How technology can help India’s urban centres become disabled friendly

 

Creating a fully inclusive and accessible India will require behavioural changes, capacity building, investments in accessible infrastructure and inclusive and accessible innovations. This will help inform policies and systems for the country's progress towards an equitable urban future.

Persons with disabilities face many challenges in participating fully in urban life. An enabling environment, with inclusive infrastructure, is needed to allow them the same opportunities to enjoy cultural, economic, and social life as non-disabled persons. This includes things many of us take for granted, like the freedom to move independently and access places of work, education and sports.

Take, for instance, Manasi Joshi, a para-badminton player, who underwent a double leg amputation following a road accident at age 22. Her strong will and determination were complemented by an accessible built environment and the availability of assistive technology. These not only helped her overcome obstacles she faced in everyday tasks, but also encouraged her to realise her dream of playing professional badminton, which she now competes in at the highest international level. While everyone cannot be a world champion, removing barriers can give us all the chance to reach our full potential.

Two mega-trends make the need for inclusive cities increasingly urgent. First, India is urbanising rapidly and is projected to add four new megacities by 2030. The country’s urban population is estimated to cross 675 million. According to the 2011 Census, one in three persons with disabilities in India or roughly eight million people already live in cities. Second, the number of persons with recognised disabilities as a share of the population could rise due to disaster and climate risks, demographic changes and broader definitions of disability in line with global norms.

One powerful solution to these challenges lies in innovative technology and ICT. These are key to ensuring an inclusive urban transformation and essential for improving and increasing the quality of life of all citizens. Nowhere is this more evident than in India, where a world-class digital governance system and dynamic tech sector are converging to deliver inclusive prosperity and resilience. This spirit of solidarity and inclusivity is reflected in India’s G20 presidency theme of One Earth, One Family and One Future.

Innovations that promote inclusivity are often perceived as unprofitable by investors. Here, the role of the state becomes critical for promoting an ecosystem for transformative technologies, especially where the return on investment may be difficult to measure.

To enhance the ecosystem for assistive technology and inclusive solutions, the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) in partnership with the UN in India hosted the first edition of the Smart Solutions Challenge and Inclusive Cities Awards in 2022. It helped in crowd-sourcing tech-based solutions and innovations for addressing city-level accessibility and inclusion challenges.

Smart cities like Bhubaneswar have deployed innovative transport and mobility solutions, showcasing how technology is being leveraged by cities to improve the lives of vulnerable communities. Several solutions and assistive technologies such as Fifth Sense, IncluMaps, AxcessAble and myUDAAN are supporting independent living for persons with disabilities. Initiatives like these and many others have the potential to help cities localise innovations for inclusive urbanisation. Many of these solutions have utilised frontier technologies like AI and machine learning extensively to contextualise solutions.

This is reflected in the Government of India’s development agenda and the globally agreed SDG targets on harnessing and maximising the potential of technological innovations and entrepreneurship. As part of its G20 Presidency, India has initiated the Start-up 20 Engagement Group to provide a global platform to enable the start-up ecosystem across the member nations. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has also launched the G20 Digital Innovation Alliance’ (G20-DIA) to showcase innovative solutions and create an alliance of players in the innovation ecosystem. And ‘Catalysing Digital Urban Futures’, one of the priority themes for Urban-20 Engagement Group under G20, seeks to discuss how data and technology can be best utilised for making city management more effective and inclusive.

Creating an inclusive and accessible India will require behavioural changes, capacity building, investments in accessible infrastructure and inclusive and accessible innovations. This will help inform policies for the country’s progress towards an equitable urban future as envisioned for the Amrit Kaal — an inclusive, accessible, safe, resilient, and sustainable India@2047. Many more people like Manasi Joshi will be empowered to make the country proud, and all of India will benefit from a society that employs its full range of talent.

Written by Shombi Sharp, Hitesh Vaidya

Source: Indian Express, 12/06/23

Why India needs an urbanisation policy

 

Durga Shanker Mishra, O P Agarwal write: A policy is needed to guide the planning and management of cities towards enabling India’s growth ambitions and also giving its residents a good quality of life, in a sustainable manner.

Cities are drivers of economic growth. As India urbanises, it must ensure that its cities offer a decent quality of life and facilitate job creation. These imperatives are fundamental to India’s ambitions of becoming a five trillion-dollar economy by 2025 and a 10 trillion-dollar economy by 2030.

From a population of 377 million in 2011, Indian cities are projected to house 870 million people by 2050, according to the UN’s projections — by far the highest among all nations. Delhi is likely to become the world’s most populous urban agglomeration by 2030, surpassing Tokyo. Clearly, a major demographic transformation is taking place.

Notwithstanding their criticality, cities face several challenges today. Inadequate affordable housing has meant that almost one-sixth of the urban population lives in slums. Water supply is unreliable. Mountains of solid waste sit on the fringes of our cities. Poor drainage, congested roads and deteriorating air quality are other challenges. For our growth ambitions to succeed, not only do these gaps have to be filled, but even greater needs, necessitated by the growing population, have to be accommodated. Estimates by a high-powered expert committee and by the McKinsey Global Institute indicated in 2011-12 that nearly Rs 39-60 lakh crore are to be invested in urban infrastructure in the next 30 years. These amounts are outside the range of what the public budget can support.

The need is for a well-thought-out urbanisation policy to guide the planning and management of cities towards accommodating and enabling India’s growth ambitions and also assuring its residents a good quality of life, in a sustainable manner. In this piece, we highlight some of the key issues that such a policy should address.

