The Virus has exposed India’s Dickension Urbanisation

Context: While the western model of urbanisation is supposed to bring modernity and prosperity, abject urban poverty in India suggests that urbanization alone doesn’t offer a path to prosperity.

Issues with urbanization in India:

• Impact of Pandemic: on the following types of city residents
  • The condition of circular migrants was made vivid by news coverage of the thousands who marched along roads to distant villages. 
  • On average, they still lack more than 50% of their pre-pandemic income. 
• Circular migrants (short-term residents): constituting 30 to 70 million people in India, are forced to move urban areas due to small farm sizes and declining rural incomes.
• Slum dwellers (lived through multiple generations): More than 110 million according to United Nations-Habitat, and are challenged by little upward mobility.

• Chronic deprivation and vulnerabilities: 

• Only 40% of slum residents did not have ration cards prior to the pandemic. 
• Only 34% had drinking water connections. 
• Just a little over one-third had completed primary school. 
• Only 6% had jobs with written contracts and statutory benefits. 
• Based on faulty logic: that slums are necessary but temporary part of economic development and disappears as urbanisation fuels greater economic growth.
• While the proportion of slum dwellers has decreased in famous cities like New York and London in the last century, the decline was not automatic but required public investments.

Way Forward: 

• Large scale public investment: in human capital will help  prepare the educated labour force required by growing industrialization.
• Need of sustained and well-resourced interventions in addressing rampant informality and creeping automation.