balakrishnan et al., India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative Air Pollution Collaborators, ‘The Impact of Air Pollution on Deaths, Disease Burden, and Life Expectancy across the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2017, Lancet Planet Health 3: e26–e39 (2019).
4 S. Chowdhury et al., ‘Indian Annual Ambient Air Quality Standard is Achievable by Completely Mitigating Emissions from Household Sources’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116(22): 10711-10716 (2019).
5 See, for example, Techi Tagi Tara v Rajendra Bhandari & Ors (2018) 11 SCC 734.
6 GBD MAPS Working Group, ‘Burden of Disease Attributable to Major Air Pollution Sources in India’ (Health Effects Institute, 2018).
7 S. Ghosh, ‘Reforming the Liability Regime for Air Pollution in India’, Environmental Law and Practice Review 4 (2015): 125-146.

FULL VIDEO OF THE SEVENTH EVENT IN THE SERIES
AIR POLLUTION

Watch the full video (above) of Anumita Roychowdhury in conversation with Dr Navroz K Dubash examining the kinds of strategies that have been effective in improving Indian air quality regulation and governance. Anumita discusses the major turning points in the campaign for clean air and the challenges faced in implementing mitigation actions. While emphasising on the role of scientific evidence, the judiciary, and public awareness, as well as the need to mobilise key actors for change, Anumita shared lessons learnt along the way and stressed on the need to re-envision the policy challenge of air pollution in an integrated manner.

About the Panelists:

Anumita Roychowdhury is the Executive Director – Research and Advocacy, and Head of Air Pollution and Clean Transportation Programs at the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi. She co-authored the book ‘Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India’ in 1996 that catalysed the Right to Clean Air campaign in India. She has written and spoken extensively on air pollution and issues relating to transport. Over the years she has participated in many global and national forums on environmental issues and is also associated with various regional networks on air pollution and transportation. In 2016 she was awarded the Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award for 2016 (in the category of International Air Pollution Policy) by the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Dr Navroz K Dubash is a senior fellow at CPR and coordinator of the Initiative on Climate, Energy, and Environment. His research and policy interests include climate change policy and governance, the political economy of energy and water, the regulatory state in the developing world and the role of civil society in global environmental governance. In 2015 he was conferred the 12th T N Khoshoo Memorial Award in recognition of the impact of his work on Indian climate change policy and the international discourse on global climate governance.

This is the seventh event in the Clearing the Air Seminar Series, organised by the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment (ICEE) at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). The series aims to promote sustained and informed public understanding around the data, impacts, sources and policy challenges involved in clearing Delhi’s air. While it focuses on the context of Delhi, the series also reflects on the fact that the problem extends far beyond Delhi. The seminar series presents the work of experts in a range of areas to help promote informed public discussion about what changes are needed, what is possible, and how to get it done. Clearing the air in terms of knowledge and public information, we hope, will make a small contribution toward actually clearing Delhi’s air. Information about previous events held as part of the Series can be found here.

The question and answer session that followed the conversation between the panelists can be accessed here.

India approaches an important new phase in our engagement with global climate change. The decisions India makes in the coming years will define how successfully we are able to bring together development and low carbon futures, and our potential to signal leadership on this issue globally. How do we make these decisions evidence-based and consistent with both our long-term climate and development goals?

In a new policy brief titled Building a Climate-Ready Indian State, Navroz K. Dubash, Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Parth Bhatia lay out a plan to revitalize climate governance in India. They argue for a structure that addresses the governance challenges of coordination, building consensus around change, and setting strategic direction.

What would this look like?

At its core, they propose a non-executive and statutory body, the Low Carbon Development Commission, which combines stakeholder views and deep analytical capacity to lay out low-carbon development pathways. A development pathway approach implies going beyond core energy and emissions policies by considering deeper economic choices such as patterns of urbanisation, industrialisation, and job creation.
They bind the system together through procedural requirements that push ministries to set sectoral goals and report on them, and give Parliament and the public a greater role in overseeing national progress.
They give life to the system through new climate capacities layered across government.
This work is informed by an open-access academic paper on the evolution of Indian climate institutions by Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Navroz K. Dubash, which was recently published in the journal Environmental Politics.

