|
By Rahul Srivastava The big city has been glorified, the small town neglected. But with more than half the urban population of India living in small urban agglomerations, we would do well to shift the focus to smaller townships for a more balanced economic growth
According to the Government of India Census, the urban habitats which include population figures in the 10,000-20,000 range are the most numerous (1,344 urban agglomerations or townships in all). This is followed by those with 20,000-50,000 people (1,151), then 5,000-10,000 (888), 50,000-99,999 (401), followed by the real towns and cities with a population of 1,00,000 and above (393) and finally with less than 5,000 (191). Thus in all there are 4,378 urban centres or townships that house the 285 million urban citizens of the country. Of these there are 35 cities that have more than 1 million people and together account for 107.88 million people. That means the remaining 177.12 million or more than half of the total urban population of the country lives in small-sized towns or urban agglomerations. Yet, when we visualise Urban India, it is largely the big cities that come to mind. Of course, if we compare them in global terms, these large urban centers are a force to reckon with. In 1991, of the 20 largest cities in the world, three were from India , and in 2001, six are from India . Even the population share of Class I cities within the country was 65% in 1991. But this once again does not mean that resource allocation should simply follow the same logic, since qualitatively these cities are very different. They are placed differently on the historical map of colonialism and demonstrate the same problems of colonial economies as a whole. That is, they are intimately tied to the depleted agrarian foundations of the nations in which they are embedded. Their populations congregate around tens of thousands of villages, interlinked into regional, national and global markets and should ideally be networked with all the 4,000-plus towns, cities and urban agglomerations. Such a network would sustain the agricultural economy regionally and globally and also become the base for the industrial, manufacturing and service sectors through providing competitive labour. In the absence of such a network, the bigger cities become the magnet for populations that emerge from impoverished rural areas which, finding their closest towns incapable of absorbing their skills, come to depend on the informal economies of the large cities. A study, ‘Urban Governance for Sustainable Development’ by Dr Alka Bharat and Chandan Chawla (1994), states that the reason for the skewed population distribution and its consequent burden on existing urban infrastructures is caused by lack of investment in the smaller towns and urban agglomerations in the first place. Given the fact that the Indian habitat shows a demonstrably large population living in rural areas, the development of smaller towns that are closer to these habitats would allow for a more balanced economic growth. Unfortunately the tendency has been to narrate a one-dimensional story which links urbanisation and globalisation and makes the larger cities compete with each other for a status that makes them part of global business flows. Thus cities like Mumbai aim to become nodes in international economic chains and ignore the fact that its history, like that of other Indian cities, is as much tied to the hinterland as it is to the world at large. There has been a bias within urban studies against small towns, where the idea of the ‘urban’ has always been seen to be ideally manifested in the big city. The scale of development in newly-developed urban centres in other parts of the world such as Shanghai has always been in favour of expensive and large-scale infrastructure. Large investments in big cities have often been justified as they are perceived to be ‘engines’ of development and growth, a geographical mutation of the ‘trickle-down effect’ theory. However, in reality, large-scale cities are based on a more exploitative relationship with their hinterlands for their physical survival, especially for energy and water and in India this translates into degraded rural peripheries which eventually become urbanised as slums or very jaded townships, always in the shadow of the big city. Even in cultural terms, the big city has always been glorified, as a space where conditions of modernity come together to develop art and a more sophisticated form of living. In reality, those moments of liberation, often found most concentrated in European cities in the first half of the 20th century, are long gone. From books to coffee houses to music and theatre, the forces of commercialisation in the media and the language of new economies have ensured that these spaces have become standardised. Yet, many scholars of cities still glamourise those moments and tend to influence the shape of imaging urban futures. While in reality, not only are smaller towns more manageable, they also have a more intimate relationship with their surrounding regions and more often than not, these contiguities are what sustains their economies. A country such as India with a significantly high rural population would do well to shift the focus of urban investments to these smaller townships. With new communication and transport technologies, there is no reason to believe that those spaces cannot also become important centers of art, culture and commerce and help us transform our notions of Middle India. InfoChange News & Features, January 2005
|