First, how large and dense should our cities be? Should they house 35-40 million people or limit themselves to 2-3 million? Large cities offer agglomeration economies but are complex to manage. Dense cities are harbingers of infrastructure-related economies but are vulnerable to the spread of disease, as evident from the Covid-19 pandemic. A proper balance between agglomeration economies and manageability as well as density and distance will hold the key in determining the right size for our cities. A way around this is a kind of decentralised urbanisation where multiple cities are clustered into growth regions. These would facilitate agglomeration economies and yet be of a manageable size. The Paris region offers an excellent example, with several townships within its ambit. Services like metro rail are provided at the regional level but local roads and primary schools are the responsibility of local governments.

The second issue concerns finances. Resources other than the public budget need to be tapped. Capital markets are an obvious choice but involving them would require pricing basic services in a manner that allows a reasonable return on investments. High prices will make services unaffordable. How does one resolve this conflict? Monetising land assets is an option. More efficient service delivery through the private sector is another. Should cities continue to depend on grants from the state or central governments or should they raise a larger share of its needs, for example by improving property tax collections? Should central finances support specific types of investments or should there be more flexible supporThird, urban dwellers should be able to live, work and play safely and happily. India has boasted of well-planned cities from time immemorial. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa have been role models for the rest of the world. The country must focus on good urban planning, instead of prioritising construction. Decisions on what to build need to emerge from a good plan, not in isolation. Planning must be dynamic enough to adjust to a city’s growth.

Fourth, should the planning boundary be limited to a city’s political and administrative boundary or should it encompass regional linkages? There are strong economic linkages between cities and their rural hinterland. There are linkages between multiple cities in a region as well as between cities and peri-urban areas. Should these interdependencies not be leveraged? Should the land-use plan for a city be divorced from a regional economic plan or be guided by it?

Fifth, we cannot afford to lose sight of sustainability. Despite having 18 per cent of the world population, India has only 2.5 per cent of the world’s landmass and 4 per cent of the world’s freshwater. Hence, global standards of land and water use may be too generous for us. Resource efficiency should be integral to urban planning.

Sixth, the challenge of climate change is upon us. A large share of our future carbon emissions will be in cities. Fortunately, our cities are still growing, and we are well placed to guide them into a low-carbon growth path. Energy-efficient buildings, sustainable building materials, clean energy, water harvesting, segregation of waste, electric mobility, public transport, walking and cycling are sustainable practices that need to be mainstreamed into urban planning. Building resilience to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change will also be critical.

Seventh, developments in technology that make it easier to work remotely will test older paradigms of office-based work. This work culture could change travel patterns and the need for transport infrastructure. An urbanisation policy should take cognisance of future mobility patterns. Increasingly, travel patterns are getting limited to shorter distances, requiring more non-motorised transport infrastructure rather than high-speed systems better suited to longer trips.

A sound urbanisation policy will guide how the growing urban population lives, works, and plays in India’s cities of the future. Such a policy is the need of the hour and cannot be delayed.

This column first appeared in the print edition on October 7, 2021 under the title ‘Designing the post-Covid city’. Mishra is secretary, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and Agarwal is CEO, World Resources Institute India. 

Source: Indian Express, 7/10/21

Redesigning urban spaces for women

 

To make cities women-friendly, urban planners must focus on two core issues —greater safety from violence and adequate childcare support.

Urban planning in India does not factor in gender perspectives. Cities need to be redesigned to address the concerns of women; so that women can work, look after their families easily, and without having to expend more energy, time and money than men do.

The 2019 Safe City Index, prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranks Mumbai and Delhi as one of the worst cities where women’s safety is concerned. The Index ranked cities on indicators of personal security, digital security and infrastructure security, among other things.  All these have a multiplier effect on the position of women — these can negatively affect their access to public spaces, jobs and even how much leisure time they can spend. Indifference to concerns of women results in a difficult commute and poor childcare facilities.

To make cities women-friendly, urban planners must focus on two core issues —greater safety from violence and adequate childcare support. Much of the current discourse focusses on improving street lighting and providing safe toilets. These are important but even more critical to making public spaces safer is mixed land-use planning. The segregation of commercial and residential areas automatically increases the commute from work to home and creates entry barriers to mobility for women. Mixed land-use, by encouraging office space and commercial areas in residential localities, makes for regular use of streets, better lighting and encourages women to use public spaces.

We already have an example in the planned city of Chandigarh, one of the safest for women in India. This city factored in local markets, commercial offices, schools, public parks, post offices, police posts and medical clinics into the design of each small locality or sector. Shaded footpaths were created for walking such that it was possible to cover the city on foot and remain in the shade. And, yet, extensive mixed-use was simply not replicated in other Indian cities. Chandigarh remained an isolated example.

A 2019 Ola Mobility Institute study, which surveyed men and women in 11 cities in India, said that while 80% respondents lived within a 15-minute walking distance of a bus stop, only 47% either walked or cycled to the bus stop. The others used shared transport, two-wheelers and cars. Shared transport has been found to be generally unsafe. But in the absence of dedicated footpaths or cycle tracks, women commuters have little option.

In reimagining urban spaces, we must not focus on somewhat vacuous efforts such as creating special transport services for women. It would, instead, be far more beneficial to sensitise men to be more civil. Already, various surveys have shown that the majority of men in India do not approve of boorish behaviour towards women. The 2015-16 National Family Health Survey indicated that 58% husbands disapproved of wife-beating. In a UN Women-sponsored household survey on sexual violence in public spaces in Delhi in 2012, 94% men said that people should intervene if they see sexual harassment in public spaces. This needs to be built upon and civility inculcated.

