India’s urban policy attributes the messiness to migrants, slums and poverty, and its preferred antidote is a Chandigarh-like order.
Cities have the potential to become ‘engines of economic’ growth, but the Narendra Modi-led government now needs to address three significant challenges: how to move people, how to broaden the scope of urbanisation, and how to improve its quality.
A metropolitan bias
Urban policy in India since the mid-2000s has focused on transforming metropolitan areas into economic powerhouses. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission exhibited a clear metropolitan bias. Recent schemes like Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation and Smart Cities Mission have also favoured metros and million-plus cities.
Policymakers have barely paid attention to the dispersed spatial nature of India’s urbanisation, which is driven not by large-scale migration of villagers to the metropolis, as is popularly imagined, but by the natural growth of large city populations, and the in-situ transition of large and dense villages into census towns through demographic and economic transitions.
Source: ThePrint
