Author: cprindia

FULL VIDEO OF BOOK DISCUSSION
IDENTITY DISCRIMINATION POLITICS

Watch the full video (above) of the book discussion on ‘Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements’ by Amit Ahuja featuring the author; D Shyam Babu (Senior Fellow, CPR); Surinder Jhodka (Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University) and moderated by Rahul Verma (Fellow, CPR).

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

About the Book

India’s over 200 million Dalits, once called ‘untouchables’, have been mobilised by social movements and political parties, but the outcomes of this mobilisation are puzzling. Dalits’ ethnic parties have performed poorly in elections in states where movements demanding social equality have been strong while they have succeeded in states where such movements have been entirely absent or weak. In Mobilizing the Marginalized, Amit Ahuja demonstrates that the collective action of marginalised groups — those that are historically stigmatised and disproportionately poor — is distinct. Drawing on extensive original research conducted across four of India’s largest states, he shows, for the marginalised, social mobilisation undermines the bloc voting their ethnic parties’ rely on for electoral triumph and increases multi-ethnic political parties’ competition for marginalised votes. He presents evidence showing that a marginalised group gains more from participating in a social movement and dividing support among parties than from voting as a bloc for an ethnic party.

About the Author

Amit Ahuja is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organisation, intercaste marriage, and skin colour preferences in South Asia. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

FULL AUDIO RECORDING
RIGHTS

Listen to full recording (above) of book discussion on ‘The Cunning of Rights: Law, Life, Biocultures’, by Rajshree Chandra.

This book probes how rights get ‘framed’ within and by law, in the diverse yet closely interrelated aspects of social, cultural, and biological life. In particular, the book focuses on biocultural entitlements of farming and indigenous communities, and explores the terms on which their interests are included and institutionalized, as well as the degrees of exclusion and stratification that accompany them.

The discussion is introduced by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President of CPR, followed in succession by Rajshree Chandra, the author; Nivedita Menon from Jawaharlal Nehru University; Lawrence Liang from Alternative Law Forum; and Naveen Thayyil from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

WATCH FULL VIDEO
INDIA-PAKISTAN POLITICS SOUTH ASIA

Husain Haqqani’s latest book ‘India Vs Pakistan: Why can’t we just be friends?’ provides a provocative and deeply analysed look at the key pressure points in the relationship between India and Pakistan.

Centre for Policy Research, in partnership with Juggernaut books, organised a panel discussion comprising Ashok Malik, Husain Haqqani, Shekhar Gupta, which was chaired by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Drawing from their extensive experience, the panellists shared key insights into how the Indo-Pak relationship has evolved over time.

Watch (above) the full video of the panel discussion, followed by the Q&A session.

FULL VIDEO OF THE LAUNCH WITH SHIBANI GHOSH, SHYAM DIVAN, PHILIPPE CULLET, AND BAHAR DUTT
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Watch the full video (above) of the launch and discussion on ‘Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles’. Shibani Ghosh, the editor and a Fellow at CPR, introduced the book, followed by a discussion between Shyam Divan (Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India) and Philippe Cullet (Professor, SOAS, University of London), which was moderated by Bahar Dutt (Senior environmental journalist).

The question and answer session with the panel can be accessed here.

About the Book

For more than three decades now, the Indian courts have delivered far-reaching judgments on a range of significant environmental matters. In their effort to adjudicate complex disputes with serious environmental repercussions, the courts have developed a framework of environmental rights and legal principles. Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles provides a critical analysis of this environmental legal framework. It studies the origins of environmental rights, substantive and procedural, and the four most significant legal principles – principle of sustainable development, polluter pays principle, precautionary principle and the public trust doctrine – and elaborates how Indian courts have defined, interpreted and applied them across a range of contexts.

As litigation and legal adjudication struggle to respond to worsening environmental quality, conceptual clarity about the content, application and limitations of environmental rights and legal principles is crucial for the improvement of environmental governance. With chapters written by Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Lovleen Bhullar, Shibani Ghosh, Dhvani Mehta, and Lavanya Rajamani, this book explores the judicial reasoning and underlying assumptions in landmark judgments of the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the National Green Tribunal, and aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the framework of rights and principles.

To read more about each chapter in this edited volume, click here.