The other priority must be reliable childcare facilities, which are necessary if we expect women to enter the job market, sustain jobs and also pursue leisure activities. Ensuring that enough creches are available throughout the city is important to set women free and support them in discharging their parental duties. For construction sites, mobile creches could be the answer.

Recent research by economist Ashwini Deshpande shows that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, those with children below five years suffered the most in the job market. In April 2019, the average employment of women in this category was 7.8%. This dropped sharply to 2.9% in April 2020. In August 2020, it recovered slightly to 3.5%. What is noteworthy is that it was the most highly-educated women who suffered the maximum job losses.

For those with qualifications higher than post-graduate and children below five years of age, the average employment shrank drastically in April 2020, as per the report. With work-from-home becoming the norm, it is the aspirational group of women who lost out the most. An institutional support structure that can take care of this responsibility would improve female participation in the labour force.

It is entirely possible to address such gaps through pilot projects in smaller townships. If well executed, such projects will draw the population away from the mega-cities. The safety of women is a major concern in any household location decision. Undertaking such projects does not require much by way of capital. Various projects for upgrading city infrastructure are already in execution throughout India. Those can easily be tweaked to incorporate gender perspectives.

To make cities women-empowering, we need more imagination and will.

Meeta Rajivlochan is an IAS officer and currently member-secretary, National Commission for Women

Source: Hindustan Times, 25/11/20

In Indian cities, the quest for dignity

 

Many cities still subscribe to an unhelpful policy which enjoins that the people living in “unauthorised” colonies are not eligible to get water and sanitation from the city, although they are “authorised” citizens, holding ration cards, working in the city and contributing to its economy.

Cities in India are characterised by institutionalised inequalities. Planners, administrators and mayors prioritise policies and resources in favour of the influential middle-class, with little thought spared for those less fortunate, despite their making up a substantial portion of any city.

Geeta Devi used to live and work as construction worker at Yamuna Pushta in Delhi. In the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, she and another 30,000 other households were moved to Savda Ghebra area on the outskirts. “It was like coming to a wild jungle, with nothing around, no water, no toilets, no electricity and we had no house. We had to build our own kutcha house, every second day a water tank would come and we spent hours carrying buckets of water. We used the jungle for defecation. My children were often ill and I had to stop working, so we had very little money. We were in despair,” she said. She was poor — and expendable.

Babuben Patni, a vegetable vendor, after marriage, came to live in Ahmedabad City. She found that her area — Sinheswari Nagar — had only one public tap, no toilets. It had garbage piled up at the entrance of the area and was water-logged every monsoon. Apart from the residents contracting water-borne diseases, women such as Babuben faced the humiliation of having to defecate on the railway tracks nearby.

Geeta Devis and Babubens abound in every city, always characterised by the contrast between areas dominated by multistoried buildings, parks, shopping centres, malls and gyms on the one hand and ramshackle, tightly-packed dwellings without infrastructure on the other.

In India, between 25% to 40% of city-dwellers are estimated to live in what are euphemistically called informal settlements. However, a slum need not remain a slum forever. And, that is the story we tell in our book, The City-Makers.

Today, 20 years later, Babuben is the proud owner of a two-storey pucca house with her own bathroom and toilet. Sinheswari Nagar has drainage, and sewage and garbage is collected every day.

How did the change come about? Not overnight.

We detail a long-drawn-out process, involving a chain of actors, from individual households to a non-governmental organisation — Mahila Housing Trust — to officials and elected representatives of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, among others. My colleagues and I in the Mahila Housing Trust have worked for over 25 years to help convert slums into more liveable colonies. The real spark for change starts with the women in slum households who have to queue up to get water; who suffer humiliation when they have to defecate in the open or in badly-maintained public toilets; who have to look after those who get sick from the open festering drains. They are the most keenest on change.The first step for change is for the households in a slum to agree that they will work together. Women must take the lead and form a Community Action Group (CAG), which then becomes the spearhead for action, beginning with finding allies such as a sympathetic elected official or the local administrator.

This often requires a financial commitment from the slum-dwellers and it is the task of CAG to collect the money and maintain accounts. Trust is important because these slum dwellers, most of whom are poor and working in the informal sector, have been cheated so often in the past.

Many cities still subscribe to an unhelpful policy which enjoins that the people living in “unauthorised” colonies are not eligible to get water and sanitation from the city, although they are “authorised” citizens, holding ration cards, working in the city and contributing to its economy.Fortunately, the compulsions of electoral democracy assert themselves. Those in “unauthorised” colonies also happen to have votes; fortunately, programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Mission are kicking in. Consequently, the “unauthorised” restrictions are being relaxed — and where that happens, the slum slowly begins to transform.

Fourteen years later, Geeta Devi, says her “jungle” in Savda Ghebra has become a busy colony. This happened gradually as she and her neighbours formed a CAG, approached their MLA, the Delhi Jal Board and the municipal corporation. She took a loan and installed her own underground water pump and made her own soak pit. At first, her CAG was ignored by the authorities but as they persisted they began getting responses. Today, not only is she recognised by the authorities but was recently invited to be part of consultations for the Delhi Master Plan 2030.

The efforts of thousands of women like Geeta Devi and Babuben are paying massive civic dividends. Many planners no longer think of the poor as interlopers; instead, they are seen as useful citizens who need to be integrated into the physical life of the city if we are to have a sustainable future.

