Urban Development In India Research Articles

Improving Urban Infrastructure

The investment needs in basic infrastructure that determine the pace of development of cities are considerably higher than the quantum of flow of funds. The key indicators of the major urban services reveal that there is a failure to achieve even moderate success in service delivery. The components of the traditional approach to financing urban services have been grants and loans from government-owned financial institutions on basis of guarantees. The urban local bodies (ULBs) in India are weak in terms of capacity to raise both resources and financial autonomy. Given the major risks involved, private sector has also largely stayed away from urban infrastructure projects, until very recently. These have resulted in huge gap between the demand and supply of urban basic services. The present government has launched several Missions to promote urban development in the country through strict adherence to reforms to strengthen financial and governance capacities of ULBs and participating in competition at state and city levels to qualify for accessing resources apart from other grants-based missions. In this context, the article discusses the investment requirements, progress of programmatic interventions for urban development in India and their financing mechanism. The article focuses on recently completed Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and the newly launched National Urban Mission programmes.

‘Census Towns’ in India and what it means to be ‘urban’: Competing epistemologies and potential new approaches

The classification of 2 532 new settlements in the Census of India 2011 as ‘urban’, and specifically as ‘Census Towns’, has brought small and emerging urban centres back into the purview of urban studies and urban development in India. Taking this to be a point of entry, this article seeks to explore how the urban has been framed and approached from different and competing epistemological standpoints in the Indian context. First, it attempts to outline the different epistemologies of the urban in India, which may be seen as competing traditions because of the unequal stakes they have claimed so far in public and policy discourse. Then, it presents two brief case studies of Census Towns from the state of West Bengal to put forth new questions in this regard. The case studies illustrate significant gaps and discrepancies between the lived experience of the urban and its representation in dominant epistemological frameworks such as the official census. I argue that the historical development of various settlement systems, which constitutes the core narrative of urbanization in India, cannot be understood in all its complexity through mere census extracts or aerial images, but requires engagement with rich, embedded epistemologies that have taken shape within these settlements.

Crowdsourcing: A New Tool for Citizen Participation in Urban Development

Post-Independence urban development in India was guided by city development plans which were drawn to address the growing needs of the city. Planners and administrators prepared development plans which were usually of 20 year duration guiding and regulating the city growth. Development planning is usually a top-down process where experts use forecasting &land use methods to regulate the growth of the city and the participation of the citizens is limited. There is a gap between the citizen's needs &aspirations and city development plans, clearly demonstrated by the recent scrapping of the Mumbai Development Plan. In Mumbai, the planners and citizens saw each other as antagonists than as partners in the planning process. While theoretically cities are opening up for greater citizen's participation however, in practice lots more need to be achieved. Some recent efforts of citizen's participation with the aid of information and communication technologies like the Smart City Planning for Pune where ideas were generated through crowd sourcing open up new avenues for active citizen's participation. Similarly, Urban Venture Lab a crowd sourcing platform at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore incubates technology based ideas from citizens for solving urban problems. This paper reviews the Smart City Planning Pune and Urban Venture Lab experience and explores whether new technologies can aid active citizen's participation in the city development process. With the new Smart City Initiative being taken up in a big way by the Government of India, the learnings from the cases have a potential for deepening the idea and scaling up.

Of Slums and Politics in Puri, Odisha: The Localisation of the Slum-Free Cities Mission in the Temple City

1. Introduction This paper grew out of my scholarly interest in how the “urban local process” of a smaller city is connected to India’s “larger urban process” by means of slum re-development policy (see author’s notes). Contemporary urban development in India is driven by the elite aspiration to develop cities as global or world cities (Banerjee-Guha 2010; Dupont 2011; Goldman 2011; Roy 2014; Roy 2011a). While Indian cities are facing a range of complex challenges and suffer from diverse prob...

Engendering Budgeting and Gender Inclusive Urban Governance in India

Gender budgeting has been internationally recognized as a key tool for empowering women by incorporating gender perspective and concerns at all levels and stages of development planning, policy, programmes and delivery mechanism. Government of India has adopted budgeting for gender equity as a mission statement and is widely disseminating tools and strategies across ministries and departments. The importance of gender budgeting has been stressed time and again in different forums. Gender Budgeting refers to a method of looking at the budget formulation process, budgetary policies and budget outlays from the gender lens. In 1984, Austria introduced the first gender budget. Taking budgets as essential instruments for promoting gender equality, pioneering analysis of the impact of public budgets on gender relations was carried out. Since then, more than 90 countries have adopted gender budgeting as a tool for women empowerment and engendering development. In India too, many states, local governments, corporate houses and private agencies have initiated gender budgeting and have introduced specific policies, programmes and schemes for gender mainstreaming. Gender perspective in urban governance in India was initiated in 1992 when 74 th Constitutional Amendment Act made provision for one third reservation in the seats of municipal elections which was extended up to 50 percent in some of the states. International agencies such as World Bank, ADB and DFID also emphasized on gender mainstreaming in planning and implementation of urban development policy, programmes and schemes. Against this view point, present paper purports to examine the engendering budgeting and gender inclusive urban development in India.

