THE REALM OF RURAL-URBAN POSSIBILITIES

THE REALM OF RURAL-URBAN POSSIBILITIES

A remarkable experiment is taking place on the outskirts of Bangalore. In a 100-acre well-manicured campus, uniformed men in airconditioned godowns drop vegetables into pre-sorted quality bins, and carry bananas on automated pallette-trucks into “bio-friendly ripening chambers”. Every morning, hundreds of buyers sit in a state-of-the-art conference room that would make any IT company proud, and electronically “punch” in their bids for a fruit-and-vegetable auction. The experiment: Safal, the electronic fruit-and-vegetable mall set up by the NDDB. Already, in the year since it started operations, Safal is doing 300 tonnes of business a day, providing better prices to farmers, and superior services to traders, cutting out the middlemen in the supply chain. Safal’s market? Bangalore’s burgeoning millions. The potential: five-fold in the next two years.

Safal is an example of how urban infrastructure and connectivity can be used to improve rural livelihoods, and at least partially solve India’s problem of rural unemployment. Unfortunately, we have another problem: our denial of the reality that urban centres are the gateways to growth. India was 28% urban at the turn of the century, and will be 50% in the next 30 years. Unless we have a unique paradigm for economic growth different from the rest of the world, we are bound to see urbanisation as the siamese twin of prosperity.

Safal – even when successful – is only one drop in the ocean. Mars Lanting – a Dutch agronomist – states that at least 15% of farmers around Bangalore are small-scale and dependent on the city’s consumption. Similarly, Dr A Ghosh of the Zoological Survey of India talks of how Kolkatta’s entire daily output of 680 million litres of sewage could be productively used in fishponds. In a document titled “Urban Agriculture in India”, Gisele Yasmin talks of the potential. She writes of the numerous experiments being tried throughout the country, in small towns and megapolises, in composting, in acquaculture and horticulture farming.

These experiments hold many possibilities: generating rural livelihoods, recycling urban solid waste and sanitation, establishing closer rural-urban linkages, and providing a sustainable development answer to urbanisation.

For these to be seen not as development 12^th men - meant for quaint case studies – but rather as legitimate and scalable, a lot needs to be done. Three specific interventions can help unleash the rural-urban potential:

First, a set of targeted policy initiatives. Safal took months of dialogue and intervention at the state-level to change the Agriculture Produce and Marketing Committee (APMC)Act, opposed by market players who thrived on the status-quo. Unfortunately, hundreds of smaller ideas are getting quashed every day. A clutch of specific initiatives that have policy support could excite rural and urban entrepreneurs. The forthcoming Horticulture Mission could hold some promise in this regard.

Second, a change in mindset in how we look at rural and urban issues. The atmosphere today is unnecessarily adversarial, filled with suspicion and fuelled by jurisdictional schizophrenia. We need to start thinking of “local” government, as opposed to “rural” versus “urban” government. These artificial distinctions will only serve to dissect governance and disempower local decision-making. In such an environment, new ideas of rural-urban partnerships are doomed to failure.

What is required is a platform for the discussion of rural-urban issues, at a regional level larger than a city or a village, but smaller than the state. In a democracy like India, these ideas need to be driven by political energy, these platforms need to have political legitimacy. The 73^rd and 74^th Constitutional Amendments in the mid-90s mandated such regional bodies as District Planning Committees (DPCs) and Metropolitan Planning Committees (MPCs), in well-understood and accepted jurisdictional configurations.

Unfortunately, they exist only on paper. The champions of rural decentralisation have long been clamouring for these regional bodies to be operationalised, but not for reasons of greater linkage with urban areas. The rural-urban partnership argument could enrich the logic for such platforms.

The third intervention is funding. Policies and platforms by themselves will not suffice. They need to be fed with funds. Given the fiscal constraints in the country, and the pressures being applied by gram panchayats for funds to be directly transferred to them, it is fiscally and politically imprudent to divert funds into these regional bodies, since they will suffocate the nascent grassroot local governments. One suggestion here is the creation of a special fund called “BURD Fund”: Balanced Urban-Rural Development Fund. Every large city in the country is seeing explosive economic activity, with state development authorities raking in money: NOIDA, Gurgaon, Bangalore Development Authority, are all case-studies. These agencies are becoming profitable by capitalising on urban growth.

A BURD Fund could state that a fixed percentage – say 10% - of the income of such special purpose agencies should be kept aside for rural improvements. The BURD Fund would not be charged to city governments, and therefore has a positive fiscal fallout as well: it acts as a disincentive to state governments to churn out special-purpose-vehicles for urban development work.

Decisions on the usage of the funds can be made at the level of the District Planning Committee, which will now get the fiscal instrument to get truly activated.

The BURD Fund has several benefits: it creates a direct method to catalyse rural-urban partnerships; it leverages an existing, dormant regional planning platform (DPC/MPC); and it provides a fiscal instrument to make this platform relevant.

With the right policy initiatives, the operationalisation of the regional platforms, and the provision of fiscal instruments, we could have a tipping point of rural-urban partnership.

Solving the rural-urban problems in this manner will have several benefits: one, it will use the flywheel of urban economic energy to dislodge rural economic malaise; two, it will establish ties between rural and urban citizens, which will have its own positive consequences; three, it will allow for a marketplace of ideas to be tried across the country, with locally appropriate solutions – the solution in Patna is not the answer in Palakkad. Most importantly, it will get us out of the damaging mindset of thinking of rural and urban challenges as separate ones.
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The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org