I.2.

Historical Backdrop

India has a legacy of urban planning that dates back to more than 5000 years ago. The civilization
of the Indus Valley which, till 1947, was part of India provides the earliest evidence of planned
human settlements that indicated demarcations for residential and commercial centres, and
facilities for settlement services considered essential in the present century. The urbanisation
process along with urban planning has been fed with the culture of multiple civilizations that led to
the introduction of varied urban institutions, styles and images. Cities played an important role in
performing the ontogenetic functions of converting folk culture into its civilized dimensions.
Invariably, towns and villages formed part of the civilization process with structural continuities
but had organizational differences between them. The available evidence indicates that many cities
that are seats of various cultures and influences at present, had also acted as the transmittal points
of culture, political authority and economic influence a long time ago. The material advancement
at that time can be deducted from the evidence of progress in the construction of settlements,
sewerage systems and city planning. Varanasi in the northern part of India was such a city, the
origin of which can be traced from the history of 5000 years ago. Much later, medium and small
towns were the most common sizes of urban centers in India and the reason for this territorial basis
could be traced to the existence of innumerable small kingdoms strewn all over the country. In
many cities, trade and pilgrimage prospered side by side and the urban dynamics of these
settlements could be very well compared with the medieval cities and towns in Europe of those
times. However, there is no evidence of an urban and rural divide along with the cultural
differences, a feature that became very prominent in later years, in the urban literature of India.

I.3. The Colonial Approach to Urban Planning

An entirely different trend in urban development was set when India was colonized by an
European power. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company obtained
permission for setting up trade and military establishments in different parts of India which, at a
later stage, were developed into major seats of administration. The cities of Calcutta, Madras and
Bombay are such examples. These cities grew fast with the activities of new trades that added to
the economic prosperity of the mother countries of the colonial governments. This change in the
economic functions of the cities introduced a truncated development pattern in India as elsewhere
in the world and the focus of development shifted to urban areas, the administrative seats of
colonial governments. Commercial agriculture replaced the old crafts and manufacturing base for
which India was known and soon India was relegated into an agricultural country with a
decreasing man land ratio that exerted increasing pressure on land. More importantly, the profits
from agriculture were not ploughed back for its development and the old industries were not
rehabilitated or revitalized to suit the changing economic scenario. The legacy of such urban
structure has significantly influenced the process of urbanization even after a long period of
independence in India

This was also most probably the beginning of a rural-urban divide in India and of urban poverty,
though this was only recognized much later. It may be surmised that urban poverty originated from
these lopsided development policies in the past, which Indian planners failed to reverse and the
urban policy makers ignored for the posterity to face the consequences. Urban poverty was most
evident in the housing arrangements of the low income settlements and for city administration,
these were ‘a fact that could not be ignored’, an eyesore and ‘blights’ that needed to be removed in
order to improve the built environment and city health. This attitude towards housing of the
poverty dominated clusters led to the introduction of slum clearance and rehabilitation measures, a
favorite scheme of the municipal corporations or urban local bodies in late 19th century. The
situation is not very different today. In the era of free markets and globalisation, the approach has
again found a place in the armory of city managers, after a long experience in other methods of
addressing the issues and in spite of a different tenor of policy preaching. It is therefore no wonder
that, under these administrative practices, an integrated approach to housing delivery for the poor
has been put on the back burner.