Humanising urban development in India: call for a more comprehensive approach to social sustainability in the urban policy and design context

Social sustainability is gaining importance in the international urban development context; however, in India, the concept is unclear and under-represented. New approaches and tools at the level of urban policy, design and implementation are highly biased towards environmental sustainability focussing on “smart” technological innovations. This scant focus, coupled with massive and inequitable urban growth, is resulting in social crises that not only pose danger to the country’s stability but also represent some of the fundamental challenges to its sustainable future. Based on a detailed review of the literature on social sustainability, this paper explores its meaning and sets out its core components. It calls for humanising Indian cities and argues that a more comprehensive approach to the constituent but neglected “social” dimension of sustainable development which goes beyond the technical aspects of solving infrastructure-focused social issues to creating built environments that nurture strong urban communities is necessary. Analytical findings are translated into the social sustainability framework, which suggests a combination of (micro-level variables of) bottom-up and (macro-level variables of) top-down approaches in its implementation, because nurturing social sustainability in cities needs both, planned context and emergent actions.

Industrial townships and the policy facilitation of corporate urbanisation in India

New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.

Water as a metric for urban development in India

Water mismanagement in India causes great havoc. In many areas that receive abundant monsoonal rainfall, adequate water for domestic uses in other seasons is not available. At the same time, the intense urbanization in the country presents an opportunity for landscape architects and urban designers to actively address water security. This study discusses water use as a determining metric for undisturbed sites, or ‘greenfield’ developments, that have an abundance of water during the monsoons and water scarcity in other seasons. The article uses projective design for a greenfield city—Naya Raipur—in central India, to argue for rainfall metrics to calculate population density and water harvesting by laws, in order to meet all per capita domestic water requirements. The proposed use of a mandatory per capita water harvesting area is an easily applicable solution for water scarcity, which can provide autonomy to households for water management and control the density of a city based on the availability of water in the region.

Urbanization and its Impacts on Land Use, Biodiversity and Ecosystems in India

India, a predominantly rural country, is going through a slow but constant and broad transition towards urbanization. The amount of cities and mega cities has increased from 5,161 to 7,935 in 2011. The united Nations predict that, by 2031, 15% of the urban population of the world, about 600 million people, will be living in Indian cities. This increase in urban population will cause repercussions in terms of environment, ecology and sustainability, which will manifest themselves in demands on urban services and governance of the urban ecosystem. In addition, urbanization generates significant tension in terms of land cover, native habitats, biodiversity, protected areas and services to the ecosystem that are basic for human wellbeing. In this paper we analyze some challenges and opportunities for urban development in India that include the participation of governments, private agencies, NGOs, and citizens from different social and economic strata.

Politics of Urban Development in India

Politics of Urban Development in India

Obstacles and Catalysts Associated with Implementation of LEED-EB® in India

Transport and buildings are two principal contributors to climate change. One of the biggest challenges to sustainable urban development in India is the lack of green buildings. The authors look at catalysts and hindrances associated with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Existing Buildings (LEED-EB) as a tool for greening of existing buildings, and determine that prestige, image and reduction in operational costs are major catalysts while better rental value, social responsibility and provision of improved indoor environmental quality are minor to medium catalysts. The high cost of renovation, difficulty in meeting prerequisites and unavailability of required data for LEED-EB submission are presented as the major hindrances. The authors call for sensitization of stakeholders to catalysts and benefits so that the green buildings’ movement can be taken forward to have a more sustainable future.

India’s urbanization and business attractiveness by 2020

In the age of globalization, urban centers, including those in India, are competing with each other to attract business. Arguably, some cities are endowed with a high quality of infrastructure compared to others. In this context, the paper explores the role played by infrastructural development in ensuring attractiveness of cities in India from the standpoint of conducting business. It examines the various aspects of development of infrastructure within a city, including the importance of socioeconomic and environmental issues. The paper presents a strategic model to tackle the problems associated with urban development in India, concluding with a few policy implications.

