WELCOME TO THE TWILIGHT ZONE

WELCOME TO THE TWILIGHT ZONE

The definition of a twilight zone is an ambiguous region between two conditions, a surreal space where normal rules don’t apply. Most residents of India’s major cities pass through such twilight zones every day, on their way to and back from work.

Where are these twilight zones? At the border of the invisible jurisdictional line between the city and the village. At the fast-growing suburban edge of the city, where new construction activity dots the skyline, and shopping malls and multiplexes reflect the chutzpah of the new Indian.

Why should these areas be called twilight zones? Because this is where the transition between the old rural world and the new urban reality is taking place. This is the zone of maximum change: economically, as old jobs are destroyed and new opportunities are getting created; socially, as the familiar networks of the past are replaced by the more anonymous transactional relationships of globalisation; culturally, as old traditions give way to the value systems of a new India; and politically, as the jurisdictional fault-lines between city and village expose a chaotic multiplicity of government agencies with fragmented responsibility for land-use planning, water supply, sanitation, transportation, industrial development belts, education, healthcare and so on.

It is this last vacuum of governance that really lends these spaces their surreal sense: the lingering ghost of a district administration is being replaced by a plethora of players, bound by a common understanding of what the peri-urban space offers: patronage, politics, power. Unfortunately, there is no one to protest, because there is no permanent player left: the old villager has been replaced by the yuppie tenant or the migrant poor. In these peri-urban twilight zones, it really is no-man’s land.

All countries are facing the governance challenge of peri-urban areas. In developed economies like the United States, these challenges are of containing suburban sprawl and balancing taxation and spending equitably across large urban agglomerations; in rapidly urbanising countries like India and China, the challenges are of environment degradation and massive increases in the numbers of the vulnerable poor. These migrants are risking their lives due to unsafe living conditions caused by poor access to drinking water, sanitation, housing and healthcare.

The governance challenges are not trivial: there are few readymade institutional solutions that can solve the peri-urban problem. The classic three-tier structure of central/state/local governments is not a solution; indeed it actually exacerbates the situation. The peri-urban areas are caught in the penumbra of the jurisdictions of multiple local governments; are orphaned by state governments; and are increasingly being overseen by a set of parastatal bodies that have no accountability to the citizen. Across the world, the solutions to these problems have been varied, depending on specific local challenges. However, there is a common thread running through these solutions: some form of regional structure, integrating the multiple local governments that fall within that regional footprint.

There are several benefits that emerge from taking a regional view of these peri-urban problems:one, there are better odds of more coherent plans for urban development being created, with consultation among all affected areas; two, sustainable urbanisation can be practised, by respecting environmental issues and protecting natural resources; three, proper economic planning can be undertaken, so that greater predictability of livelihood outcomes can be ensured for all, especially the poor; four, rural-urban interdependencies can be identified and nurtured, so that more healthy and holistic eco-systems can be created around such rural/urban pockets; five, spatial planning can be done at an appropriate scale,so that key large-scale decisions like public transportation infrastructure can be done on the right canvas; and finally, regional governance structures can ensure that there is a legitimate, accountable decision-making platform.

So, how is India prepared to adress the regional and peri-urban challenge? The scorecard is mixed: the good news is that the 74^th Constititional Amendment that was passed in 1992 envisaged the creation of exactly such regional platforms: a Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) in any area having a population greater than 1 million, and a District Planning Committee (DPC) for the smaller pockets. These committees were meant to function much the like regional bodies described above, and be responsible for , among other things, the preparation of a development plan having regard to “matters of common interest between the Municipalities and the Panchayats including coordinated spatial planning of the area, sharing of water and other physical and natural resource, integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation”

The bad news is that, more than a decade after the passage of the Amendment, only one state has created an MPC: West Bengal, for Kolkata; and this too is not fully functional. This is at a time when India’s urbanising trends are showing increasing concentration in existing urban centres, i.e. the problem is growing. Between 1901 and 1991, urban India’s population grew 8.5 times, from 25 million to 217 million; but the number of urban centres increased only 2.5 times, from 1827 to 3768. Among these, the top 23 cities had 31% of the urban population in 1991, and their share has grown larger in the last 10 years. By 2020, there will be 75 such agglomerations containing more than 1 million citizens each.

Each of these will contain many local governments. Each of these will contain the twilight zones of peri-urban strips. Each of these will present a range of ungovernable problems that will spread like viruses through our urban landscape: unplanned neighbourhoods, environmental degradation, patchwork infrastructure, massive numbers of migrant poor receiving minimal services like water, education, healthcare. And to top it all, a governance vacuum that is an open invitation to the land mafia and political opportunism.

We could ignore the problem, and instead choose to enjoy the shopping malls and multiplex theatres that are sprouting here. But unless the right institutional arrangements are created, our expectations of long-term urban solutions in India could be just like the films that play inside these multiplexes: pure fantasies.

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The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org