City To Recover

Context: Covid reinforces that good urbanisation is our most powerful technology for poverty reduction.

Urbanisation problems in India

• Poor state of living of migrants:
  • Hostility to migrants: Antimigrant attitudes such as restricting labour licenses to those who can speak a local language etc.
  • Men-only migration, leaving the women with all hard labour of farm work, raising children, and looking after in-laws, while having virtually no recourse to health services, or to even emotional support of spouse.
• Infection hotspot tendency: In the first six months of Covid-19 outbreak in India, three cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai were the main urban epicentres of the disease.
• Diminished centrality to future of work due to digitisation: Work from Home concepts limiting the need for physical offices and thereby downplaying urban living.
• Infrastructure-gap: Such as inadequate planning, non-scalable infrastructure, unaffordable housing, and poor public transport.
• Issues associated with local government bodies:
  • Funding gap: 15th Finance Commission estimates our 2.5 lakh plus local government bodies only spend Rs 3.7 lakh crore annually, compared to total spending of Rs.34 lakh crore by Centre and Rs.40 lakh crore by 28 state governments.
    • Only 13% and 44% of budget of rural and urban bodies was raised themselves.
  • Power gap: local government is curtailed by state government departments in water, power, schools, healthcare, etc.
    • Having separate central rural and urban ministries distorts policy.
    • City leadership is either unelected with power (bureaucrats) or elected with limited power and unreasonable conditions such as candidates are only eligible for one term in 30 years due to reservation policy.
    • Lacks independence: Department of Local Self Government in the states has almost unlimited powers including suspension/removal of mayors and other elected representatives or supersession of elected local bodies is almost routine in most states.
  • Vicious cycle of decline as ambitious and talented individuals isn’t attracted to city leadership.

Conclusion: Good urbanisation is crucial to delivering economic justice for women, children and Dalits. And, getting power and funds to cities need states to sacrifice self-interest.