Renana Jhabvala is executive trustee, Mahila Housing SEWA Trust and co-author of The City-Makers

Source: Hindustan Times, 21/10/20

Urban employment guarantee scheme signifies India’s failure to address inequality

Half-baked countercyclical policies such as the promise of an urban employment guarantee are an apology for the larger failure to address the unequal distribution of fruits of economic growth.

The opposition is reportedly mulling on including the promise of an urban employment guarantee scheme in its Common Minimum Programme ahead of the 2019 elections. In principle, the idea sounds tempting.

The rural employment guarantee scheme, which was launched by the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, has proved to be a useful countercyclical policy tool in the rural economy. The recently leaked findings of the first Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) have shown the unemployment rate to be at significantly higher levels than it has been in a long time. GDP data shows that the present government has fared relatively badly in terms of growth in employment intensive non-farm sectors such as construction. Can an urban employment guarantee scheme can solve these problems?

The rural guarantee scheme works on self-selection. All of the work under the scheme is of the unskilled manual nature such as digging ponds and making link roads in villages. This means that no special skills are required for the job seekers. Can (and, more importantly, should) such a framework be implemented in the urban economy?

The basic premise of a healthy rural to urban economic transformation is to transfer workers from low-skill and low-productivity professions to high-skill jobs. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an urban employment guarantee scheme to ensure this. Given the fact that common land — which is where most of the rural guarantee works happen — is more scarce in cities than in villages, even a perverse (and undesirable) unskilled job guarantee would be difficult to implement in cities.

Are the opposition parties and their advisors not aware of these facts? Most probably, they are. Why are they making such promises, then? The explanation probably lies in the perverse evolution of India’s political economy narrative in the post-reform period. Most political parties agree that reforms have been good for economic growth. But they are also aware of the rising inequality and an acute shortage of quality jobs in this phase. The tragedy is that there are very few political actors who have the imagination and political will to widen the transformative impact of economic reforms for the mass of the population.

Half-baked countercyclical policies such as the promise of an urban employment guarantee are an apology for the larger failure to address the unequal distribution of fruits of economic growth. But such moves will not be able to douse the aspirational anger which characterises the urban unemployed. They will also divert scarce resources which could have been better utilised.

Source: Hindustan Times, 5/03/2019

Widening urban, rural divide must be addressed

Confusion and conflict among the younger generation from rural areas can lead to social tensions and this needs to be dealt with immediately.

Among the many contradictions and paradoxes of Gurugram are the varied kinds of settlements in the city. In general, when Gurugram is mentioned, all we think of are the swanky office buildings and gated communities of New Gurugram. I wrote a few weeks ago about the large migrant population that are often invisible in the city. But there are also the urban villages which are a key part of the city. We know them as areas such as Sikanderpur, Nathupur, Tigda, Wazirabad, Jharsa and Ghata among others.

Gurugram was just a set of villages in the 1960’s when private developers began buying the land. At that time, the Haryana government was the only state government that allowed for private developers to buy land directly from farmers. This began the process of transforming agricultural land in this area for non-agricultural purposes. Over the years, several private developers have bought land directly from the farmers and land owners. The two decades following the 1980’s saw a flurry of land being acquired for private buildings.

While the local villagers sold their agricultural land, they continued to live in the villages. There were around 100 villages. With the setting up of the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon in 2008, many of these villages became incorporated into the city.

Some of the villagers made a fair amount of money selling their lands which they either invested in lands further away, building houses, setting up small businesses and even on luxury items such as fancy cars. There were of course some who did not and some who kept the lands had to sell them to HUDA for lower compensations.

These areas are very poorly served in terms of infrastructure and services. Thus, even today inside some of these areas, you will find poor narrow streets, poor drainage and sewage facilities and these are quite in contrast to the gated communities that they border. The areas are extremely congested and densely populated. While the private developers have provided services to residents where it was not given by the city, these areas became neglected. One of the main problems of this city has been poor service delivery by the city authorities.

While they are residents of this city, many of them feel a sense of alienation and even erasure of their histories. These villages are enclaves within the larger city of high rise buildings and malls. Some of them have set up businesses, others work as drivers or security guards. Many of them are landlords now, renting their properties to migrants who come into the city looking for work.

In her research on these urban villages, anthropologist Shubra Gururani found that many of them choose to continue living in the village area as they enjoy the traditional village ethos and structure. The village remains a support network for them. Even though there are more migrants now living in these areas, the landowners and the original inhabitants of the area have a sense of belonging to the village, and often a sense of marginalisation in the larger city.

This reality of Gurugram needs to be addressed and the city must be seen as a conglomeration of all the different sets of people who inhabit it. For many of the younger generation in the urban villages, the lifestyles of new Gurugram are aspirational and this leads to both confusion and conflicts. These need to be dealt with and not swept under the carpet. The diversity of Indian cities and the people who inhabit them are part of the contemporary urbanisation process, but the increasing divides and exclusions can only lead to social tensions.

@SafetipinApp

Co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, the author works on issues of women’s safety and rights in cities

Source: Hindustan Times, 21/02/2019

Urban Only In Name

One-fourth of the urban population lives in these small towns (20,000 to 1,00,000 population). These 7 crore people need amenities to match up to their ‘urban’ status. Many of these towns may not be in the vicinity of big cities

Small towns in India are something of an oxymoron. They are far removed from cities in character and appearance and are constantly struggling to establish their “urbanness”. A drive along the outskirts of Gajraula, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, will reveal impressive fast food and retail joints, industrial plants and higher education institutes. But the town’s interior represents a different picture. It’s riddled with open drains, lacks sewerage along and is heavily-polluted. Sardhana, in contrast, boasts of a rich historical past — it’s home to the famous early 19th-century church built by Begum Samru. But Sardhana, which is situated away from the national highway, fares poorly on development parameters like Gajraula.

