Disparate events in recent weeks have offered a window into how India’s governing class, regardless of party, sees our cities.
On May 15, the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) replaced, nominally for now and substantially in due course, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike as the city’s governing body. The chief minister of Karnataka will be GBA’s chairman. Various civic functions, including land, water supply, sewage and electricity, currently provided by separate agencies under the state government, are to come under its umbrella.
Later in May, the prime minister, speaking to the governing council of Niti Aayog, asked states to make cities, especially Tier 2 and Tier 3 ones, the engine of sustainability and growth, and referred to the Urban Challenge Fund (UCF) announced in this year’s budget with a planned corpus of ₹1 lakh crore.
The UCF also anchors the $10-billion plan for India’s urban transformation announced by the Asian Development Bank, after its president met with the prime Minister. Curiously, the announcement makes specific reference to “metro extensions [and] new regional rapid transit system corridors” and “private investment for urban infrastructure”, indicating that the investments and UCF are targeted at larger cities.
Finally, last month, following on from the trend to mandate sewage treatment plants in apartment complexes in which Karnataka is a pioneer, the newly-elected Delhi government made it mandatory for high-rise commercial, institutional and hospitality buildings to install anti-smog guns to combat air pollution.
What do these events tell us about how to address three big questions that shape our approach to urbanisation? First, should we focus on the biggest cities or the not-so-big ones? Second, as K C Sivaramakrishnan, a former secretary in the ministry of urban development, was fond of asking: “Who rules the city?” And third, what should we think of as the city—the urban local body or the economic region? After all, as part of its Growth Hub initiative, Niti Aayog has advanced an economic master plan for the Surat ‘region’ comprising five districts.
As an economist, one is tempted to favour ‘large’ cities, where much vaunted agglomeration economies supposedly drive economic growth. And yet, it is not clear how large a city needs to be to benefit from these economies. Boston and San Francisco, two global hotspots for new ideas, both have less than a million people. This is also true for European hubs of innovation such as Torino in Italy and Braga in Portugal.
India has many more cities with a population above a million than the US, Europe and Japan combined. The districts around the 10 largest cities in India by population have less than a tenth of India’s population, but a little over a fifth of India’s GDP. Should one focus on these or, as the PM said, on the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities? Might it be easier to improve governance in smaller cities compared to our large metros?
Large cities are difficult to govern. Not only is their infrastructure complex and large, large cities also embed significant opportunities for rent extraction. Small changes in rules can generate substantial changes in the value of land—for example, during the redevelopment of textile mills in Mumbai.
This is true not just in India, but in other countries, too—such as the growth machines in the US and local governments in China, whose officials are often disciplined for corruption. It is understandable, therefore, if state politicians balk at handing these decisions and rents over to local representatives. By contrast, smaller cities with limited rents may stand a chance of being better governed.
The GBA model is perhaps an acknowledgment of this tension with representation. It removes local politicians from decision-making and promises better coordination across civic functions. Should this be a model for the future? What if we had a trade-off, with chief ministers controlling the capital city, as in Bengaluru, but implementing the Constitution’s 74th amendment—also known as the Nagarpalika Act—in letter and spirit in the other cities of the state?
Could this create an open, constructively competitive ecosystem across secondary cities, resulting in a sustainable and vibrant process of urbanisation, as hoped for by the prime minister? Eventually, those in the capital cities may also demand a voice, emboldened by an encirclement of the state capital—not Mao-like from the countryside, but by smaller cities.
Not only is urban governance not representative, it is often also performative. Like anti-smog guns, they have limited effectiveness but look modern and give the appearance of action. Delhi has shifted this expenditure to the private sector, but public money, too, is often spent on ineffective infrastructure that has popular support because of its performative aspect. Consider the metro rails in many cities. While in some they are both necessary and effective, they do little to solve the transportation problem in others. But residents feel proud to live in a city with a metro rail, unaware that for that cost they could have mitigated their transport woes with an effective bus system.
Finally, the identity crisis. Is the urban local body an artificial administrative construct and should one instead consider the ‘metropolitan area’ or ‘economic region’ determined by commuting, spread of contiguous night lights, or just fiat? How can such regions be governed? Indeed, for cities like Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai, such a region will spill across even state boundaries and trigger a series of other questions.
Are investments such as the Namo Bharat regional rapid transit system, which takes less time to reach Meerut from Delhi than it does to reach parts of Gurugram by road, to be seen as guideposts? Is the preferred expansion of Delhi to be along this corridor? If so, should one shift defence operations to Jewar instead, and develop Hindon as a civilian airport? Where will the existing private investments along the Gurugram-Jaipur route fit into such a plan?
No such questions are raised. Urbanisation has been reduced to an assorted collection of schemes and projects, scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that no one is interested in putting together. Maybe, each individual answer has become so lucrative that it’s too troublesome to even remember there was a question.
Partha Mukhopadhyay | Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, and former member, Technical Advisory Committee, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs
(Views are personal)