WHERE THE CITY ENDS AND THE VILLAGE BEGINS

WHERE THE CITY ENDS AND THE VILLAGE BEGINS

I spent three days in Goa last week, attending an urban conference. While there is visible evidence that Goa – being a smaller state, and at the higher end of all development indicators – has different challenges from many other parts of the country, it also holds many lessons for what our future local challenges could be.

The drive from the airport to the beautiful seaside resort took us past Panjim – the state capital, through Calangute to Candolim. The entire route was a fairly continuous stretch of development, with good roads, restaurants and services spotting the drive – in many ways, substantially urbanised.

However, the political jurisdictions were invisible to us in that short forty-minute drive: we passed through two municipalities, one city corporation, and twelve gram panchayats – our hotel itself was located in a panchayat. While this may seem like a trivial issue, it has significant implications for many day-to-day decisions: the delivery and maintenance of the road network that links these towns and villages, the local public transport system, the water supply and sanitation service, garbage management, the environmental concerns arising out of the tourism industry, and so on. Detailed questioning revealed that these were indeed difficult questions that they were grappling with.

These challenges are not being faced in Goa alone – they are already being felt in all our large metros, and are beginning to ripple across the smaller cities and towns as well. The Master Plan for Greater Bangalore, for instance, comprises 1,500 sq.km. of which Bangalore City Corporation is only 250 sq.km.. Eight small municipalities comprise another 250 sq.km, while 1,000 sq.km. is made of 70 gram panchayats - the forthcoming Devanahalli International Airport is in a panchayat. The administrative and governance challenges are enormous: establishing transport systems, projecting and planning housing needs across different sections of society, ensuring environmental protection, identifying and enabling economic clusters, and so on. Many of these challenges are arising out of urbanisation, which is slicing up our local jurisdictional map like a birthday cake being slashed by a boisterous three-year-old.

These are examples of regional coordination challenges – issues that are clearly beyond the boundaries of a specific local government, but are not large enough to be elevated to the state government. Hence, responses to these challenges require an intermediary level of decision-making, one that respects the role of local governments, and yet brings them together at a larger level. These challenges are not uniquely Indian – they are present in most countries in the world, with governments establishing different regional structures based on their constitutional provisions. While there are variations in the specific formulas being used – the regional structure in Toronto is different from that of London, which is again different from Tokyo - the common element is that there are formal systems that cluster multiple local governments – rural and urban – within a common regional footprint.

So, how is India addressing the regional challenge? The scorecard is mixed: the good news is that the 74^th Constitutional Amendment 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 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. Mumbai was forced to create an MPC by the courts, but this has never been operationalised.

Almost ten years after this amendment were passed, the National Commission to review the working of the Constitution (NCRCW) had this to say about the extent of the regional problems, “The B.E.S.T which is part of the BMC for instance, however, competent it may be, cannot do much about public transport in Mumbai if the Ministry of Railways handling the suburban system does not subscribe to a common plan. The Government of India’s Ministry of Environment or Maharashtra's State Pollution Control Board cannot do much to mitigate pollution without BMC's active collaboration. Above all, the maintenance of the infrastructure to keep the mighty economic machine of Mumbai going is a task requiring much interaction and collaboration between the Central, State and local governments, the public and the private sector, industry, commerce and the citizenry. The Metropolitan Planning Committee was envisaged as an inter-institutional platform for similar purposes.”

India’s urbanising trends shows increasing concentration in existing urban centres, i.e. the problem is growing. 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 present a range of ungovernable problems that will spread like viruses through our regional landscape: unplanned neighbourhoods, environmental degradation, patchwork infrastructure, massive numbers of migrant poor receiving minimal services like water, education, healthcare.

The intellectual work on establishing the institutional framework for such regional planning platforms has been completed in India; unfortunately, the hard work of implementing them on the ground is yet to begin.

Establishing these regional structures is urgently needed not just in our metropolitan regions. If the drive to the hotel in Goa is any precursor, we will soon reach a point in most of our states where it will be hard to see where the city ends and the village begins.

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