Every small town in India has its unique story and significance but their problems are similar — lack of basic services, dilapidated infrastructure, overcrowded spaces and dwindling job opportunities. However, these towns have thriving marketplaces with urbanesque spaces like supermarkets, beauty parlours and gymnasiums. They have private schools and clinics, a variety of fast-food eateries, modern tailoring shops and mobile and electronic stores. Such entrepreneurial energy says something about the growing small-town population which desires better services and an improved quality of life. But this is relatively unrecognised by the government.

The UPA government’s urban development programme, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), covered both big cities and small towns but gave financial preference to the former. The criticisms of JNNURM did lead the UPA government to change focus towards small towns in JNNURM-2. However, the change in government in 2014 led to amendments in urban policy. JNNURM was replaced by the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) that focusses on infrastructural development for Class I cities (those with a popu1ation of one lakh and above). The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) was launched to address our growing fascination with world-class cities that use technology to improve their services.

The common thread between these urban schemes is that they cater to Class I cities, which already have better access to services. For example, as per the 2011 census, 50 to 60 per cent of households in these cities have access to piped sewerage and closed drains. The percentage of population who have access to these services in smaller towns is way lower.

One-fourth of the urban population lives in these small towns (20,000 to 1,00,000 population). These 7 crore people need amenities to match up to their “urban” status. Many of these towns may not be in the vicinity of big cities. But though they are small in size, many of these small towns have an enormous growth potential. Yet, mega cities continue to be seen as engines of economic growth and attract large sums of central investments just to sustain the weight of their population. But what seems to be forgotten is that the smaller towns have been doing that for decades with very little policy attention.

Many studies have shown that the benefits of small town development can spill over to villages, especially in terms of employment generation. Others have talked about the need for a well-spread network of cities to counter the problems of migration. But this discourse has remained at the level of the academia; it hasn’t translated into policy.

The debate between progress and development is not new — the former is largely about world-class cities while the latter focuses on a more inclusive agenda. But the current government’s focus on big cities is problematic. The development of small towns can make these urban centres fulfill the long-standing demand for a link between rural India and the country’s big cities and towns. The growing population in these small towns needs to be backed by adequate investments by the Centre. There should be a key role for these urban centres in development planning.

The writer is with the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

Source: Indian Express, 21/11/2018

A gated revolution

Current forms of urban politics construct a new aam aadmi: The relatively privileged white-collar professional who feels he has been denied his rights due to ‘appeasement’ of the poor.

Urban India is the site of the most dramatic changes in human life. The manner in which we work, live, play, do business, enter into relationships and construct communities is firmly entrenched in the life of our cities. The romanticised village of post-Independence cinema holds little interest for young people in particular, as they seek new futures within possibilities offered by the inexorable expansion of urban agglomerations. Through unplanned and semi-planned means, our cities absorb — with different degrees of hospitality — migrants of different capacities, including those escaping provincial feudal social and economic structures and the fading promise of regional development. In 2011, for the first time since the Census came into being, the absolute urban growth recorded a higher rate than the rural one. Urban life for many may still be brutish, but it is possibly longer and not as short as in the countryside.

The exuberant abandon of urban growth has been accompanied by a quieter but just as significant process that will also deeply influence city life in subsequent years: A very significant middle-class participation in urban planning and development. This new aspect of the urban can be most frequently witnessed in the manner in which Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs) are able to galvanise members to act on an issue that affects their perceived interests. The growth of RWAs is, in turn, linked to both political nurturing of an important constituency (such as the Delhi Bhagidari scheme under the Congress) and a gathering sense of self among middle-class urban residents.

This is a new form of activism, enacted through lycra-clad bicycle enthusiasts, leisure activists, environmentalists, bird-watchers and “ordinary mums and dads” who want a better life in the city. The ongoing residents’ campaign against the construction of a six-lane highway through Gurgaon’s Aravalli Bio-Diversity Park that stretches over 400 acres is a case in point. Spurred through word of mouth, social media and news reports, protesters have gathered in their thousands, with steely resolve and placards aloft. Alongside, local editions of national newspapers have carried extended coverage of protests as well as columns by Gurgaon residents that speak of the kinds of sustainable infrastructure that cities need for a decent life. The protagonists are articulate and rational in their evaluation: The urban fabric requires careful attention to the balance between physical and natural surroundings. “Who will bring back the birds?”, they rightly ask in one strong voice.

Strangely, however, cities such as Gurgaon hardly ever elicit such response — and it is difficult to gather a group of 50 protesters — when it is the social fabric of the city that is in question. In the very recent past, the city has been witness to events that are fundamental to defining the social nature of cities. In Gurgaon, for example, one religious community’s public right to worship has been sought to be curtailed (while placing no limits on others) and there have been severe disturbances that relate to working conditions of factory labour, including those at Maruti’s factory in Manesar.

Another site of significant urban development near Delhi, Noida, witnessed a riot-like situation when workers stormed a gated enclave to protest against the alleged overnight detention of one of their colleagues who worked in the complex. These, too, are issues and events that determine the nature of a city.

