The settlement pattern in India is in a state of equilibrium and has
remained so over a period of time. Equilibrium has different meanings in
physics and chemistry. The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary
defines it “a state of balance”. It is from this angle, therefore, that
the subject will be approached. The table below gives the total
population of India,
| Census Year | Total Population | Total Urban Population | Proportion of Urban Population |
| 1901 | 238,396,327 | 25,693,125 | 10.8 |
| 1931 | 278,977,238 | 33,138,184 | 11.9 |
| 1951 | 361,088,090 | 61,986,721 | 17.2 |
| 1991 | 846,421,039 | 215,771,612 | 25.5 |
| 2001 | 1,028,737,436 | 286,119,689 | 27.8 |
| 2011 | 1,210,569,573 | 377,106,125 | 31.2 |
Source: 1. General Population Table A-4 Part-II 2001 (India &States)
2. Primary Census Abstract – Data Highlights-India – Series 1-2011
As will be seen, between 1901 and 2011 the total population of India
has increased more than five-fold whilst the urban population has
increased by about 17 times. Despite this, as a proportion of the total
population, the urban population has increased by only about three fold
in these 110 years. Undoubtedly the growth of urban population as
compared with the total population is higher than the growth of rural
population in percentage terms, but a three-fold increase in the
percentage of urban population is not by itself alarming and is
certainly not indicative of a skewing of the settlement pattern in which
rural settlements are decaying and that at their cost massive
urbanisation is occurring in India. In fact, as per the census of India
of 2011, the primary census abstract states that the percentage growth
of urban population indicates a 3.4 percent growth as compared with the
previous decade, which is certainly not indicative of any massive rural
to urban migration.
In order to understand the urbanisation scene in India, a good point
of reference is the report of the National Commission on Urbanisation
which was presented to the Prime Minister on 12th August
1988, though an interim report had been submitted to the Government of
India as early as January 1987. The National Commission on
Urbnanisation was constituted in 1985 by the Government of India on
account of what the preface to volume-1 of the report states in the
following words, “Future historians may well decide that the crucial
phenomenon of our times is the massive urbanisation that is engulfing
the third world. Even in the span of the last two decades, towns and
cities all over Asia, Africa and Latin America have been doubling and
tripling in size. India, which has the second largest population in the
world, is central to this phenomenon. It is indeed encouraging that
for the first time the Government of India has appointed a National
Commission to look into these issues”. The Commission noted that there
was a significant difference between the pattern of urbanisation in
India and that in Latin America and much of South East Asia. In 1981,
the total number of urban settlements in India was 3301, whereas the
rural settlements numbered approximately 5.5 lakhs. At the same time, no
urban settlement could be defined as a primate city such as Bangkok or
Mexico City because no single city dominated the whole country. Mexico
City has almost one-fourth of the population of Mexico. In India, by
contrast, as against the urban growth rate of 46.2 percent in 1981, the
growth rate of the then existing twelve metropolitan cities was less
than 30 percent during the decade 1971-1981. It is the medium size
towns which showed the highest growth rate. Though the tables relating
to the population break-up of urban India have yet to be released by the
Registrar General for the 2011 census, the picture prevailing in 1981
has not significantly changed in 2011. The only real difference is that
many of the cities which were just below the one million mark have
reached the one million mark, from 12 to 18 in 1991, 35 in 2001 and 53
in 2011. This only reinforces the point that it is the medium towns
which have shown a consistently high growth rate and have become
metropolitan in the process.
The issue can be looked at from another angle. The census
classification of urban settlements is metropolitan, class-I ranging
from 1 lakh to 1 million, class-II ranging from 50,000 to 1 lakh,
class-III from 20,000 to 50,000, class-IV from 10,000 to 20,000, class-V
from 5,000 to 10,000 and class-VI from 3,000 to 5,000. The 53
metropolitan cities contain 19.24 percent of the total urban population
of India. However, as a proportion of the entire population of India,
the 53 metropolitan cities account for just 6 percent of the total
population. Therefore, in the total settlement pattern of India the
metropolitan cities still only represent a very small proportion. In
this behalf there is not much change between what prevailed in 1981 and
what we find today.
