Need of an inevitable and massive wave of urbanisation

The 2011 Census data underlines the message arising from the mess created by forcible land acquisition around Delhi and its subsequent legal undoing: India needs coherent policy for releasing large tracts of rural land for urbanisation. The rise in India’s urban population over the past one decade has been a remarkable 32%, while rural population growth was 12%. All of western and southern India are now more than 35% urban, while four states saw an absolute decline in their rural populations. More new towns came up since the last Census of 2001 than new villages: 2,774 vs 2,279. Out of the 181.4 million addition to India’s population since 2001, towns accounted for 91 million, more than half, raising the urban share of the population from 28.81% to 31.16%.

And the process has just started. For, this change has to do with the change in economic structure. Agriculture has been growing at less than 3% a year while industry and services have been growing at well over three times that rate. Industry and services do not grow on the farm: their habitat is urban. The larger the share of off-farm activities in the economy, the bigger the share of people engaged in these and living in towns. So, as India continues to grow at rates close to 9%, driven by industry and services, the pace of urbanisation would accelerate.

The rise in urban population stems not so much from an explosion in urban fertility as from migration. If these crores of migrants have to be accommodated in the existing towns, our cities would become a sea of slums dotted with a few islands of planned development. Such a process of urbanisation would spawn plague, crime and misery.

To avoid that fate, we need to build new towns, such as Greater Noida, a suburb of Noida, which is a suburb of Delhi. How not to meet that need is now being spelt out by the Allahabad High Court as it annuls acquisition of parcel after parcel of farmland for urbanisation. How to go about releasing land for urbanisation is one of the major political questions which the government cannot afford to duck anymore. We need imaginative solutions in our politics, not just obstreperous opposition to any move to release land for new towns.