However, it frequently appears that the more our cities expand, the more narrow — and gated — our perspective of our place within them. It is striking that the well-off primarily consider urban life as the sum-total of its physical infrastructure, gathering in large numbers to protest against it or argue for it. However, the social life of a city — a decent existence for its most vulnerable populations — appears to not interest many. The emerging nature of urban politics, an apparent revolution that primarily concerns itself with the interests of a small group versus wider discontent that parades in tattered saris and trousers has the potential to produce deeply fragmented cities, if it hasn’t already done so.

The current forms of urban politics are quite different from mass political movements we have seen in the past and it is this difference that holds the key to the kind of society we may end up with. Its key concerns are based on redefining the idea of the “ordinary” person. The ordinary person now is the relatively privileged white-collar professional who, it is asserted, has been exploited and denied his or her rights because of state “appeasement” of the poor. The ordinary person pays taxes and gets little in return; the ordinary person pays for electricity while slum-dwellers steal it. The anger of this ordinary man is at the heart of a new sense of the city where the apparently dispossessed stake a claim through agitational activities that are increasingly narrowly defined in terms of their objectives. This new outlook seems particularly prevalent in newer urban locations where the separation between the well-off and the poor is embedded in the fundamentals of planning.

Our cities will fail not just because we lack parks, gardens and highways. Rather, they will slide into dystopian states because of a failure of the imagination. The nature of a liveable city is fundamentally connected to the possibilities of freedom and decency of life for the vast majority that has limited means to influence these aspects. A “global” or “smart” city is, primarily, an advanced form of habitation because of the manner in which its residents think. What is required is an urban consciousness that is concerned with both the physical infrastructure as well as its social one: Diversity, equity, and fair treatment of its most vulnerable workers. Without such a consciousness, we will end up with a situation where it is easy to gather the well-off to defend a park but impossible to make them rise to defend the idea of a city.

The writer is professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

Source: Indian Express, 13/11/2018

Our cities cannot be smart, until they are accessible for everybody

Contractors hired to remove the barriers in the urban built environment must not be paid till civil society representatives sign off on the projects

The Delhi government’s public works department has set December 2019 as the deadline to make more than 500 buildings managed by it accessible to differently abled people, a notification issued by the department this week said. The buildings will have ramps, railings and accessible washrooms, apart from trained staff to assist the physically challenged.

At first glance, the State appears to be becoming more sensitive towards the needs of the more than 26.8 million physically challenged people in the country. The National Democratic Alliance government was proactive in amending the Person With Disabilities Act, 2016, to broaden its scope along with the Accessible India campaign with the objective of encouraging disabled-friendly buildings and human resource policies. As a part of this, 1,707 buildings were identified to be made accessible. Across 57 Indian cities, auditors provided pointers to the government on the features that could help buildings become accessible. After the audits, state governments sent proposals to the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) which released funds to retrofit these buildings. According to section 44 of the Persons with Disabilities Act, the norms for retrofitting included the creation of ramps in public buildings, modification of toilets for wheelchair users and installation of Braille symbols in elevators. But the progress on this front has been sluggish. In March this year, even the Delhi High Court criticised the slow pace at which access audits for the disabled were moving.

In May this year, the Union finance ministry made it mandatory for new projects to incorporate accessibility costing in the total project cost when proposals are sent for expenditure finance committee approvals. This can help in creating an accessible physical environment since retrofitting later turns out to be a financial and design challenge. Any new construction project such as a flyover where pedestrian crossings are being planned or an overbridge or a new government building – would mandatorily have accessibility features built in.

As part of the Accessible India Campaign, the flagship national programme to make public buildings and transport less hostile for the physically challenged, 50% of these were to be made fully disabled friendly by July 2018. But more than two years after the launch of the campaign, only 3% of buildings have become accessible, according to the DEPwD.

It isn’t just inaccessible buildings that create barriers for the disabled. Along with that, our public transport is notoriously hostile towards the needs of the differently abled. The Centre’s target of making at least 25% of public transport disabled-friendly is yet to be met. Unlike the Metro rail, which has accessibility features built in, other trains are inaccessible. Census 2011 data reveals that of the 13.4 million people with disabilities in India in the employable age group of 15-59 years, 9.9 million were non-workers or marginal workers. Not only are we forcing millions of India’s unemployed with disabilities to be dependent on social security or their families and caregivers, the hostile environment and public transport also robs them of the dignity of carrying out tasks that everybody else takes for granted.

Access is no longer a a social duty, it’s a constitutional obligation. The government’s Smart Cities Mission offers a good opportunity to ensure inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in workplace, neighbourhood activities and in social life. Beyond displaying the political will to create disabled-friendly buildings, the government will now have to hold stakeholders accountable. Perhaps, Indian cities can emulate the example of Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where disability organisations identify barriers in a city’s built environment. The contractors hired to remove the barriers are not paid till civil society representatives sign off on the projects. Our cities cannot be called smart till they are accessible for everybody.

aasheesh.sharma@hindustantimes.com

Source: Hindustan Times, 23/10/2018

Not so great walls

Gated communities don’t make cities safer — only offer a bubble

We are surrounded by them in all our suburbs. They are so ubiquitous that we don’t even think of them as a separate urban form. Big, private residential spaces, enclosed by a wall and tall gates, inside which are worlds unto themselves, containing a swimming pool, a club house and tennis court at least, and sometimes, restaurants, golf greens and spas. They have names like Nirvana, Garden City or Laburnum, that evoke luxury and exotic chic. Their ads describe them in florid prose, extolling their closeness to nature, exclusivity and promise of luxury.

Gated communities. The modern-day version of the fortresses that medieval nobility built to keep themselves safe and private. The trend for such dwellings picked up in southern California in the 1960s; these continue to form a major share of the real estate market in the US. But their most remarkable growth has been in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and, of course, India, where they have proliferated largely because of a lack of confidence in law enforcement.