About the Editor

Shibani Ghosh is a Fellow at the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment at the Centre for Policy Research, where her research and writing focuses on environmental law and governance. She is an Advocate-on-Record at the Supreme Court of India, and practices before the Supreme Court and the National Green Tribunal.

About the Panellists

Shyam Divan is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. His areas of practice cover most branches of civil litigation including banking, securities law, arbitration, administrative law and environmental law. He has appeared for citizens’ groups in a host of civil liberties and constitutional cases. Mr Divan has co-authored Environmental Law and Policy in India (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2001), one of the leading texts on Indian environmental law.

Philippe Cullet is Professor of international and environmental law at SOAS University of London and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He works on international and domestic environmental law, natural resources, water and sanitation and socio-economic rights and engages regularly with policymakers at the national and international levels. His latest edited books are Right to Sanitation in India – Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019 – co-editors S Koonan & L Bhullar) and Groundwater and Climate Change: Multi-Level Law and Policy Perspectives (Routledge, 2019 – co-editor R M Stephan).

Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and environmental journalist, and the winner of over twelve national and international awards including the Ramnath Goenka Award for excellence in environmental reporting. She was previously the Environment Editor at CNN-IBN and a columnist for the Mint. She is the author of Green Wars: Dispatches from a Vanishing World (Harper-Collins, 2014) and the founder of the MITTI Project.

FULL VIDEO OF DISCUSSION WITH PROFESSOR KELLY SIMS GALLAGHER, AMBASSADOR SHIVSHANKAR MENON, PROFESSOR AMBUJ SAGAR AND PROFESSOR NAVROZ K DUBASH
CLIMATE CHANGE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

On 6 March 2019, the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment (ICEE) at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) organized a discussion on the recently-released book, ‘Titans of the Climate: Explaining Policy Process in the United States and China’ by Kelly Sims Gallagher and Xioawei Xuan.

The panellists were Professor Kelly Sims Gallagher (Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University), Ambassador Shivshankar Menon (Former National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary of India), and Professor Ambuj Sagar (Founding Head, School of Public Policy at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi). The panel was moderated by Professor Navroz K Dubash (Professor, Centre for Policy Research).

Among other things, the panel discussed international climate politics, and US-China relations in the broader context of climate policy.

About the Book

The United States and China together account for a disproportionate 45 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. In 2014, then-President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced complementary efforts to limit emissions, paving the way for the Paris Agreement. And yet, with President Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Paris accords and Xi’s consolidation of power—as well as mutual mistrust fueled by misunderstanding—the climate future is uncertain. In Titans of the Climate, Kelly Sims Gallagher and Xiaowei Xuan examine how the planet’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters develop and implement climate policy. Through dispassionate analysis, the authors aim to help readers understand the challenges, constraints, and opportunities in each country. They make the case that if each country understands more about the other’s goals and constraints, climate policy cooperation is more likely to succeed. Read more here.

About the Speakers

Kelly Sims Gallagher is Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She directs the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher. From 2014 to 2015 she served as Senior Policy Adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and in the U.S. State Department’s Senior Envoy for Climate Change Office. She is the author of China Shifts Gears and The Globalization of Clean Energy Technology, both published by the MIT Press.

Ambassador Shivshankar Menon served as National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of India from January 2010 to May 2014, and was Foreign Secretary of India from October 2006 to July 2009. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, a Distinguished Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings India, and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi. His long career in public service spans diplomacy, national security, atomic energy, disarmament policy, and India’s relations with its neighbors and major global powers. He is the author of Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy, which was published by Penguin Random House in 2016.

Ambuj Sagar is the Vipula and Mahesh Chaturvedi Professor of Policy Studies and the founding Head of the School of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Ambuj’s interests broadly lie at the intersection of technology and development. His recent work has focused on innovation policy for meeting sustainability and inclusivity challenges, energy innovation policy and strategies (in areas such as biofuels, clean cookstoves, coal power, automobiles, and institutional mechanisms such as climate innovation centers), climate change policy and politics, capacity development, and higher education policy.