There is another factor which we must take into account when we look
at the share of urban population in the total population. About 7.5
percent of the urban population lives in towns ranging from class-VI to
class-IV, that is, from 3000 to 20,000 population which represents about
2.5 per cent of the total population. When we deduct this from the
total urban population, which is necessary because most of these towns
are either linked with agriculture directly or provide marketing and
other services to an agricultural hinterland which makes them more rural
in character than urban, then the picture alters further. If we take
their population into account and deduct it from the total urban
population because even today such towns are semi-rural or semi-urban,
then even today the actual urban population is only about 28 percent of
the total population . At the macro level, therefore, one could safely
state that India’s population is well distributed in a hierarchy of
settlements ranging from the smallest hamlet and village right up to
mega metropolitan cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.
This picture is in sharp contrast with how things developed in China
after the Revolution. China embarked on a deliberate policy of
industrialisation, largely based on the secondary or manufacturing
sector and by definition the Chinese model of development made
industrialisation conterminous with urbanisation. A great deal of
investment went into urbanisation, with people being actively encouraged
to migrate from agriculture to manufacture and other urban activities.
Today more than sixty percent of the people of China live in cities and
towns. China also followed a deliberate policy of directing investment
to provinces and autonomous regions which showed the maximum promise of
industrialisation and it never had the equivalent of the Finance
Commission that we have in India in which weightage is given to backward
States and backward areas in the matter of allocation of non-plan
central funds and sharing of revenues between the Centre and the States.
Instead of promoting equity between different regions, through various
programmes, China welcomed migration of people from very backward
regions to the cities so that the balance tilted heavily towards urban
centres.
The governing philosophy in India is and has always been totally
different from that in China. The National Commission on Urbanisation
did comment as under, ”Urbanisation involves two closely related
factors. The first is the people—work relationship in rural areas, in
which land is the essential medium—and which is right now so critically
balanced that any addition to the population must inevitably push
people out of agriculture into non agricultural occupations. The second
is the fact that only urban settlements can offer substantial non
agricultural employment and absorb the migrants who are moving out of an
agricultural economy”. In this context, the National Commission on
Urbanisation, in setting out its philosophy, stated, “It is from this
perspective that the Commission has examined the crucial issues and
conceptualised the strategic thrusts needed for the next few decades
--- without, in any way, questioning or preempting the development and
reform which must be carried out with the greatest urgency within
rural India itself ”. Thus as early as 1985-88, the very Commission set
up to study urbanisation and suggest a long term national policy in
this behalf was acutely aware of the fact that rural India itself needs
to be strengthened so that there is a continuity and continuum between
rural and urban India to the mutual advantage of both. The Commission
did suggest urbanisation as a means of siphoning off surplus rural
population, but never as a means of actively encouraging migration from
rural to urban areas, thus emptying rural India. The urbanisation
policy, therefore, has to work in tandem with our policies of rural
development. In other words, there is a definite appreciation of the
fact that our settlements have a certain equilibrium which must be
strengthened and not disturbed.
Why rural India is still so important in our settlement picture? In
many of the countries where either primate cities have developed or
where there is a deliberate move towards urbanisation one would find
that what lies behind between rural to urban migration is an iniquitous
system of land tenure and holdings. In Mexico, for example, the ordinary
peasant, or peon, held land entirely at the pleasure of the feudal lord
of the hacienda and was no better than a serf in medieval England or
Tsarist Russia. He, therefore, did not have a visceral relationship with
the land that he tilled and, therefore, was quite happy to migrate to a
town which offered him a better life. In China, peasant proprietorship
as enshrined in the ryotwari system did not exist and the peasant was
entirely at the mercy of the landlord or, in Russian terminology, the
Kulak. That is why when the Revolution occurred in China it was the
land lord who was persecuted to the point of death, just as the Kulak as
a class was liquidated in the Soviet Union. Except for the Bengal
Presidency where Cornwallis, through the Permanent Settlement,
introduced an iniquitous Zamindari system, the rest of India practised
ryotwari or where there was Malguzari, or Jagirdari, the tenant was
still protected by law. This was further reinforced in the early 1950s
of the last century when Jagirdari, Zamindari, Malguzari, etc., were
abolished and the tiller of the soil became its owner. I am not trying
to read into the situation a spiritual relationship of the farmer with
the land, but the fact of ownership did create a vested interest in
which the farmer would like to hang on to the land and use it to earn
a living. That is why the approximately 5.5 lakh villages in India
form such a powerful constituency that at policy level government is
bound to promote what the National Commission on Urbanisation refers to
as “development and reform within rural India”.
