Making villages “city-like”

Hardly anyone is aware of an international milestone in formulating housing policies which is coming up in October in Quito, Ecuador. The third UN Habitat conference — which takes place only every 20 years — should be an occasion for every government to do some stocktaking and see where it stands on providing that most basic necessity — a roof over its citizens’ heads. 

It is important to remember that the UN refers to human settlements in its Habitat programme, which refers to the housing and wellbeing of our entire country, including the 833 million who live in the countryside, not urban housing alone. Instead, the NDA is too busy implementing Smart Cities, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna, Swachh Bharat and other city-centric schemes. The Vancouver declaration at the 1976 Habitat conference referred to human settlements and noted that land couldn’t be treated as an ordinary asset. Land ownership goes hand in hand with the accumulation of capital and presents a major obstacle to housing the poor. The UN action plan called for subjecting land to public surveillance for this reason.

This is a far cry from today’s situation in the country, where 68 per cent of the people live in villages. The remaining 32 per cent, in some 4,021 census towns and cities, produce 68 per cent of the GDP, which is why they are the foci of attention. In a decade, this is estimated to go up to 75 per cent. Since the National Commission on Urbanisation, headed by Charles Correa in 1988, cities are regarded as the “engines of growth”. They occupy a small per cent of the land mass but consume three-quarters of all resources and spew out an equivalent proportion of solid and liquid waste. Cities, we must remember, are also produced by growth. If there was sufficient investment in infrastructure in rural areas, this would incubate many more small towns and make for a more even pattern of “rur-urbanisation”. 

Not that our cities are exemplars of inclusive development. Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, is a classic example. Some 60 per cent live in slums, there are 20,000 dilapidated cessed buildings and a small floating population of salary and wage earners. The all-powerful building lobby, comprised of operators and politicians who often can’t be distinguished from one another, caters to only 10-15 per cent of the population. Due to this narrow base, it is currently facing stagnation, with unsold or unoccupied stock. One wouldn’t suspect this, judging by the proliferation of ads and sponsorship of virtually every public festival, including Ganesh Chaturthi. Builders are caught up in a vortex of their own making: they must remain in the public eye to prosper, but their client base necessarily restricts them to the upper echelons of the market.

The current Development Plan (DP) — in its new avatar, after the first was scrapped last year due to a public furore — slyly introduces the concept of “affordable housing”. But it does so in even in No-Development Zones (NDZs) and salt pans, which is subterfuge for allowing builders into hitherto inaccessible natural areas under the guise of housing the poor, which is furthest from their minds. Natural areas, along with mangroves, were intended by earlier planners to insulate Mumbai from rising tides and mega floods such as the city witnessed in July 2005. Build on them there will be no escape from torrential rains, especially when they coincide as they do this month with the year’s highest tides, or erosion of entire swathes of the coast.

The DP states that Mumbai needs 15 lakh affordable houses. In 15 years, it has only built 1.5 lakhs, so at this rate it will take a full century to house all Mumbaikars. However, solutions stare the city in its face. Slums only occupy 8 per cent of the 483 sq km that comprise Greater Mumbai. Reserve these for slum dwellers, with an FSI of 3 which they are entitled to, and get public agencies like the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Agency (MHADA) to build homes for which they pay, provided bank loans are available. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem: MHADA recently built 16,500 homes for unemployed mill workers at just Rs9.6 lakhs a unit, covering all its expenditure. The catch is that the land is free.

The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board under AAP, the first urban political party in the country,  has been building 375 sq ft homes without making any profit and raising a five-year Rs 2 lakh corpus for maintenance, after which they are handed over to cooperative societies. The government has also set up mohalla health clinics at Rs 6 lakhs apiece, with a fee of just Rs 30, with 80 free medicines and referral to  other hospitals. This month, former Justice Markandey Katju paid them a surprise visit and verified how well they were functioning. The Washington Post reported that the US could learn how to fix its “broken” health system from this initiative. 

Currently, rural areas are under siege from a slew of “corridorisation” like the $90 billion Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor, one of the biggest in the world, the Rs 98,000 crore bullet train and a proposed six-hour Delhi to Chennai train. Like the ill-conceived Special Economic Zones of the previous Congress regime, these lead to the acquisition of  acres of land and the pauperization of small and marginal farmers.

The neglect of the countryside has to be reversed by ushering in “city-like” conditions. We are facing “de-peasantisation”, with some 2,500 farmers leaving for the cities every day. In 2007, the Arjun Sengupta committee reported that 836 million Indians were spending less than Rs 20 each a day. 

The Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA), the brainchild of former President Abdul Kalam, which envisaged the Rural Development Ministry partnering panchayats, could well form the skeleton of such a thrust. While it would be unwieldy to plan for 6,20,000 villages, there could well be 6,000 “smart blocks”.

These could have better provisions for health, education, housing and connectivity, both by roads and Internet. Farmers could benefit by being informed about weather, crop issues and, not least, digitized land titles. As it is, half the legislators in Andhra Pradesh were previously block development officers. Apart from all the other spinoffs, this alone will make cities sustainable by reducing migration.

The author is Chairperson, Forum of Environmental Journalists of India (FEJI)