Navroz K Dubash is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. He works on climate change policy and governance, the political economy of energy and water, and the regulatory state in the developing world. Widely published in these areas, Navroz serves on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a Coordinating Lead Author. In 2015, he was conferred the 12th T N Khoshoo Memorial Award for his work on climate change policy. His most recent book (co-edited with Sunila Kale and Ranjit Bharvirkar) examines the political economy of electricity in India’s states, and a forthcoming edited volume will examine climate politics, policy and governance in India.

FULL AUDIO OF TALK BY ANURAG GUPTA
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS IDENTITY DISCRIMINATION

Listen to the full audio of the talk (above) where Anurag Gupta (Founder and CEO, Be More America) talks about the concept of unconscious bias and how it affects society, focusing primarily on his work on addressing racism in the US.

In this talk, he shares how Be More America utilises in-person trainings and e-learning tools to create targeted interventions than can facilitate the ‘un-learning’ of racial biases. Through Be More America, Anurag aims at a social movement that could potentially lead to an equitable society.

A short video introduction to Be More America and its work on hacking unconscious bias can be accessed here.

Watch the full video of the workshop (above), where Philip Harrison discusses ongoing comparative work on cities in BRICS, a grouping of countries that account for nearly 40% of the world’s total urban population.

There is enormous diversity in BRICS countries in almost all categories, including scale, economic performance, levels and rates of urbanisation, income and governance. This diversity raises questions over the meaning and purpose of comparison between the countries, argues Harrison.

In this presentation, Harrison looks at the far-reaching political and/or economic transformations experienced by all BRICS countries over the last few decades, as well as the differences in the national and local management of these processes.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. More information about the talk can be found on the event page.

Watch the full video (above) of the webinar on ‘Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: Experiences from India’ featuring Kishan Rana (Professor Emeritus, DiploFounation); Shyam Saran (Former Foreign Secretory & Senior Fellow, CPR); Yamini Aiyar (President and Chief Executive, CPR); and Nayan Chanda (Associate Professor of International Relations, Ashoka University). The webinar was co-organised by The Bridge Project and CPR.

The webinar discussed the role of think tanks, diplomacy, universities and media in bridging the gap between theory and practice in India.

By Mukta Naik, Sama Khan and Shamindra Nath Roy1

Indian urbanisation is not just mega cities, it is as much in smaller towns, in villages on the urban peripheries, along corridors and in many other transforming spaces across the countryside. This continuum of urbanisation has to confront the binary of governance – where local government actions and central schemes are subject to an urban and rural dichotomy. States have the ability to transcend this schizophrenic approach and must be encouraged to do so. The Union too needs to redesign its central schemes to avoid exacerbating this divide.

Cities are seen as the key drivers of growth and managing urban expansion is a major policy challenge. But, Indian urbanisation is marked not just by expansion but also by the transformation of a large pool of rural areas (Pradhan, 2013). Together these two factors contributed about 40% of urban population growth between 2001 and 2011 census, with an equal contribution coming from natural growth, and the rest from migration. India’s urbanisation is thus as much a story of its large megacities as it is a story of the in-situ transformation of its rural population, not just in the periphery of cities, but also beyond.

Indian urbanisation on the ground – a rurban story?

In India, very large cities co-exist with a dense network of small towns. The six major urban agglomerations – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai – constitute about 74 million inhabitants in 2011. They are followed by a series of secondary metropolitan areas, which are state capitals and other big cities, and all these million-plus cities constituted a little under a third – 31% – of the urban population in 2011.2 Some are recent upstarts like Gurugram, but most have been around for some time, as medieval or colonial cities.

While the large cities are commonly regarded as growth engines, urban growth in the past decade is not concentrated in these but actually quite evenly distributed across various urban categories and locations. One-third of fastest growing cities are small towns – 40% of the urban population in 2011 lived in small towns of less than one hundred thousand – and their economic activities are confined to the development of specialized clusters involving cities of various size as well as villages (Swerts et al, 2018).

Not all these towns are administratively ‘urban’ or statutory towns (STs), but they are counted as urban by the census since they are above the demographic and economic threshold of being ‘urban.’3 These settlements are known as census towns (CTs), and together with smaller STs, they bridge the gap between India’s large cities and rural area, as nodes that supply essential goods and services to the hinterland.