Equilibrium, therefore, comes from the factum of rural India being
the most populous entity in India, which had stagnated in the past, but
which has now attracted policy attention at the highest level. The
continuum is promoted because clusters of villagers need market centres
where the produce can be traded and these market centres, in turn,
become the service centres which provide services to agriculture and to
other activities in rural India. Where the marketable surplus is huge
as in the Punjab, the market centres, or mandis, developed into multi
activity urban centres which have a defined hinterland and where there
is mutual interaction to the benefit of both mandi town and the villages
it serves. Between mandi town and the next order of towns ranging from
a population of about 50,000 up to just short of a million, there is a
definite link on account of agro based industry, banking and other
services, education and health facilities and administrative
infrastructure. The relationship of the district headquarters, tehsil
and block headquarters, the market villages and the village settlement
is visible, pronounced and very much alive. A good example of this is
the National Capital Region which includes Delhi and towns and villages
in an area of approximately 38,000 square kilometres, covering the
States of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, besides the Union
Territory of Delhi. The NCR was envisaged as a kind of protective
envelope for Delhi which would, by ensuring the growth of a number of
small and medium level towns, safeguard Delhi from excessive growth.
What is forgotten is that the region itself is agriculturally prosperous
and contains a large number of small and medium towns which has a
viability of their own. Sonepat, Hapur, Alwar and Meerut would have
survived even without NCR because they each have a hinterland which they
service and with which they interact. The money spent on developing
NCR could probably have been better spent in developing towns in those
areas where there is economic backwardness and from where substantial
migration takes place to large cities such as Delhi. Whereas the rural
hinterland of the NCR is still vibrant, the NCR plan has actually
resulted in on the one hand increasing the density of Delhi and on the
other strengthening the gravitational pull of Delhi so that it has drawn
cities such as Gurgaon and NOIDA into the mass of Delhi. This defeats
the very purpose of the NCR plan. Despite this, the 38,000 square
kilometres of the National Capital Region still shows traces of the
basic equilibrium of settlements in India.
In the dynamic situation in which India finds itself there are number
of forces and counter forces which are operating simultaneously and
which are impacting the settlement pattern. The National Rural
Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) under the Mahatma Gandhi National
Rural Employment Guarantee Act has been designed to give a hundred days
employment per year to anyone in the rural areas seeking employment.
Almost a lakh crore rupees per annum are being spent on this programme.
I do not want to enter into the flaws of the programme, which are
manifold, but it has had one major effect in States such as Bihar from
where there was migration of labour in search of employment to States
such as the Punjab, which are starved of agricultural labour. By
providing some semblance of employment in the villages, NREGS has
sharply impacted the migration pattern and today rich farmers in States
such as the Punjab have to go to rural Bihar in order to cajole the
landless and the marginal farmers to come and work as farm hands. This
has certainly pushed up wages. Even in Madhya Pradesh, in the more
prosperous agricultural districts farm labour is difficult to find. It
is too early to make any study of the overall impact on NREGS and its
long term implications, but if the programme is restructured to create
permanent assets in the villages, such as minor irrigation works, soil
conservation and water conservation works, water harvesting, etc., it
will certainly reduce rural-urban migration. In fact, in districts such
as Jhabua, Dhar, Mandla, etc., which are tribal and from where annual
seasonal migration is the normal feature, aggressive watershed
development management programmes have increased fuel and fodder
availability, raised the water table in wells, substantially increased
irrigation at micro level and reduced seasonal migration. The ridge to
valley treatment of hill features, vegetation and water conservation
methods have all been beneficial to the environment. This has kindled
hope in the villages, which show a degree of vibrancy which was hitherto
missing.
There are two other schemes which have also had a beneficial effect
in retaining the importance of rural India in our settlement hierarchy.