I.4. The Sectoral Approach to Urban Planning: The Post Independence Era

Until recently, urban planning in India, like in many Asian countries, was confined to spatial
planning, focusing specially on Master Plans and detailing of land use patterns, drawn in exclusion
of the socio-economic and environmental realities of the urban economy. As such, urban planning
had isolated itself from the mainstream development process and planning, decision making and
implementation strategies It has at best provided some weight to the social dimensions. This had a
long term impact on the flow of funds for urban development. This deficiency in urban planning
was pointed out by UNCHS as early as 1984. It commented on the need for appropriate allocation
of resources and properly programmed investment plans so that urban planning could contribute its
best, and for ensuring coordination at the local level of national and regional programmes. A
similar observation was noted in the Government of India’s Seventh Five Year Plan a year later
(1985-90), which acknowledged the need for interaction between physical planning and
investment through regional and sub-regional planning. It further pointed out the imperatives of
coordinating city plans with central and state level plans and resource availability. In fact, in a
situation of scarce resources and blanket cut in budgets, a multi-disciplinary approach is essential
for ensuring linkages between different sectors and maintaining the viability of programmes,
taking into consideration the changes in the plan’s components and financial resource availability
that would arise under the curtailed budget position. One of the barriers in this process of
integration has been the existence of a maze of institutional devices with many overlapping
functions, diverse jurisdictions and sector specific institutions that have vital roles in urban
development and yet function independently of each other. There is very little coordination among
the agencies entrusted with spatial, social, economic and financial planning at the Central level. At
the State and local government levels, a significant amount of funds is determined at the national
level, both for Plan and non-Plan funds. There is, thus, a compartmentalization both at horizontal
and vertical levels. Inadequate expertise in multi-disciplinary planning seems to be a slowing down
factor. Indian urban planning could at best be called a multi-sector planning model. Integration
would involve both functional and institutional upgrading. Under this prevailing urban system, it
was too much to expect that an integrated approach even in a loose form, indicating the
coordination of all services, would be in place.

I.5. Developments in the 1990s

The decade of the nineties witnessed a number of moves that introduced a new
paradigm into urban development planning. The 12th. Schedule of the Constitution (
74th Amendment) Act was passed in the early 90s, to provide scope for integrated
decentralized planning in urban areas. It introduced the bottom up planning process by
conferring a constitutional status to local governments and making them directly
responsible, among others, for urban poverty alleviation, slum improvement and
upgrading, land use and house construction, water supply, sanitation that could build
up local capacity and enhance the urban economy. The transfer of responsibility for
urban, social and economic planning to these Local Urban Bodies provided a much
wider horizon for development planning than that included in the town planning
functions which these Bodies had earlier been entrusted with. The emphasis on publicprivate
partnerships in urban development, on schemes for environment protection and,
of late, the wave of good governance initiatives seek to establish a multi–dimensional
approach for achieving the goal of good urban governance. Another sustainable
measure was the mandate for the constitution of District Planning Committees under the
Constitution Amendment Act, which would initiate the most desirable move towards an
integrated planning process of urban and rural bodies.
While an initiative has been taken to install an integrated system from the lowest
rung of the administrative system, much more remains to be done to put in place a truly
integrated system for urban development processes. SDS is playing a key role in the
development process through its operational model to promote and sustain knowledge
infrastructure that it is in the process of building, through a convergence and
coordination among all stakeholders. For the first time, there is a strong possibility of
this approach being adopted in the Tenth Plan, as is evident in the Tenth Plan Steering
Committee Report. To quote the Report: “There is an urgent need for organizational
arrangements for the managerial coordination and convergence of services…” In fact,
SDS is developing, in partnership with the World Bank, a series of good governance
products to address priority concerns identified by city managers and stakeholders,
such as property tax reform, water utility pricing and waste management, all on the
principles of coordination and convergence, to address the key governance challenges
of improving coordination and convergence of programmes and leveraging city level
resources from among city stakeholders, the CCL principles. It is being increasingly
accepted that an effective integrated approach depends on promoting the CCL
principles and the Tenth Plan is expected to take positive steps towards this approach.