While the CTs are administrative villages that are counted as urban, there are many villages that do not cross the census threshold but show visible non-agricultural functions. Together, these new ‘rurban’ spaces are slowly becoming a vital part of India’s settlement hierarchies, and their importance is rising in terms of filling the spacing between the interconnected city systems. They provide two main kinds of crucial linkages between rural and urban, spatial and economic.

Spatial Periphery: While the peripheries of large cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata are growing at a faster rate than the core cities4 (Sivaramakrishnan et al, 2005), population and built-up growth is happening around smaller cities as well, and across different geographical locations. For example, Mallappuram, which used to be a small municipality of ten thousand people in northern Kerala during census 2001, grew to an urban agglomeration of 1.7 million people by 2011. This growth came from census towns – administered by panchayats – around the city, which constitute 80% of the population of Mallappuram urban agglomeration in 2011.

Spatial Corridor: Rurban areas are also emerging along industrial corridors, combining cities of different sizes and villages between two distinct city clusters, to create an extended urban region. For example, many such settlements connected to textiles and light manufacturing stretch along NH 45, from Bangalore to Salem in southern India. Such spaces blur the inter-urban boundaries while facilitating integration of the rural with urban.

Economic: Economically, non-agricultural activities are spatially diffused, much of it outside the larger cities. In 2005, the share of the districts where largest 50 metropolitan areas are located was only 41% of the total non-farm value added in the country (Swerts et al, 2018). As per the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18, about 45.8% of the manufacturing employment in India is rural. In these rurban areas, the economic activity is not just non-farm but also agricultural, with returns from farm, and remittances being invested in services like transport and retail trade. Even in large cities, stringent land-use regulations and urban-density policies can push firms beyond the formal city boundaries. The pace of manufacturing employment growth was fastest (41%) over 1998-2005 in rural areas adjacent to largest metropolitan cities (Vishwanath et al, 2013).

In India, therefore, it may be more accurate to characterise this phenomenon as a rural-urban gradation (Chatterjee et al, 2015) not just in terms of economic indicators like non-farm activities but also in terms of other measures like built-up growth or nightlight intensity. These places are also not very different from smaller towns in terms of consumption levels or investment in private assets like septic tanks or motorized two-wheelers.5 Neatly classifying such settlements as urban or rural biases our understanding of India’s structural transformation and its associated welfare outcomes (Chatterjee et al, 2015).

Dichotomous Governance

Yet, our administrative structure valiantly attempts to govern India’s settlements across clear administrative boundaries of rural and urban. The Constitutional framework of rural and urban governance, introduced by the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment, gram panchayats in the case of villages and municipalities in the case of urban areas, reflects this dichotomy. This is historically evident at both state/local and union government level. Only the statutory towns are administrative urban areas, and are governed by an elected urban local body (ULB) constituted by the Article 243 P & Q of the Constitution, which varies across different sizes and scales like Municipal Corporations, Municipalities or Municipal Councils, and Nagar Panchayats or Transitional Urban areas. The criteria to designate (or declassify) a place as a ULB and categorizing them across different scales is a prerogative of the state governments. These criteria vary across states, from population cut-offs to workforce character, revenue generation capacity, etc. (Joshi et al, 2018). What is recognised as an ULB in one state may not be so in another.

CTs and villages, which constitute the rural-urban gradation, are not designated as administratively urban by the state, and continue to be governed by the appropriate gram panchayat. However, socio-economic changes in these rapidly transforming spaces make them appear quite similar to formal urban areas in terms of economic activities, human capital and the nature of services required by the citizens.

This administrative classification also results in differences in functional domains and financial incentives to the rurban areas and smaller STs. The 11th Schedule of the Constitution places important functions like agriculture, irrigation and housing under the ambit of Panchayats, while the 12th Schedule places urban planning, land use, water supply, roads, bridges, health sanitation and slum improvement under the purview of municipalities. But, the states are not obliged to transfer these functions to local bodies and there is variation across states as to the extent of transfer. This functionally distinct structure of rural and urban means that a panchayat may not be able to pursue policies that respond to the changes happening in its jurisdiction.