Enabling urban development in India through technology: making change effective

PurposeIn the increasingly global world, there will be additional pressures on urban infrastructure, societies and organisations. Many factors cause these additional pressures, such as compression of time, competitiveness of organisations and economies and the demand for higher levels of transparency. Under these circumstances, a focus on sustainability becomes even more important than in the past. Evidence from several developed and emerging economies shows that technology can enable efforts towards sustainable urban development. However, in order for such efforts to yield results, the focus has to extend well beyond technology to balancing economic, environmental and socio‐cultural issues. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors critical to making the additional investments required for sustainable urban development worthwhile in a country such as India.Design/methodology/approachThere is not much documented evidence of such urban development projects in India. This paper explored two cases of large‐scale, multi‐year systems implementations in the public sector, in the expectation that lessons learned from those projects would be applicable to urban projects too. The findings are primarily based on interviews with senior government officials involved in such projects.FindingsWhile technology no longer poses major limitations, the return on investment of such projects is determined by large‐scale adoption. Most issues raised in the course of this research study pointed to a lack of robust change management in the implementation process. The framework and principles followed by organisational transformation initiatives are seen to be applicable in such cases too. Differences in scale and approach are highlighted in the analysis. In arriving at the return on investment, an approach using a “benefits index” is also proposed.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research would involve in‐depth study of many more instances of such projects. While this paper looks back at the projects several years after their inception, ongoing longitudinal studies taking an in‐process view might also add insight.Practical implicationsThis paper proposes that in such projects, as much focus must be placed on human transition as is placed on the technical aspects of the project itself.Originality/valueThere is hardly any documented evidence of such large‐scale public purpose projects in India. There are, however, several such projects planned or being executed. This paper is an attempt to identify the issues likely to be faced, so that there might be a higher probability of success for all stakeholders – government, citizens and private companies alike.

Urbanization in India – Spatiotemporal analysis using remote sensing data

Urbanization is arguably the most dramatic form of irreversible land transformation. Though urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon, it is especially prevalent in India, where urban areas have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth over the last 30 years. In this uncontrolled situation, city planners lack tools to measure, monitor, and understand urban sprawl processes. Multitemporal remote sensing has become an important data-gathering tool for analysing these changes. By using time-series of Landsat data, we classify urban footprints since the 1970s. This lets us detect temporal and spatial urban sprawl, redensification and urban development in the tremendously growing 12 largest Indian urban agglomerations. A multi-scale analysis aims to identify spatiotemporal urban types. At city level, the combination of absolute parameters (e.g. areal growth or built-up density) and landscape metrics (e.g. SHAPE index) quantitatively characterise the spatial pattern of the cities. Spider charts can display the spatial urban types at three time stages, showing temporal development and helping the reader compare all cities based on normalized scales. In addition, gradient analysis provides insight into location-based spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization. Therefore, we analyse zones defining the urban core versus the urban edges. The study aims to detect similarities and differences in spatial growth in the large Indian urban agglomerations. These cities in the same cultural area range from 2.5 million inhabitants to 20 million (in the metropolitan region of Mumbai). The results paint a characteristic picture of spatial pattern, gradients and landscape metrics, and thus illustrate spatial growth and future modelling of urban development in India.

Urban development in India

Urban development in India

From Utopia to Pragmatism: The Paradoxes of Urban Development in India

From Utopia to Pragmatism: The Paradoxes of Urban Development in India

Sustainable urban development in India: An inclusive perspective

The mainstream debate on urban development looks either at urban development or sustainable cities, and tends to miss out on people-centred approaches to development. The former addresses the issues of economic growth, whereas the latter that of environmental problems, to the exclusion of development concerns of the poor. The new perspective of Sustainable Cities in the South is an 'inclusive approach', which puts the vision of the poor and marginalised sectors at the centre and includes all the dimensions of development in a holistic and synergetic manner. The paper presents such a vision of sustainable cities in India and describes activities aimed at reaching this vision.

Heritage Conservation and Urban Development in India

This paper discusses the role a voluntary organization plays in the spatial definition and material conservation of cultural heritage in late twentieth century India. Voluntary organizations work in a broad range of fields in India, but the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) may be of particular interest to applied anthropologists because of its creative uses of anthropological concepts and methods. In addition, since the concept of culture is not confined to academic discourse today, anthropologists may find it worthwhile to learn about other public and private ways culture is defined and cultural analysis is carried out.

Urbanization and urban development in India: some policy issues

Urban trends in India over the period 1961-1981 are analyzed and prospects for further urban growth until the end of this century are assessed. "Trends in distribution of the urban population by cities and smaller urban places inter-state variations in urbanization and changes in the contribution of the urban population to the national GDP are reviewed and the implications of the trends and projections for national policies on urban and regional development are referred to briefly." Particular attention is given to the social and economic problems associated with urbanization and to their resolution. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND GER AND SPA) (EXCERPT)

The Costs of Urbanization in Developing Countries

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Costs of Urbanization in Developing CountriesJohannes F. LinnJohannes F. Linn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 30, Number 3Apr., 1982Third World Migration and Urbanization: A Symposium Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/452578 Views: 107Total views on this site Citations: 32Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1982 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sabyasachi Tripathi How does urbanization affect the human development index? 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