New data shows urban renewal at snail’s pace

It had been always suspected that the driver programmes of the Narendra Modi government intended to bring about urban transformation were moving slowly. However, data released by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Urban Development has shocked even the most diehard Modi supporters. The worst performance has been by the grandiose Smart Cities Mission mandated to build 100 smart cities in a decade. The funds allocated for such a massive programme are peanuts; Rs 48,000 crore in Central support over five years is really a drop in the ocean. But that is not the issue. It is the fact that of the funds released, the utilisation has been miniscule. According to the Parliamentary panel, of the total

Rs 9,943 crore released so far, the Smart Cities Mission has utilised just Rs 182 crore, a paltry 1.83 per cent. 

The other urban programmes have similarly been languishing. For the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), a frontline initiative to provide 500 cities with crucial infrastructure like sewerage lines and local transport, just 13 per cent has been released of the allocated Rs 50,000 crore till 2019-20. Even of this, the actual utilisation for projects on the ground has been just 28 per cent. In case of the Prime Minister’s Swacch Bharat Abhiyan, merely 38 per cent allocated have been used, while the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), designed to provide Housing to All by 2022, has used just 21 per cent.

SMART CITIES FALTER

The Smart Cities Mission excited the most attention as it aimed to transform existing crumbling cities and building new cities by syncing information and communication technology with urban services such as transportation and waste management. What has happened on the ground so far is a public relations exercise in choosing the 100 ‘Smart Cities’ and the time-wasting bureaucratic process of setting up organisational logistics to implement these projects. The Parliamentary Panel blamed the shortage of town planners available with municipal and local bodies and shoddy work. But is the malaise deeper considering the lack of nodal government focus and supervision?  

Data culled by IndiaSpend.org shows that just three per cent, or 23 projects of 642 identified, were completed by February last year; and work on another 65 or 10 per cent of projects valued at Rs 2,737 crore had just begun. The Parliamentary Committee noted in its report that while the projections were huge — as much as Rs 2.04 lakh crore worth of projects had been identified — the ground movement of the Mission was less than a snail’s pace. Just 86 projects had got Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in place, and 64 had Project Monitoring Cells. 

Communication and technology firms too are getting restless. Nokia has been critical of the tardy pace of the Smart Cities Mission. “We have learned from other parts of the world that you don’t have to go to the mayor or the city council, but to businesses like retail malls, utility companies, and parking garages,” Rakesh Kushwaha, Global Head Nokia’s IoT business said in an interview. 

AMRUT MISSION

The AMRUT is a renaming of the earlier Congress government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNRUM), aimed at transforming the civic and housing infrastructure of 500 Indian cities. However, a government report card showed that of the 330 urban local bodies, only 40 — mainly in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha — carried out majority of the 11 reforms mandated. 

The reforms include introducing services such as payment of property tax, creating a dedicated municipal cadre and bringing in double-entry accounting for municipal finances. In UP, for instance, only one out of 61 municipalities adopted most of the reforms.In comparison, the JnNRUM, launched in December 2005 as a seven-year plan to fund urban infrastructure and basic services in 65 cities, allocated over Rs 66,000 crore. It funded the water supply systems in several cities like Aurangabad, and backed the famed Pimpri-Chinchwad and Ahmedabad Bus Rapid Transport Systems. But more importantly, it achieved some degree of success too in committing cities to a series of measures including the preparation of a city development plan and setting up of a planning authority.Unfortunately, the grandiose urban programmes of the NDA government raised hopes sky high, and therefore, the dismal failure of over-the-top targets has bred even more cynicism about future.