In India, as the middle class grew more disappointed with the state’s ability to assure personal safety or basic utilities like continuous power supply and clean water, it ran into the waiting arms of property developers, who offered walled residences where everything that the state failed to provide could be bought. A security industry, itself often dubious and ill-equipped, emerged in parallel. A fear of crime and the “outsider” have always been fundamental reasons for people moving into gated communities: But are we any safer here? In the US, when gated communities were growing rapidly in the 1990s, studies showed that the long-term crime rate altered very marginally. Some studies concluded that the crime gets pushed to low income, less secure neighbourhoods. In India too, there are frequent reports in the mass media about criminals who easily breach the porous security of a gated complex.

Eventually, every gated community dweller must engage with the city. A woman living in a complex in Gurgaon still has to go to work, possibly in Delhi. Even if she drives a car, lonely parking lots, possible harassment at traffic signals and the risk of provoking road rage in a driver by daring to overtake him are still a reality. There is only so much running away from the city that you can do because you cannot fortify yourself from the business of living. There are offices and schools to attend, markets to visit, people to meet. To not keep looking over your shoulder — which Indian women are instinctively used to doing — our streets and public transport need to be safe. Outside the gates of the posh complex, the reality of the city bites hard.

In fact, it becomes even more stark because of the wall around the complex. All the action, children in playgrounds, kids playing football, happens within the gates. At some distance is a slum or a village. In-between are streets on which only a few walk, fearful of any passing motorbike, wary of the silence. If the wall wasn’t there, life would be conducted outside. Children would come to a public park to play, homemakers would walk to the neighbourhood market, retired people would stroll on the pavements. There would be more noise, more people out and therefore, greater social surveillance against petty crimes. That’s how it was just about two decades ago when there were no urban islands inviting you to live in “another place, another world”, to quote the taglines of a builder’s advertisement.

The tall gates of the complex are a message to the poor that their world is separate from ours and we wish to safeguard ourselves from the “contamination” they represent. The separation of “us” and “them” is anathema to social harmony and can only foster resentment, laying the basis for more crime. Gated communities may have made rich Indians “feel” more secure — but they haven’t made the streets any safer. That needs a different response altogether from the state. Hiding ourselves in private enclaves cannot be a solution to our unsafe cities.

Vasudevan studies urban spaces, mobility and gender and has authored ‘Urban Villager: Life in an Indian Satellite Town’

Source: Indian Express, 17-02-2017

Ourview The promise and pitfalls of urbanization in India

The urbanization that has taken place is skewed and cannot be a healthy long-term model

The eye has never seen a place like it,” wrote Persian ambassador Abdur Razzak of Vijayanagara, capital of the Vijayanagara empire, “and the ear was never informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world.” He was writing in 1443, during the long summer of the empire. Other visitors would praise the city’s wealth and prosperity in later years; Domingo Paes, a Portuguese traveller, compared it favourably to the Italian city-states in 1520. A high compliment indeed—the latter, at the height of the Renaissance, were global centres of wealth, commerce and culture. Sailing east along the Mediterranean coast would have brought a traveller like Paes to one of their few rivals, Constantinople (now Istanbul)—in its time the richest and largest city in Europe.The role of cities as engines of economic growth and innovation has a long history. Urban studies pioneer Jane Jacobs has argued that cities, not nation-states, are the main players in macroeconomics. The Economic Survey, 2016-17 starts its chapter on cities as growth dynamos by quoting her, as it happens. It goes on to detail the manner in which urbanization has defined—and will continue to define—Indian development. From 1991 to 2011, the percentage of India’s population that lives in cities and towns has increased from a quarter to a third. This segment produces more than three-fifths of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The survey notes that controlling for GDP per capita, India’s rate of urbanization is not particularly slow—and as the former picks up, so will the latter.

Higher rates of urbanization will in turn boost GDP more, creating a virtuous cycle; the core thesis of agglomeration economics is that productivity increases with proximity to high levels of economic activity such as are likely to be found in urban centres. A 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper, What Is Different About Urbanization In Rich And Poor Countries? Cities In Brazil, China, India And The United States, finds that the agglomeration effect in India is, in fact, larger than the US. Nor are the benefits confined to capital owners. Unlike the other countries studied, there is a significant real-wage premium associated with denser population clusters in India. There are also associated differences in the quality of human capital due to differences in the quality of education and the like. In other words, greater urbanization in India will boost citizens’ quality of life just as it will boost the GDP.

So far, so good. But urbanization in India also faces a large number of problems, many of them related to internal migration. The 2011 census showed that a third of India’s population consisted of internal migrants. The NBER paper, however, noted that “only two per cent of the sample had moved during the preceding five years in 2011, and that figure replicates results for 2001 and 1993. Less than one per cent of the population had made a major move.” A substantial number of studies back this up. Although there is a lack of comprehensive data about the composition of India’s migrant population—a problem in itself when it comes to policymaking— independent surveys point to the reason for the discrepancy: The majority of internal migrants are seasonal workers.

Thus, policymakers must address two parallel issues: how to enable temporary migrants, and how to enable more long-term migration in the formal sector. There are no silver bullets here, only a host of overlapping measures. Empowering urban local bodies (ULBs) is one, as the Survey points out. The political deficit—the lack of responsibility and authority vested in a city government— leads to governance fragmentation, deficits in funding and infrastructure and low expenditure per capita. This failure of the majority of cities to deliver adequate services and infrastructure means that urbanization patterns are skewed, adding pressure on a handful of already burdened urban centres.