At the union government level, where the focus is more on financial incentives and grants for development, there is historically a sharp differentiation between rural and urban, where Union schemes have given preference to rural over urban in centrally sponsored schemes (CSS). For instance, the estimated allocation of Swachh Bharat Mission – Grameen (SBM-G) is Rs. 134,386 crore which is about seven times the support for the urban counterpart, SBM-U. As a result, many states prefer rurbanising places like CTs to remain rural, rather than classifying them as urban, to benefit from the larger budget for rural development (Sivaramakrishnan, 2002, Mukhopadhyay, 2017). Indeed, in 2004, Tamil Nadu switched the classification of over five hundred urban areas to rural, to obtain more funds from the Union (Denis, et. al. 2012).

The Dissonances

Gap in services: Differences in governance across the formal urban (ULBs) and rurban settlements is responsible for the gap in public services like piped sewerage or in-house water connections across them, despite a private demand for these services6. Though these rurban spaces, i.e. the CTs and large villages are very different in economic structure, built-up area and services from other rural settlements, they are not capacitated to meet their changing requirements like drainage, septage management or street lighting, as all of them are governed by the same rural governance structure. Even within the urban periphery, public service provisions like piped sewer falls off sharply once the formal administrative boundary of the core city is crossed7. In most of the cities, it is lower in all settlements around the core city, and falls sharply with increasing distance from the core city.

Resistance to Reclassification: One consequence of this ‘denied urbanization’ (Samanta 2014) is that citizens resist state government proposals to reclassify them to ULBs.8 While there is regional variation, a lot of services, especially sanitation, are individualised due to low provision of public facilities like sewerage network or piped water facilities.9 However, Article 243 X of the Constitution permits the ULBs to collect taxes and duties, as authorized by the state legislature. Hence, the absence of property taxes and higher subsidies in rural areas can drive strong local interest to retain the rural-urban binaries (Mukhopadhyay et al, 2016), as people are often reluctant to pay extra for the services that they already self-provided. The poor provision of public services in smaller towns adds strength to this preference.

Resistance to integration: Concomitantly, in large metropolitan areas, where public services may be the responsibility of a parastatal agency like metro water boards, people prefer to be in smaller municipalities rather than become part of an expanded core city. For example, 18 new municipalities were created around Hyderabad during August 2018 to regulate land development in the city’s peripheries. In course of this process, the government negotiated with the elected representatives of the erstwhile GPs to make them separate ULBs, instead of merging with Hyderabad, where they feared that taxes may be higher.10

Employment: These unequal service provisions across the rural-urban spectrum affect the economic transformation of rurban areas. While some specific labour-intensive manufacturing industries are moving out of the municipal boundary, growth restrictions prevent significant employment growth in such districts (Desmet et al, 2013). In some of these districts, there are concentrated clusters of well-developed household industries, like the carpet and handloom clusters of UP or bidi clusters of West Bengal. These, if integrated to the wider economic geography, can enhance the growth machine and provide substantial local employment.

Transport: This is another issue that falls between two stools. The movement of labour and spatial distribution of jobs in urban peripheries are linked to the availability of multimodal and intermediate public transport like three wheelers, but there are no clear functional domain in the rural governance framework to regulate this.11 As a result, despite having a low cost of operation, these modes are pushed to the fringes rather than becoming an integral part of the public transit system, making it harder for labour to access employment.

Over time, these limitations can have repercussions on the future growth of CTs and large villages12, where large sections of the workforce are only precariously engaged in non-farm jobs as small entrepreneurs or casual workers (Chatterjee et al, 2015; Swerts et al, 2018). Even where necessary factors to provide a more solid non-farm transformation are present, the prevailing functional and fiscal domains can prove to be a bottleneck for such growth. If it were possible to overcome these dichotomies, there could be significant employment growth.

Policy Recommendations

The onus to overcome these rural-urban binaries in the governance framework and integrate a variety of interlinked rural-urban functions is on both the union and federal levels of government.

State
At the state level, the effort should be to make the functional domain flexible, in case of rurban spaces. Even within the prevailing framework of the 11th and 12th schedules, it is possible to make such provisions. For example, the 12th Schedule does not make any distinction between the categories of urban areas like municipal corporations, municipal councils and Nagar panchayats in devolving urban management functions. The language of the Act does not restrict the states from devolving functions from the 11th schedule to ULBs or functions from the 12th schedule to panchayats.13 Using this flexibility, states can transfer functions like permitting building licenses, sub-divisioning and readjusting land for variable uses, or regulating permits and lay-out routes to transport modes, like e-rickshaws, to the rurban areas.

