RURAL-URBAN PARTNERSHIPS – AN ERA OF GLORIOUS POSSIBILITIES

RURAL-URBAN PARTNERSHIPS – AN ERA OF GLORIOUS POSSIBILITIES 

A senior minister from a rural district in Karnataka told me recently about an incident of a woman from his constituency.

“She was struggling to get a square meal a day in the village”, he said, “and would prepare akki-rotis for a living. One of her employer’s cousins visited from the city, and – on tasting her wonderful rotis – asked her if she would be interested in working as a part-time cook in the city. She began working for an hour a day, getting Rs 1,000 a month. Within a few months, word of her culinary skills had spread. She now works in 10 households, getting Rs 10,000 a month.” 

The world today is seeing two clear trends: urbanisation and federalism.  

In a recent article in Yale Global, globalisation scholar Deane Neubauer stated, “"For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than do not”, and went to say, “all the demographic data point ineluctably to the 21st century emerging as the urban century.”

The world’s democracies are also embracing federalism as a way of running their governments. Of the 75 developing and transitional economies with a population of over 5 million, all but 12 countries have initiated steps to decentralise political, administrative, and fiscal powers to local governments. 

Taken together, these two trends have deep implications for politics, policy and public services in our country. Unfortunately, the size and scale of rural problems has locked politicians and policy makers into defining the choice as a zero-sum game – of rural versus urban. While this makes visceral political sense, and even possibly yields short-term benefits, it has no rigorous logic supporting it. The answers to our country’s development problems cannot lie in pitting urban versus rural. 

If anything, the seed of a new paradigm lies in the perceived seam of conflict between rural and urban. The real opportunity lies in moving the development paradigm away from treating rural and urban as separate issues, and in harnessing the powerful forces of localisation and urbanisation for rural prosperity.

Rural and urban challenges in our country can broadly be understood along two dimensions: economic energy and governance structures.

Urban India has got strong economic energy: it is growing at a healthy pace, with job creation in the secondary and tertiary sectors- the problems of cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and hundreds of small towns are really those of unanticipated growth. However, urban governance structures are weak: weakly empowered municipalities, absence of participation and transparency, too many agencies etc.  

Rural India has seen a tremendous amount of decentralisation energy, and we now have fairly rigorous governance structures in place: gram and zilla panchayats are claiming their place at the political table with increasing strength and success – Karnataka recently transferred over Rs 1000 crores directly to Grama Panchayats in a historic fiscal devolution move. Painful detailing work of bottom-up planning and participation has also been completed.  

However, rural India continues to be dogged by the lack of economic energy without which quality of life simply cannot be improved; this is a challenge that every country has faced as jobs move from agriculture to manufacturing and service sectors – in some sense, we are fighting the inexorable forces of history. China saw the migration of over 150 million rural poor to cities just in the last decade.

 The question is “Is there a way to combine these strengths – the economic energy of urban areas with the governance structures of rural decentralisation – to create a more balanced spatial model of development, across rural and urban India, in a manner consistent with the forces of localisation?”

India is sitting on the cusp of possibly unleashing a grand wave of economic prosperity, sustainable development, and balanced economic growth through rural-urban partnerships, driven by a set of somewhat serendipitous circumstances.  

There are roughly 4,000 urban centres, spread across the 600-odd districts in the country – on average, 7-8 urban centres per district.

We have fiscal decentralization institutions: all states have established State Finance Commissions to determine devolution formulae between state and local governments.

Most importantly, we have established regional planning mechanisms in the Constitution, called District Planning Committees and Metropolitan Planning Committees. However, over the past ten years, there has been little progress on operationalising these.

Hence, the political, institutional and legal infrastructure for rural-urban partnership is in place.  

Rural areas can tap into the urban economic energy, which can act as flywheels of economic growth. At the same time, urban areas can benefit from the same governance structures that have so carefully been detailed in rural India. 

The benefits of such rural-urban partnership are manifold:

-          Economic

o        The three substantial benefits of urban centres will become available for rural economies: infrastructure, credit, market linkages.

o        Over 100 million jobs can be created and managed without the significant migratory dislocation that would otherwise be unavoidable.

-          Services

o        Common platforms to address local public goods like water supply and sanitation, healthcare and education etc can improve the quality of service outcomes in these services.

o        Regional planning structures allow for resolution of conflicted issues like water supply and distribution

-          Political

o        Middle-tier political leaders at the state level will get a new political platform through the DPC/MPC structures to exercise their political aspirations.

-          Social

o        The increasing divide between rural and urban demands can be addressed by creating these regional partnerships where mutual cooperation is emphasised 

Doing this will require political will, something that is often in short supply, and - even when it exists - disappears like the morning mist. Political leadership at the national and state level is required to pull these pieces together. Initiatives like PURA, Rural Business Hubs, and rural infrastructure can be accelerated through rural-urban partnerships. Almost every stakeholder will respond positively to this idea – from markets to civil society institutions. Rural citizens need to see the economic benefits of decentralization; urban citizens need to see their local governments working for them.  

As I broached these ideas to the Cabinet Minister from Karnataka, he acknowledged that politicians were struggling to respond to urban issues. In his troubling piece on urbanization and globalisation, Neubauer notes, "The first urban century has its work cut out for it." India stands at a tantalizing threshold of unleashing rural-urban partnerships. Are our political leaders listening, especially the younger generation who claim that they want new ideas? 

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