Democratisation was front on centre as the need of the hour on Day 1 of the international symposium on ‘Reimagining Inclusive Cities in the COVID-19 Era’. The need to make residents of a city, especially those from the economically weaker sections and from slums, a critical part of the policy and decision making process, city planning as well as the implementation was repeatedly stressed by urban development experts and practitioners through the session.

Click here to know more about the symposium.

The first day of the virtual international symposium on September 20, 2021, started with a focused discussion on ‘Responsive urban planning framework towards building equitable and inclusive cities in the wake of COVID-19’.

“There is a new impetus to look at this issue both at the city level as well as the national level in South Asia, especially in India. On the other side there is the whole backlog this (pandemic) is going to create to global goals, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)and to the New Urban Agenda (NUA). So, a rethinking of what universal services might look like in the post-COVID era was something we felt was very timely,” said Shubhagato Dasgupta, Senior Fellow and Director of the SCI-FI initiative at CPR, in his opening remarks.

The inaugural address to set the tone of the three-day international symposium was delivered by David Satterthwaite, Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London. He underscored the transformative nature of community involvement in the process of informal settlement and slum upgradation.

Satterthwaite drew on the experiences gained from the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) in multiple countries.He noted that hostility to information gathering evaporated when a member of their own community was involved in the process. Their involvement also led to greater trust and awareness and led to a comprehensive broad basing of the nature of information that could be gathered. This information would also be contextualised and could in turn be used to formulate relevant interventions in a timely manner.

Satterthwaite also said successful examples of slum and informal settlement upgrading usually include and depend on much better relations between informal settlement dwellers and local government. He said this engagement, when done right, could form the foundation from which other exclusions can be addressed.

The next session was an exploration of experiences from the Global South. Experts shared their experiences in carrying out the upgradation efforts in Brazil’s Sao Paulo, Kenya’s Nairobi and India’s Mumbai. The session was moderated by Anaclaudia Marinheiro Centeno Rossbach, Regional Manager LAC of the Cities Alliance.

Speaking of the learning from Sao Paulo, Fernando Mello Franco, the city’s former Secretary of Urban Planning, drew a picture of vulnerability that was concentrated away from major areas of government investment like roads and public transport.

He pressed the concept of stressed communities as key force multipliers in the context of responding to crises such as the pandemic. Suggesting the use of the term ‘physical distancing’ as a more suitable term over ‘social distancing’ in the context of the pandemic, Franco recalled examples from Sao Paulo where slums which had stronger community bonds had experienced lower death rates due to COVID, often lower than the municipal average that included more affluent areas.

Jane Weru, Executive Director of the Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT) from Nairobi lined out her experiences from interventions in Nairobi’s sprawling Mukuru area, which was declared as a Special Planning Area. She said the local government had promoted a sectoral approach and involved 46 organisations and community representatives in the upgradation of the slum.

In the context of the pandemic, she said there had been a paradigm shift in how health services need to be prioritised. “This has happened in Kenya, is an appreciation that public health interests far supersede the interests of private property. So therefore, in the face of the pandemic, regardless of the title interests of individual, the state should enter and provide basic services that will ward off present and future pandemics. I think that is another principle upon which the future reimagining of cities should be visited,” Weru said.

Vidyadhar Phatak, former head of the Planning Division of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) demonstrated that a top-down planning approach could lead to deeply entrenched systemic issues that could reduce the efficacy of slum clearance, rehabilitation or upgradation efforts.

Phatak outlined some unintended consequences of the decades-long reliance on private players as a part of the slum clearance efforts for below-par outcomes for residents. He shared examples where the construction of tightly-packed apartments to replace slums had led to houses that did not have enough light or ventilation and potentially led to higher incidence of diseases like tuberculosis. He said the reliance on private developers, who had profit considerations, continued to be looked on positively by the political class because they would not have to scramble to find dedicated budgetary allocations.