Another measure is allowing temporary migrants to easily access financial services and benefits. The present administration’s JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) Yojana is a start—but only that, as the numerous reports of account dormancy and duplication show. Stabilization here, allowing migrants to access and transfer resources through formal banking, must be followed by delinking benefits from location to the extent possible and gradually shifting to the direct benefits transfer model.

That would be just a start. Encouraging more compact urban development through changing land use regulations, investing in urban mobility and addressing the convoluted classification process of census towns that results in denied urbanization should all be on the menu. As matters stand, the many problems mean that the organizing principle of urban economics—spatial equilibrium, which dictates that if an urban centre has high wages and good services, it will also have a high cost of living, which in turn will make other centres attractive and lead to equalization of growth across a region—has failed to function adequately in India. The skewed urbanization that has resulted cannot be a healthy long-term model.

Source: Mintepaper, 9-02-2017

The overrated urban spinoff

Agriculture’s contribution to poverty reduction is five times more than that of metropolitan centres

Speaking at the third BRICS Urbanisation Forum in Visakhapatnam on September 14, Deputy Chairman of the Niti Ayog, Arvind Panagariya, announced that “Without cities we can’t grow rapidly”. He added, “urbanisation plays an important role in poverty alleviation”. Both claims are exaggerated and somewhat misleading.

A recent report prepared for the UN points out that, over the last two decades, India’s urban population increased from 217 million to 377 million, and this is expected to reach 600 million by 2031 — 40 per cent of the country’s population. The current pattern of urbanisation is largely taking place on the fringe of cities, much of it is unplanned and outside the purview of city codes and bylaws. It is already imposing high costs. The gap in urban infrastructure investment over the next 20 years is estimated at $827 billion; two-thirds of this is required for urban roads and traffic support. So the case for higher investment in urban development is compelling. The key question, however, is whether a substantial hike in urban infrastructure investment would imply a substantially lower increase in rural investment. It is difficult to offer a precise answer but something can be said about the growth and poverty effects of rural transformation relative to those of urban development.

A recent IMF study measured the impact of urbanisation on rural poverty in India using the NSS data over 1983-1984, 1993-1994 and 1999-2000. It distinguished between the location and the economic linkage effects. The former entails reduction in rural poverty due to the change in residence — from rural areas to cities. The latter focuses on the impact of growth of the urban population on the rural poverty rate. There are several channels through which urban population growth affects poverty in surrounding areas: Consumption linkages, rural non-agricultural employment, remittances, rural land/labour ratios, rural land prices and consumer prices.

Urbanisation has a significant poverty-reducing effect on the surrounding rural areas. Over the entire period in question, poverty reduced between 13 per cent and 25 per cent as a result of urbanisation. But this reduction is not as substantial when compared to the reduction in rural poverty brought about by state-led rural bank branch expansion, which explains approximately half of the overall reduction of rural poverty between 1961 and 2000. A major flaw of the IMF study is that it examines the role of urbanisation in isolation of rural transformation — especially emergence of high value chains and more remunerative opportunities for labourers, smallholders and those self-employed in non-agricultural activities. Just like urban transformation, rural transformation has a multiplier effect on poverty reduction. As agriculture modernises, for example, it reduces rural poverty and overall poverty through greater demand for chemical fertilisers, pesticides, machine services, processed seeds or fuels, which promote non-agricultural production. Besides, higher incomes in rural areas promote demand for processed foods produced mainly in urban areas and generate employment. Decrease in food prices due to agricultural growth results in better food security and overall poverty reduction in both rural and urban areas, while the reduction of food prices lowers the real product wage in the non-agricultural sector, thereby raising profitability and investment in that sector. So, without comparison of direct and multiplier effects of rural transformation and urbanisation, an isolated analysis of either sector is likely to be misleading.

Our research encompasses this broader perspective. We examine overall growth and poverty effects of both agriculture and non-agriculture, taking into account the linkages between them. As the non-agricultural sector includes both rural non-agricultural and urban activities, we disaggregate the rural areas into agriculture and non-agriculture sub-sectors, and the urban areas into small towns, secondary towns and metropolitan cities in order to compare their effects on poverty.

As a country grows and shifts from the low income to the middle income category, the nature of agriculture typically changes from subsistence-oriented farming to more commercialised and market farming. It then has a closer linkage with the non-agricultural sector. Our analysis shows that spillovers from agricultural growth rate are twice as large as from non-agricultural growth. Besides, agricultural growth has a much stronger poverty-reducing effect than non-agricultural growth.

We also examined the separate effects of agriculture, rural non-agriculture and metropolitan cities on poverty, relative to secondary towns. Using a decomposition that allows sectoral population shares as proxies for their contributions to poverty reduction, used in a recent World Bank study, we found that the (proportionate) poverty reduction is largest for agriculture. Contrary to the World Bank’s conclusion, we found that agriculture’s contribution to poverty reduction is five times more than that of metropolitan cities.

Although a definitive conclusion about public investment priorities will depend on the pattern of rural transformation and urbanisation, there is a strong case for rural transformation through easier access to new technology, credit and markets. Strengthening of extension services, rural infrastructure and skill formation will not only raise productivity and living standards but also curb rural-urban migration. Our analysis shows that creating more remunerative opportunities in rural areas deserves greater emphasis.

Gaiha is visiting scientist, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston; and honorary professorial fellow at Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England. Katsushi. S. Imai, associate professor, economics, University of Manchester, has co-authored this article