India needs more census towns for sustainable job creation

Nearly 800 million of 1.3 billion Indian population still live in the over six lakh villages. If there has to be a meaningful and inclusive economic development, these villages will have to become sustainable with adequate jobs.

Since there is a limit to the number of jobs the agriculture sector can provide, a planned movement into non-agricultural activities is inevitable. Most such activities are better available and managed in urbanising situations where a "densification" of population takes place, enabling a more efficient provision of goods and services.

Census data indicates 57% of migration in the country happens from small villages to bigger villages in search of jobs outside the farm sector, as farming is increasingly becoming unsustainable due to fragmentation of land holdings; in many areas lack of irrigation and dependence on seasonal rains, often erratic, increases the risk. Many people migrate to nearby and larger villages rather than to towns as cost of living is less compared to urban towns. Also skills required to get absorbed in a non-agricultural occupation is less in these places.

India has gram panchayats and Nagar Palinkas as the basic units of local governance, as envisaged in Part IX and IX-A of the Constitution. Though the constitution also envisages "Nagar Panchayats" (by any name) as an institution of urban governance for an area in transition from a rural area to an urban area, the idea has not really been understood and used for planning this transition.

S Vijay Kumar, a former IAS officer from Himachal Pradesh cadre, who was the rural development secretary in the central government and is now a distinguished fellow in TERI, told DNA Money that India has successfully tackled the problem of food security but not as yet overcome the problem of poverty partly because of the challenge of creating a vast number of jobs in the non-agri sector in difficult conditions and when skill sets are still quite low. He is among the growing number of policy analysts who are of the view that this unplanned migration is both a challenge and an opportunity.

He advocated a planned creation of Nagar Panchayats, an intermediary between gram panchayats and Nagar Palinkas, to deal with developmental as well as governance problems of the mega villages, called "census towns" by the Census Commission of India, that have mushroomed in rural India often spread over several contiguous panchayats.

At the moment census towns, where a substantial proportion of migration is taking place and is likely to further pick up pace, continue to be governed under the State Panchayat Acts, though the governance skill sets and planning requirements are now much more than those required by urban areas.

According to the definition used by the Census Commission, a census town is one which is not statutorily notified and administered as a town( and thus remains a rural area subject to panchayat jurisdiction), but nevertheless whose population has attained urban characteristics. They are characterised by the following: i) population exceeds 5,000; and ii) at least 75% of main working population is employed outside the agricultural sector.

In India, typically a village has a population of 500-3,000. There are less than 4,000 villages with population of over 10,000 people.

The migration is largely from villages to the census towns. This is evident from the fact that census towns have grown nearly three-fold from 1,362 in 2001 to 3,892 in 2011.

West Bengal (780) had the highest number of census towns in 2011, followed by Kerala (461), Tamil Nadu (376) and Maharashtra (278). Almost the entire growth in urban population in Kerala between 2001 and 2011 was due to additional CTs.

"Census town amenities are not good as they have grown haphazardly without integrated planning for roads, water supply or sewerage because often the "town" is actually a contiguous combination of parts of several panchayats. So there is no funding preference for the urbanising part of panchayat. It is not equipped to support densification. The crucial point is one cannot plan densification covering multiple panchayats without appropriate governance and integrated regulation," Vijay Kumar said, adding "there is a governance fracture."

The well-developed census towns will promote job creation. Studies show a mere Re 1-1.5 lakh investment is enough to create one job in rural India whereas it takes at least Rs 5-6 lakh in urban areas.

Typically, a Rs 60 crore development budget annually over the next decade or so in such mega panchayats or census towns will create much-needed urban amenities in rural India as envisaged by former President, Late Abdul Kalam.

Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Rurban Mission launched by the government is an attempt to realise Kalam's dream, and aims at forming clusters of contiguous panchayats with an aggregate population of 25,000-50,000 but so far only 100 clusters of villages are proposed to be developed under the mission and not all the 4,000 odd census towns in the country.

Given the small area size of panchayats in many states, a cluster to an aggregate population of 25,000 may actually involve a substantial number of panchayats.

Also, the implementation strategy of the scheme as it stands is to ensure administrative convergence of the contiguous panchayats, which may not give the necessary cutting edge to the governance and regulation that a Nagar Panchayat can give for such special area.