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By Rahul Srivastava States with the highest levels of urbanisation are also the states with the highest levels of water and food insecurity
If you examine the level of urbanisation in all the Indian states, Delhi tops the charts with 93% urban population, followed by the union territory of Chandigarh (89.9%) and Pondicherry (66.6%). These are followed by Tamil Nadu (43.9%), Maharashtra (42.4%) and Gujarat (37.4%). The proportion of urban population is the lowest in Himachal Pradesh with 9.8% followed by Bihar (10.5%), Assam (12.7%) and Orissa (14.9%). However, in terms of absolute numbers of persons living in urban areas, Maharashtra leads with 41 million persons (which accounts for 14% of the total population of the country) then Uttar Pradesh (35 million) and Tamil Nadu (27 million). What strikes one immediately is that the states with high levels of urbanisation (whether in percentages or in absolute numbers) are also perceived in the media as the most developed and lead the others in terms of infrastructure, per capita income and consumption levels (except perhaps for Uttar Pradesh). However, all the most urbanised states also reveal a major crisis in terms of the availability of water and in fact have a history of drought in many regions. Tamil Nadu has reached a situation where it is now investing in de-salination plants to solve the water crisis, a move one usually associates with desert societies with a history of water scarcity. To quote from the ' Food Insecurity Atlas of Urban' India by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and the World Food Programme, 2002, we find that the urban populations of Orissa and Pondicherry are classified as "extremely food insecure". Urban Uttar Pradesh and Bihar remain close behind these states and are categorised as "severely food insecure". The urban populations in Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi are the most "food secure", with urban Himachal Pradesh leading this category, even though only 10% of Himachal Pradesh's population lives in urban areas! These are also states with cities that continue to be divided in terms of habitats for the poor and the rich, often represented in the simplistic binary of the slum and skyscraper. The cities are aggressively moving towards vertical landscapes, multiplication of consumption spaces and increasing road spaces for private cars, while the poor are finding themselves increasingly living in slums and on wastelands. More often than not, cities are surrounded by rural areas that quickly become victims of environmental degradation, making the rural landscapes completely dysfunctional. According to a report, ‘ Contamination of Urban India Environment by Hazardous Industries’ by Kausalya Ramachandran , D Sai Kiran, M Kalpana and M Purnendu (2002),the Chennai region reveals that the watersheds of Thiruvallur, Avadi, Ennore, Manali, Kanchipuram Alltur, Marai Malainagar, Nandambakkam, Pallavaram and Sriperumbudur are extremely endangered owing to contamination. In Delhi , the watersheds of Kirtinagar and Okhla reveal contamination hazards from pharmaceutical units and the dye industry. The Yamuna and Hindon emerged as horrifyingly polluted. In Hyderabad region there are 159 industrial units producing hazardous substances. Unfortunately the perception that urbanisation and development are inter-dependent categories is not recent. Modernisation and development have always been expressed in urban contexts and higher levels of both have always been synonymous with better civic life. However in many European and American contexts, this has been accompanied by a vanishing rural population that is wholly absorbed in new urban centres which themselves have been designed to accommodate these transformations. In the context of countries like India , where rural populations continue to remain significant in real and relative terms, and where urban infrastructures have never been made to accommodate rural migrants in a proportionate way, the modernising and development of the economy have never translated into quality urban conditions. But people are now attempting to do this on a large scale, and making up for lost time! By following the example of China, which has recently ignored its rural contexts and come to define development as high-voltage and high-scale urbanisation, many urban-based interest groups in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore are keen on developing infrastructure that approximates the landscape of the advanced urban centres. The reason why they may actually land up being a Sao Paolo or Johannesburg rather than New York or Shanghai is that like the former cities, they too have vast numbers of the poor, living in both rural and urban contexts, who will be made to pay for the transformation of their civic spaces. And rather than be absorbed (which will not happen given the high costs of these transformations), they will simply become large threatening shadows on the landscape. Also important to keep in mind are the mind-boggling figures involved in transforming our existing urban centres into more livable spaces, in very basic terms of water and transport. According to the ' India Infrastructure Report, 1996' the annual investment need for urban water supply, sanitation and roads is about Rs 28,035 crore for the next ten years. The Central Public Health Engineering (CPHEEO) estimates that the requirement of funds for 100% coverage of the urban population under safe water supply and sanitation services by the year 2021 will be Rs 172,905 crore. InfoChange News & Features, January 2005 |
