India's dimming city lights

With 340 million Indians living in our 5,161 cities and towns, forming 30% of the total population, urban GDP accounting for 58% and projected to rise to 70% by the year 2030, our annual spend in per capita terms in the urban areas is only $17. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan envisioned Indian cities to be the locus and engine of economic growth over the next two decades and suggested that the realisation of an ambitious goal of 9-10 % growth in GDP depends fundamentally on making Indian cities more liveable, bankable and competitive. Yet the scenario today is that day in and day out, urban residents are constantly reminded and made aware of lack of adequate civic amenities. Rapid economic growth will naturally lead to an increase in urbanisation as cities provide large economies of agglomeration for individual activity.

Unfortunately, the state of urban infrastructure has deteriorated to the extent that we are not able to fully benefit from these economies. Poor urban infrastructure inflicts a severe hardship on people. There is tremendous pressure on civic infrastructure systems like water supply, sewerage, drainage, solid waste management, basic shelter, parks and open spaces, transport and so on. It has also led to deterioration in the quality of city environments. In several cities, the problem of traffic congestion, pollution, poverty, slums, crime and social unrest are assuming alarming proportions.

The midterm appraisal of the ongoing Eleventh Plan points out that the transformation of Indian cities faces several structural constraints: weak or outdated urban management practices including planning systems and service delivery models, historic lack of focus on the urban poor, incomplete devolution of functions to the elected urban local bodies, unwillingness to progress towards municipal autonomy and an urban management and governance structure that is fragmented between different state-level agencies and urban local bodies. What makes it worse in the case of large cities is the concentration of urban population in few large cities with 68.9% population living in 441 class-1 cities which are cities with more than one lakh population.

Let us first have an appreciation of the key issues involved. When it comes to water supply, one of the fundamental requirements of a city dweller and basic civic facility, only about 91% of the urban population has access to water supply facilities leaving a gap of 9% for whom making such a provision is still an unfinished task. Even within this 91% there are concerns. Only 70% of urban households are served by tap water, with remaining 21% relying on tubewell or handpumps. While 66% of urban households have their principal source of drinking water within their premises, 32% had it within a distance of 0.2 km. And 41% urban population had sole access to their principal source of drinking water with a huge 51% sharing a public source. In many cities, adequacy, equitable distribution and per capita rate of supply are not as per prescribed norms.

An ADB study on benchmarking of water utilities in India shows that the duration of water supply varies in cities significantly. For instance, while Chandigarh receives a supply of 12 hours per day, Rajkot is at the other end with a supply of 20 minutes per day. No city as a whole had 24x7 water supply. The poor, particularly those living in slums and squatter settlements are generally deprived of the basic facility of access to water. At places cost incurred by the poor to fetch water is much higher than for valid connection holders.

When we move to the area of sewerage, the survey shows that 26% of urban households had no latrine, 35% were using septic tank and only 22% were using sewerage system. Only 62% of the urban population has access to sewerage and sanitation facilities. Laying a sewer network is such a difficult proposition for a city local body that most of them just cannot find the type of investment required for this. Even in cities where sewage facilities are available, connections varied from 48% to 70%. The Central Pollution Control Board says that against a generation of about 15,800 million litres of waste water per day in 300 cities with a population of more than one lakh, treatment facilities exist for only 3,750 million litres per day. Which means the balance is flowing or merging with water flows posing serious health hazards. A sanitation rating of cities undertaken early this year by the Union ministry of urban development showed that no Indian city could come in the highest desirable category of 'green', with only four cities, namely Chandigarh, Mysore, Surat and Delhi succeeding to make it to the next best level of a 'blue' city.

As far as municipal solid waste is concerned , it is estimated that about 1,15,000 tonnes of solid waste is generated daily in our cities but on an average, the collection efficiency of the waste ranges between 70% and 90% in metro cities whereas it is less than 50% in most other cities. Per capita generation of waste is in the range of 0.2 to 0.6 kg per day and it is increasing by 1.3% per annum. Going beyond collection, waste actually treated before disposal in the million-plus population cities is only about 30%. Landfill sites have not been identified by many municipalities and in several cities the landfill sites have exhausted and either the concerned local bodies do not have the resource to acquire new sites or there is stiff resistance to location of such sites close to residential or other areas of activity. While waste is a resource today, very few cities have been able to recognise this fact and move away from a traditional concept of spending money on employing persons to sweep and collect waste to the more relevant concept of outsourcing the entire process and converting the process to one of net return for the city.

The recent McKinsey study on India's urban awakening sounds enough warnings on how continued low investment in our cities is going to create further complications as far as urban living is concerned. It is pointed out that India's urban spending remains at a dismally low level. Our annual per capita urban spending including capital and operational expenditure, at $50, is only 14% of China's average of $362 and less than 3% of the UK's $1,772. If we continue to invest in urban infrastructure at the current rate, say, $300 billion over the next 20 years, the urban infrastructure will be woefully short of what is necessary to sustain prosperous cities.

(The author is former secretary to the government in the ministry of urban development)