I.6. Trends in Urbanization in India

The pace of urbanization during the colonial rule (1752-1947) remained low. The
documented population growth rate shows an increase in the size of it from 10.84 per
cent in 1901 to 13.86 per cent in 1941. The major reasons for the low growth were a
low spread of urban centers and high mortality rates.
The immediate post-independence period added nine million people to the urban
category, enhancing the urbanization rate to 17.3 per cent in 1951 and this was mainly
due to partition of the country which led to in-migration that far out-paced the outmigration.
Unlike many western countries, increased commercialization, rather than
industrialisation led to the first stage growth in urbanization in India. The rate of growth
in the post-independence decade of the fifties picked up from 26.4 per cent to 46.0 per
cent in the seventies. As per the latest Census, the growth rate has declined, and the
population in urban areas in 2001 stood at 28.0 per cent (Census of India: 2001). In
terms of share, the urban population appears to be small but India is one of the
largest urban systems in the world. The level of urbanization would be higher if the nondeclared
areas with more than 1,00,000 population are considered. The higher financial
benefits to rural areas from the poverty alleviation budget are a major contributory factor
to the slower growth phenomenon. Declassification of urban areas due to nonfulfillment
of the rigorous tests for consideration of a hitherto rural area as an urban area
is also an important factor for the slower growth of the officially declared urban size. The
unofficial estimate of urbanization at present is 32.0 per cent.

I.7. Spatial Growth and its Consequences

A major characteristic of Indian urbanization is its high spatial concentration,. and

its low spread. The skewed spatial distribution of urban population is reflected in the
fact that 65.2 per cent of the total urban population of India resided in 300 class 1
towns (population above 1,00,000), that accounted for only 8.2 pert of the total number
of towns in India in 1991. Furthermore, some 23 metropolitan cities accommodated
50.57 per cent of the total population of the class 1 towns. The metropolitan cities,
constituting only 0.6 per cent of the total number of urban settlements, accommodate
32.56 per cent of the total urban population in the country. An interesting indicator of
spatial concentration is the urban density in mega cities, which varied between 8,800
and 13,500 in 1991. Amidst this jungle of statistics, the excessive concentration of
population in large cities remains unmasked. A high concentration of poverty in these
places also brings out the inadequate city planning and un-preparedness to
accommodate the population influx. These findings have many implications in terms of
the urban quality of life and may explain the causes of urban poverty to a large extent.

An obvious manifestation is the rapid growth of slums and squatter settlements,

the consequence of lower order urbanisation, a characteristic feature of cities and towns
in most of the developing countries, which was also evident earlier in the now
developed world and is still evident in some of its urban pockets known as the urban
ghettoes. The intensity of problems varies from town to town and city to city depending
on the city size, its functional characteristics, functional behavior of the rural hinterland
surrounding the city, physical and topographical characteristics of the city, level of
economic status of the state/ country to which the city belongs, as also the level of
management of urban problems by the urban planners and municipal authorities.
I.8. Urbanization and Urban Poverty

The close relation between industrialization and urbanization, a concept originated in the North, is
now well established there, but does not seem to fully fit in the urban scenario in developing
countries in the South. While the urbanization process in these countries did originate from
industrial activities, it did not necessarily lead to faster development due to a number of dissimilar
features. According to some urban scientists, the pace of urbanization in India, in terms of its
demographic trends, fitted very well with the early urbanization phase in European countries, but
there was a
great dissimilarity between the industrial pace in India as compared to the pace in the early phase
of urbanization in the latter countries. According to many of them, this trend in the early period
was responsible for the adoption of a negative approach towards urbanisation by the Indian
planners in the post-independence period and inhibited them from considering urban planning in
its own perspective and its concomitant growth prospects. The limited resources of India and the
fear of over investment in the urban economy, at the cost of the rural, which was the earlier
practice, and the visible slow
spread of the urban benefits were also responsible for this approach. The genesis of urban poverty
lay in this factor and it was exacerbated due to long-standing misconception among the elites in
India about the poor as a drain on the urban economy, which prevented adoption of development
oriented poverty reduction programmes. And the continuance of the welfare approach is another
factor related to the first, that left the basic issue of income improvement to the growth and trickle
down
processes of development from the top.
Urbanization in India is characterized by the predominance of the service sector. The productivity
of the urban sector is reflected in its contribution to the GDP, which is expected to reach around 60
per cent in the near future. The poverty ratio therefore, reduced from a one time high of 45.2 per
cent in 1977-78 to 26.1 per cent in 1999-2000. In this sense, more than the economic vulnerability,
it is the shelter vulnerability (nonpermanent tenure, poor quality of housing, inadequate basic
services, as defined by the Planning Commission) that has characterized the cities in the
developing world and
India belongs to this group.