The size-insensitive character of the urban governance framework (Sivaramakrishnan, 2013) can be also be used to functionally empower smaller ULBs or empower panchayats to provide “urban services” so that citizens in CTs and other rurban spaces get desired levels of service and incur an obligation to pay, where appropriate. However, these devolutions should be made with regard to local capacities and political environments.

More co-ordination in land-use and key infrastructure across the rural-urban gradation is necessary, especially in transport, water treatment plants or solid waste management, etc. As most rurban development, especially in the periphery and along corridors, usually follows the trunk routes of transport infrastructure, urban planning needs to happen simultaneously with the expansion of transport networks. The use of spatial data over time can help with this.

There is also a role for mechanisms, some defunct in many states14, like the District Planning Committee (DPC) and Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) to institutionally co-ordinate between rural and urban local governments (Sivaramakrishnan, 2013). These, or similar, structures can also enable States to blend funding from various sources to address the needs of rurban spaces.

Union
At the Union level, there is an urgent need to break out of the hardcoded definition of rural and urban. There is wisdom in being cautious about absolute conversions of CTs into STs15 (PIB, 2016). Given the variety of circumstances under which CTs are formed, States would need to deploy a case-specific approach to leverage their urban characteristics.

Designs for central schemes must not impose restrictions by typology of location because services in rurban areas need a fit-for-purpose approach. For example, SBM-Grameen focuses on constructing twin-pit latrines on priority basis in rural areas, but many rurban spaces where the use of septic tanks was already high at the start of the mission, would have been served better by efficient septage and fecal waste treatment management. Therefore, it is avoidable to hard code central scheme interventions by specifying technologies for urban and rural spaces.

At the implementation level, states must have the flexibility to evolve modus vivenda to address rurban needs. For example, given how mobile labour is, states should be able to use funds from the National Urban Livelihoods Mission in a variety of locations, including peripheries and corridors. Similarly, though PMAY avoids some of the pitfalls of hard coding by supporting state and region-centric variations in materials and technology, PMAY-Urban may be more suited for peripheral villages, instead of PMAY-Rural.16

Disassociating schemes from their location is challenged by the existence of separate ministries for rural and urban development, but schemes like SBM that do not come under these can choose to function outside of this binary. For example, the central scheme for working women hostel has transcended this binary and since its inception in 1972-73 has been catering to urban, rural and even semi-urban areas where employment opportunities exist for women under the umbrella of the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

Another approach is to allocate funds from different schemes to fill the gap in key infrastructure and bridge the service vacuum between rural and urban. The Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM) is a step in this direction, but its location within the Ministry of Rural Development limits its ability to aid ‘urban’ spaces.

Conclusion

As cities and their associated economic engines are beginning to be viewed, not in isolation, but as connected to their peripheries and as a part of a wider city system throughout South and South-East Asia, this is a good time for the new government to introduce an integrated approach to the urbanisation, bridging the artificial divides of the 11th and 12th schedules. It is time to build mechanisms that can facilitate inter-ministerial interlinkages and it might even be prudent to imagine a single ministry of local governance in the long run. For now, a category-agnostic approach to Central schemes and an architecture that allows States to respond flexibly would enable India to leverage the latent opportunity in rurban spaces.