Phatak further said some of the present problems faced by slum upgradation efforts had their roots in restrictions that local governments came up with to control unregulated construction by slum residents. He said the easing of these restrictions were being used as incentives to the private developers.

“The apparent success of the SRA model (slum rehabilitation in Mumbai) depended on the supply side constraint, both natural and regulatory, which kept boosting the prices because of the scarcity of developments rights in the market. This scarcity of development is being attempted to be used as a solution to housing. First you create a constraint then you use a relaxation of these constraints as an incentive. This is not the optimal policy option in this case,” Phatak said.

These sessions were followed by a panel discussion of the evening on the creation of ‘Responsive urban planning frameworks in building equitable and inclusive cities in the time of pandemic’, moderated by Aparna Das, Senior Advisor at Gesellschaftfür Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The discussion sought to address the meaning and nature of planned development and the need to bridge the intentions and implications of the actions of planners.

Sheela Patel, Founder-Director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), questioned the foundation of the planning process – data collection. “We are countries that have huge poverty and deficits which are not going to be solved by cute little tinkering of little plans. All the digitalisation that we are inheriting from global excitement of big data, we are not understanding the political value of data that should be in the hands of poor people” she said.

Patel spoke of the politics of knowledge and to whom it goes and what it does. She said only if the data is in the hands of the poor could they make relevant political decisions on what to do with it and what questions to ask. She said this was critical because an increasing component of planning is based on reliable data.

Hong Soo Lee, Senior Urban Specialist (Smart Cities) at the Urban Sector Group of the Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) spoke on the need for urban planners to take into account more than just one policy objective while drawing out master plans. He pointed to the need to stitch together the planning for civic services and transport alongside efforts at slum upgradation and regeneration, instead of dealing with these policy areas in isolation from each other.

The Brazilian model came up for examination again in the context of using data in the policy making process. Tereza Herling, Urban and Housing Specialist, Academic at Mackenzie University’s Architecture and Urbanism School and also former Joint Secretary for Urban Development of São Paulo pointed to social involvement as a prerequisite to effective urban planning.

Speaking of the existence of social movements in her country as well as the legislative framework recognising land having a social function, Herling said reliable streams of data were critical to decide the prioritisation in the deployment of financial resources. “I understand that social movement organisations are very important prerequisites to foster public policies to go forward… These social movements in Brazil were responsible in the important achievement of the legal framework of the city statutes,” she said. Herling added that it is important to bring planning data not just to the public at large, but also introduce them in schools so children can be made aware of their cities and the rights associated with it, as a mode of strengthening social movements.

The flip side of social mobilisation in the field of urban planning was presented by Georg Jahnsen, Project Manager, SUD-SC at GIZ. He spoke of the situation in Germany, where there would be little engagement by members of the community even when the process allowed for feedback and inputs. He said while the need to make planning processes democratic was critical, it was also incumbent on the planners to ensure that the community is not just made aware of these rights but also encouraged to participate.

Day 2:

The second day of the international symposium, September 22, will feature discussions on ‘Upgrading informal settlements to foster resilient cities against future pandemics’. The sessions will commence at 4:30 pm IST.

1 June 2016
Building Evidence for Justice – Groundtruthing Environmental Compliance
A WEBINAR BY KANCHI KOHLI
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Watch the full video (above) of the webinar on ‘Building Evidence for Justice – Groundtruthing Environmental Compliance’ by Kanchi Kohli, Research Director of the CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program.

The webinar explains how the groundtruthing exercise can lead to effective evidence to demonstrate levels of compliance to environmental and social regulatory mechanisms by projects (industrial, infrastructure, mining) to relevant authorities.

The webinar also presents CPR-Namati’s experience of using this method within its legal-empowerment-based environmental justice program in India.