Krishnanath. C
If one traces the history of the subcontinent, cities have been the centres of trade and political action, and continue to be so. The first thing any student would learn from a history textbook would be about the city planning of the Harappans. Their city-street cuts across at right angles; the administrative centres are located on an elevated platform; the occupational classes reside and function on the lower sides. Harappan history also says that houses had a proper drainage system covered underground. Occupations here included weapon-making, pottery, textile manufacturing. Hence with least ambiguity, one can ascertain that cities existed as epicentres of economic activity and the core of administrative purposes. What is even more striking is the departure of its population from agriculture. That cities have historically been non-agricultural is the image that has been created and sustained over epochs.
Closer in time, cities have only shown more congruence to this image. Lalit Batra has argued that since colonial rule, there has been a great commitment to create new city spaces in the country (Batra, 2009). As colonial rule progressed, the urban landscape here expanded visibly — the formation of Presidency Cities, administrative hubs in the colonial regime, stands testimony to this. Urbanity itself was created by physical infrastructure to suit the country’s growing economic needs, and consequently, the population in these spaces also rose, giving birth to residential enclaves. Batra argues that during the stint of the imperial regime, there was a 2% growth in urban population (Batra, 2009). It’s worth noting that there has only been a gradual increase in the vastness of these cities and its population since then.
The relevance of city planning that has been intact throughout though. The notion of urban planning gained quite a lot of currency in the post-Independence era. India aimed to shape up its cities along existing colonial lines. Through planning, concerned authorities aimed to transform cities into hubs of economic activity and create spaces that would essentially support these activities. Cities were perceived to be locations where innovation and social change would shape up. As a corollary to the creation of economic centres, urban planning also aimed at creating residential, educational, and recreational spaces as well. However, has urban development materialised in the same way it was conceptualised? Let’s have a look.
India’s obsession with urban migration has come to be since the past four decades and the population count in its cities has visibly risen during this period. There has been in-migration of labourers and refugees to urban spaces (Batra, 2009). Here, planning was done to accommodate these people who had newly moved, and to accomplish it, the focus was on creating residential spaces. The aim of planning soon extended installing manufacturing centres and the generation of employment avenues. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the growth trajectory India adopted was more urban-oriented. However, very often, these could not be actively implemented.
Firstly, there has not been much spatial expansion in the case of Indian urbanisation or urban planning to a large extent (Batra, 2009); there was a larger concentration of people within the small city space. This inability to spatially expand led to the formation of slums — generally, residential spaces of blue collared workers — and this contributes to spatial segregation within cities. Sebastian Morris argues that the Indian obsession with the architectural mode of city planning paid little attention to the need to have an egalitarian urban space (Morris, 2017). For example, urban planning in India has largely concentrated on cities that were already established — resulting in a small, economically strong centre, with huge suburbs relatively unattended. The entire population and economic activity were limited to this centre, making it spatially congested. Further, this model of urban development only led to more inequalities. It was rich or inhabitants alone who could access the city’s best spaces, and others had to be pushed to overcrowded slums. Hence, the inadequacies in planning resulted in creating unequal urban spaces.
Another striking feature of Indian urbanisation has been the elements of exclusion it has overtly exhibited (Menon, 1997). The kernel of exclusion was the need to have a ‘beautified’ city that replicated the Western city, and this ‘beautification’ was carried out by invisibilizing the urban poor populace. Planning, in this case, manifested to be anti-poor in nature, and this facet made cities an inaccessible spaces for some. The imagination of the city as a ‘beautified’ space made it an elite enclave. As Anil Kumar Vaddiraju argues, this mode of urban resulted in it conveniently avoiding poor migrants and forcing them to leave the city, leading to a severe loss in incomes and livelihoods (Vaddiraju, 2013). On the idea of exclusionary urbanisation, he argues that due to the pro-rich beautification mode of urbanisation, urban spaces were consequently occupied by it’s elites.
Another bias has been that small towns in India are often neglected or eliminated from planning. Urban development happens in a way that the entire focus is on the already existing city, rather than creating a new one (Vaddiraju, 2013) — the examples of Dharwad and Bengaluru have been compared by Vaddiraju to establish this. Such a method resulted in furthering the gap between the affluent and the impoverished, for urbanisation should focus in equitably developing more cities and urban landscapes rather than being restricted to expanding the older cities. A centralised, big city bias results in the lack of adequate development of vital infrastructure and inhibits the place from receiving any capital investment. Decentralisation is the way to go.
Another recent trend is the neoliberal model of urbanisation, as argued by Swapna Banerjee Guha. She says that over time, urban development has only focused on elevating Indian cities as global cities. Through this, the intention is to maximise capital investment and create a more westernised image of the city (Guha, 2009). However, under the order of neoliberal urban planning, the focus will be on eliminating the poor and ensuring maximum visibility for the urban elite rich class — remould cities to accommodate global capital ventures, by removing the indigenous, working and entrepreneurial class. (Guha, 2009). Urban planning has become even more divisive and non-egalitarian under the influence of neoliberal policies.
Tying all the above arguments, the image of the Indian city that appears is a bleak one. They sustain inequalities: social, spatial and economic — and are made for the rich and the elite consumerist. On one hand, there exists a city that lives up to the standards of a global city, while the other half is in peril and poverty. Indian cities, rather than being inclusive spaces, have increasingly been unequal ever since the advent of globalisation; they have sustained inequalities and are anti-poor. Successive governments in independent India failed to proactively create an inclusive city, and thanks to the advocates of neoliberal ideas, our cities are inaccessible and discriminatory.
Conclusion
It is accurate to say that the development of urban spaces in India has been carried out through planning. Indian policy makers have invested intellectually to conceptualise the country’s urban spaces and this practice of planning was adopted from a colonial legacy. However, since the past couple of years, its manifestation has been quite fallacious. The imagination of the city has changed drastically, turning out to be quite non accommodative to certain sections of the society. The mode adopted to materialise India’s post-Independence developmental aspirations have come with certain inherent flaws. Hardly any measures are adopted to undo these flaws and its unapologetic continuation furthers social distinctions. Centralised urbanisation and image-replication must be revisited cogently, for ‘development’ shouldn’t be at the expense of equity. When cities are made the drivers of economic growth and progress, they ought to be inclusive. The political agenda of equality and accessibility must be urgently invested in urban planning and urban development in India. That is the need of the hour.
References
- Batra, L. (2009). A Review of Urbanisation and Urban Policy in Post Independent India, Working Paper Series no 12, Centre for Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
- Guha-Baerjee, S.,(2009). Neoliberalising the Urban: New Geographies of Power and Injustice in Indian Cities, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 44, (22).
- J. Wood (1958). Development of Urban and Regional Planning in India, Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, Vol 34, (4).
- Krishnamenon, AG ( 1997), Imaging the Indian City, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 32, (46).
- Morris, S. (2017) The Horror of Urban Development in India, Identifying the Real Issues, Working Paper Series, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
- Vaddiraju, A (2013), A Tale of Many Cities: Governance and Planning in Karnataka, Economic and Political Weekly ,Vol 48, (2).
Krishnanath. C a Master’s student in Governance and Development Policies at the International institute of Social Sciences of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. He also has a post graduate degree in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad. Krishnanath is a passionate development practitioner with interest in issues like urbanisation and social development.
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