1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the inputs of Kanhu Charan Pradhan while writing this piece.
2 Only if the core city is taken into account, not the entire urban agglomeration.
3 A census town is a settlement which has a population of 5000 or more, a population density of more than 400 persons/sq.km, and a male main workforce participation of 75% or more. All STs, which constitute an urban local body (ULB), are automatically defined as urban. Unlike India, many countries rely only on a population size to distinguish between rural and urban areas. If only population size was used to identify census towns in India, and villages with more than 5,000 inhabitants were considered urban, the share of the urban population would increase by about 15 percentage points.
4 For example, the growth rate of the core city in the Mumbai metropolitan region is 0.4% while the periphery grew at 3.6%, within 2001-11.
5 NSS 2011-12 consumer expenditure data reveals that a small town consumer spends about 70% of a consumer in million-plus cities. However, their spending pattern is very similar to large cities, with similar amounts being spent on items like conveyance, rent or consumer durables, as in million-plus cities. The share of households which owns a motorized two-wheeler is 28% in these rurban areas, and 27.8% in smaller STs, which has a population of less than 50,000. The share of households with septic tank is 58.8% in rurban areas, while it is 55.7% in smaller towns.
6 The share of households with in-house access to water is 35% in villages, 59% in rurban areas (CTs and large villages) and 62% in smaller STs, which have less than a hundred thousand population.
7 For example, the share of households connected to the piped sewerage network is 86% in the municipal area of Hyderabad, but drops to 50% in the other ULBs and 27% in the all the CTs in the Hyderabad metropolitan (HMDA) area. The share of villages with piped sewer in HMDA is 7%. Interestingly, the outgrowths of HMDA, which are also rural but are contiguous to the core city, have a higher share of piped sewer coverage at 52%.
8 The interests of the state governments to reclassify the CTs or other forms of rurban spaces into ULBs also varies by the shifting growth trajectories across states. While states like Gujarat reclassified 24 CTs to STs within 2001-11, UP chose to not reclassify any of them into formally urban categories.
9 There are a lot of self-provisions of public services like roads, piped connection of water to households in some of the richer peri-urban neighbourhoods of larger cities (Randhawa et al, 2014; Mehta et al, 2015).
10 Accessed from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/59-new-municipalities…, at 24th April, 2019.
11 The Kolkata city is dominated by yellow taxis and auto-rickshaws, while the periphery is served by a variety of different modes of IPT services like the batter operated e-rickshaws, and diesel-fuelled vehicles like Tata Magic and Piaggio Ape. A lack of regulations at the RTA, police and local levels lead to contestations across there different kinds of services, which leads to operational issues and easy movement in the peripheries, instead of facilitating the services (CPR, 2016).
12 An analysis of the 6th Economic Census (2012-13) data shows only about 20% of the CT population resides in such kind of settlements where the share of manufacturing to total workforce is more than 50%.
13 The ambiguous part of the act has usually led to different responses from the state governments so far. There has been persistent resistance from the state governments to implement the provisions of the act in totality, and issues like water and sanitation management remains the prerogative of parastatal agencies under the control of state governments for a majority of cities. Very few financial and human resources functions have been transferred to municipalities and ULBs remain weak highlighting the unwillingness of the state to relinquish its control over the urban (Nandi and Gamkhar 2013, Ruet and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2009).
14 While MPCs have rarely been set up in most states, they have been only involved into mere consultations while dealing with issues, rather than any active involvement in planning functions (Sivaramakrishnan, 2013).
15 During May 2016, the erstwhile Ministry of Urban Development came out with a notification that asked all the 28 states to take ‘immediate and necessary action’ to convert all the census towns (CTs) into statutory urban local bodies (STs) to promote planned development.
16 An ongoing CPR analysis of the PMAY-U data shows that approximately eighty villages have been included in the projects enlisted under PMAY-Urban, most of which are neighboring larger Urban local bodies.

References

Centre for Policy Research. (2016). Integrating intermediate public transport within transport regulation in a megacity: A Kolkata case study. Working Paper.

Chatterjee, P. (2011). Democracy and economic transformation in India. In Understanding India’s New Political Economy (pp. 33-50). Routledge.

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Watch the full video (above) of the panel discussion on ‘Bringing Voters to the Polling Booth: What can we learn from the Banda Model?’ featuring S Y Quraishi, Heera Lal, Rama Lakshmi, and moderated by Rahul Verma.

During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Banda’s District Magistrate (DM), Heera Lal, IAS, conceptualised a massive voter mobilisation drive to increase the turnout by over 90%. He undertook various initiatives, coordinated with stakeholders, encouraged his team to share ideas, and applauded team members at every stage. The district administration’s efforts paid rich dividends and the increase in voter turnout in Banda district was substantial, one of the highest in Uttar Pradesh and perhaps in the country, if one accounts for state-level factors.

In this panel discussion, the district magistrate presented details of the measures his administration undertook to increase voter participation.

S Y Quraishi is the former Chief Election Commissioner of India. Heera Lal is IAS and District Magistrate, Banda, Uttar Pradesh. Rama Lakshmi is Opinion Editor of ThePrint. Rahul Verma is a Fellow at CPR.