Imperatives of constituting 2nd National Commission on Urbanisation

WILL the year 2021 be a secure future for all of us living in the cities? This question haunts many of us who have been working in the cities since long. The year 2020 has been a thorough expose of the way how we are developing and imagining our cities.

The COVID pandemic which destroyed our economic structures and turned the situation into a holocaust was an exposure of the hollowness of our building framework of our cities. The unsustainability of the cities came to the fore in a very vivid manner.
Such a system is completely fragile, and we need to reimagine how we are building our urban centres. The lockdown announced in a span of four hours, and the reverse migration of the urban workers mostly in the unorganised sector to their villages will go down in the annals of history.
But why is it that the cities that boasted of creating many indices for ranking on livelihood, sanitation, resilience and what not, could not just hold their poor, informal sector workers and other marginalised sections for even a few days? There are no easy answers to this question. However, one thing is quite immanent to it; the processes and ways in which the cities are being developed are delinked from the people’s demands.
There is a transformation in the cities that began long ago. This transformation, where cities are considered ‘engines of growth’, ‘entrepreneurs’, were actually linked to the need and vagaries of global finance capital. This process began in the early 70s in the world and in the 90s in India and Indian cities. Policy paradigm was suggested to ensure that cities become competitive and become investment-friendly.
Now, what does this mean in simpler terms? It means that the cities will have to ease out their laws to sustain their infrastructure needs; since most of the laws concerning land, which is so pivotal for development, were either with the state or central government, central and state legislations were brought in. But a naive question could be asked why should cities become competitive, and why should not the state and central government invest in the cities?
According to the JnNURM, the reforms that were effected during the UPA 1 regime, which had the support of the Left in the government, $630 billion are required to meet urban India’s infrastructure needs in two decades. Guess what the total money injected during that the ten year period of UPA 1 & 2 is? It is a mere 2.2 per cent of this demand. Mere $14 billion was planned to be injected in the cities through JnNURM process, most of these were project-oriented grants.
The large capital, which was believed to ameliorate our cities’ problems, did not serve the purpose. Instead, a nexus was generated at the centre, state level, forcing the cities to accept the provisions of the reforms and allow a paradigm shift in urban governance.
I remember Venkaiah Naidu, former urban development minister, saying in a conference on cities; “the cities do not have money, they come to the states, the states also do not have money they come to the centre, the centre also does not have the required money, they look at the multilateral agencies.” These agencies then through their interventions not just in projects, but also on policies, roll out the development model, which is then eulogised by states and the cities. The states and cities are forced to implement these reforms because if they do not, then a large number of grants are stopped, which are linked to these reforms.

Impact of new missions

Smart cities, AMRUT, Swachh Bharat Mission and many others were linked to the old model. It was for privatisation of cities without realising that this model was already failing. The new model of governance in the cities through the smart cities concept brought in an adjunct of special purpose vehicle which usurped the elected council’s powers as the significantnumber of developmental projects were designed and decided by SPVs.
Samuel Stien, in one of his pioneering works, The Capital City, writes that in a few American cities, the city development process has become the primary mode of capital accumulation. We are not sure if that is also true for Indian cities. Still, a cursory look suggests how the privatisation of utilities and services affects the people’s livelihoods.
This has led to a situation where the asset holding capacity of the marginalised and poor has dwarfed phenomenally. In the Oxfam report, the top 10 per cent and bottom 10 per cent in rural India has a gap of nearly 500 times, whereas in urban India the gap is mind-boggling 50,000 times. The poor do not have any asset to hold onto in the cities. How can they sustain, or how can such cities sustain without them?

What needs to be done?

I remember participating in a webinar discussion just recently where Kirtee Bhai, the lone living member of the first Urban Commission formed in 1986 of which Charles Correa was the chairperson was emphatically quoting from the 2nd Habitat. The executive director of the 2nd UN-Habitat time and again mentioned the necessity of a revolution in the urban to ensure that the urban centres sustain. Of course, ‘revolution’ in the UN terminology has its own connotations. But at least a word missing from the vocabulary of many of the liberal urban theorists started to resonate. Then we had the Habitat 3 in Quito in which I was also a delegate and the executive director of Habitat III kept on reminding that the present model of urbanisation is unsustainable and that we have to go back to the basics. John Closs, the ED of Habitat III vociferously raised his voice that “things, as usual, will not work”, he remarked that “the previous decades of laissez-faire, i.e., the free-market economy has proven disastrous and that we have to go back to the basics of planning.” Now if both these are compiled together what does this lead to?
It has very specific connotations, and the crux is that things must change and change in the people’s interest.

Form 2nd National Commission on Urbanisation

The first Urban Commission had interesting guidelines for the then government. The driving force or if one could say the preamble of this commission was driven by a fact that the cities were looked upon as manufacturing centres. A major part of the objectives of this commission was to address this challenge in the cities.
This commission’s principal role was to examine the state of urbanisation-demographic, economic, infrastructural, environmental, physical, energy, land, poverty, aesthetics, and cultural aspects.
Its role was to prepare basic guidelines for a specific action plan in priority areas; evolve policy frames and suggest approaches to building interactions among government, academic, research and citizen groups. Not just to limit to suggestions but also suggest an institutional framework for monitoring the effective implementation of the commission’s recommendations.
The commission had made some recommendations which are worth sharing. It had recommended for promoting 329 growth centres and emphasised upon strengthening of the existing larger metropolis.
In the given circumstances, what is required is to have a 2nd National Commission on Urbanisation to understand our cities’ complexities. When the first commission was formed, migration was not a big issue; likewise, the formal employment sector was more than what it is today. The sheer numbers in the cities have grown phenomenally high. In the 80s, nearly 23 per cent of the population stayed in urban centres. Today it is more than
34 per cent (2001-31.8 per cent). Since the 80s nearly 218 million more people were added to the country’s urban centres (India’s urban population: 1981 -159 million, 2011-377 million). By the 2021 census, the numbers would further swell. The piecemeal approach to urban problems that includes employment, city development, governance, utilities, the vitality of the town etc., cannot serve the purpose.
A 2nd National Commission should be entrusted with a task to formulate a holistic picture of the urban spaces and the challenges. Small doses of “ease of doing business”, “smart cities”, AMRUT, etc., cannot bring in either quantitative or qualitative changes. But the point is who is going to do it?
Different sections of the people will have to come and reclaim their spaces in the urban in the given situation. Meanwhile, some states can formulate their state-level commissions to analyse urban challenges and develop action plans accordingly. The year 2021 is a year of optimism as 2020 has not just been excruciatingly painful for many of us who have lost their close ones but also continue to suffer because of the pandemic both pathologically and economically. This optimism for 2021 for a year of fulfilling cherished dreams will not and cannot fall like a fairy tale but will have to be achieved through our collective efforts for a better and secure future. And urban is part of that!