By: Mausumi Das
(Associate professor, Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics)
The proportion of people living in cities is growing rapidly in India. The percentage of urban population increased from 17% in 1951 to 29% in 2001 and is expected to reach about 37% by 2021. It is predicted that by 2050, 50% of India’s total population will be city dwellers. Urbanisation in itself is a sign of prosperity. With job opportunities concentrated primarily across cities in India, and rising per capita income, city-dwelling has become essential as well as affordable.
Yet, rampant urbanisation has brought in its wake a plethora of miseries: rising pollution, congestion on roads, overcrowding in public transportation, failing public infrastructure and expansion of slums, marring the city landscape. Rapidly growing slum areas, adjacent to luxurious modern housing facilities, have come under media glare recently for their alleged role in increasing incidents of crime. Slums are often projected as undesirable outgrowth and perceived as infringement upon basic civic rights of the city-dwelling population. This black and white categorisation misses out the point that slums are natural by-products of urbanisation, especially in a labour-surplus country like India. Urbanisation requires provision of various kinds of consumer services. In a labour-surplus economy, cheap labour is available to provide these services. Hence, an informal sector develops to complement the formal sector. Wages are low but, at the same time, these jobs require physical proximity to centres of employment (cities). So, slums develop.
Contrary to popular belief, growing slum areas is not the primary drawback of modern city life. The basic problem lies elsewhere. Development of basic infrastructure around a city (roads, electricity, water, sewerage, security) is state responsibility. Economics tells us that many of these are natural monopolies; therefore, state is the most efficient provider of these utilities. Yet, we are increasingly witnessing withdrawal of the state from all kinds of public utilities. The reason is partly financial (lack of sufficient resources) and partly political (privatisation being the popular chant). The inevitable outcome is the crumbling of infrastructure, law and order problems, and so on.
In advanced western countries where labour is not so cheap, use of machines is more common. Some countries (e.g. China) also have strict laws that restrict migration. Yet in a democracy like India, such draconian laws are neither feasible nor desirable. The only possible solution is a proactive state, which plans, regulates and provides infrastructural support to the urbanisation process. In a properly planned township, one would expect cheap subsidised housing to accommodate the residential requirement of informal sector workers. But urban planning is India is almost nonexistent. Haphazard urbanisation under private initiative precludes any such pre-planned accommodation for poorer people.
Haphazard urbanisation under private initiative also contributes to rising inequality — not only in income, but in the social sector as well. Private provisioning cannot be a substitute for public merit goods. It is not even efficient. Also, private initiative will always exclude the poor who cannot pay the steep price of private facilities. A city might have state-of-the-art, super-specialty private hospitals, which the poor cannot access. There might be excellent private schools, which are beyond the reach of poor kids. With the state abdicating its responsibility, rising inequality seems inevitable. Rising inequality will bring in other problems in terms of rising intolerance, political and social instability. Blaming the slum population for all problems in urban India is rather misguided. The onus of making our cities habitable lies on the state. At the end of the day, it remains a state failure.
Sector 23