The first is the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana which has
dramatically improved road connectivity in rural India. The second is
the rural electrification programme carried out in States such as
Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, where separation of the agricultural feeder
from the normal feeder has ensured quality power for the prescribed
number of hours for lift irrigation and other agricultural purposes,
while guaranteeing twenty-four hours normal power supply to every
village, but for which there are metered charges. The availability of
twenty-four hours power supply does not merely improve the agricultural
picture. In many States guaranteed power availability has encouraged
small scale industry to locate in villages. One example of this is
Bhavnagar District in Gujarat where, in about 180 villages, households
have installed diamond cutting lathes and other equipment, thus
collectively making Bhavnagar District the biggest diamond cutting
centre in the world. The activity is industrial, but carried out by
agriculturists and the settlement picture remains undisturbed because
the village is viable and people live there. Here is an example of small
scale industrialisation not automatically leading to urbanisation, but
nevertheless providing nonagricultural jobs to villagers.
There is another factor which is having a definite impart on the
settlement pattern and that is education. Unfortunately the village is
too small an entity to host institutions of higher learning unless, of
course, it be fortunate like Pilani to attract the Birlas to set up the
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, an institution on par with an
Indian Institute of Technology. Even here some change is visible, for
example, the location of the Jaypee Institute of Technology in Raghogarh
in Guna District of Madhya Pradesh. Raghogarh is a very small town in
Guna District but the Jaypee Group preferred to locate in this place.
But by and large children who want to go in for higher education have
unfortunately to leave the village for a town where a good college is
located. Very often these children do not return to their parent’s
occupation of agriculture and they are the ones who permanently migrate
to cities. This is a phenomenon which we can neither stop nor should
stop. Whereas NREGS may as a stopgap measure check distress migration to
the cities, it cannot stop the movement of the educated young to urban
areas.
The next question which arises is what should be the destination of
migration. The first time educated would be still be at the stage where
after a basic degree they would like a job. It is unlikely that their
interest would lie in research, academics or fine arts. This is where
the hierarchy of settlements and the equilibrium have an important part
to play. Because India does not have primate cities there is no single
city which dominates, but the mega metropolitan cities do have some
characteristics of a primate city, that is, they do not have a definite
hinterland. The National Capital Region is not the defined hinterland
of Delhi where, for example, about half a million people working in the
garment trade have migrated from Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Are Azamgarh,
Balia and Ghazipur the hinterland of Delhi? Obviously not, but yet they
contribute labour to Delhi. Hapur does not. Similarly, if the city of
Mumbai were to be set physically adrift from the mainland, it could
survive like the island city of Singapore in which the world would be
its hinterland. In fact, the entire Shiv Sena movement gains strength
from the fact that Mumbai does not have a hinterland and the Shiv Sena,
in a bid to protect the Maharashtrian roots of the city, resents this
fact and wants Maharashtra to be the hinterland of the city and the
others to be kept out. And yet these huge metropolitan cities are very
much a part of the entire settlement picture, representing as they do
just six percent of the population of India. But it is the other
ninety-four percent who are also accommodated in the settlement pattern
and unless there is equilibrium they will virtually become the exploited
and the mega metropolitan cities will be the predators and the
exploiters. This is a very important factor in determining our
settlement policy for the future which, by implication, means the entire
economic policy and the employment policy.
By itself rural India has the capacity to be self sufficient,
provided the following things are done:- (1) Substantially upgrading
the existing irrigation infrastructure and then adopting means of
massively increasing irrigation through a hierarchy of projects ranging
from the village pond, dug well, tube well, micro and minor irrigation
works and all the way up to mega projects like dams on the Narmada.
(2) Stabilising power supply and ensuring twenty-four hours power supply
to villages, but on a full tariff basis so that there are adequate
returns on the power supply. (3) A massive input into improving school
education, vocational education and technical education, together with
encouragement to rural students to enroll in colleges specialising in
Humanities, Social Sciences and the Liberal Arts. (4) Improving the
network of rural communications, development of market villages and
towns, strengthening of mandis, location of industry which adds value to
agricultural produce in the mandi towns. (5) Strengthening the rural
credit system so that the service town and farmers in its command both
mutually benefit.
There are some factors which are likely to bring about a change in
the settlement equilibrium. India is beginning to realise that if it is
to maintain and strengthen its strategic global economic strength, then
its manufacturing sector has to evolve, develop and grow to an extent
where it can compete with the European Union and with countries such as
China. One step in this direction is the conceptualisation of the
Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor , which largely impacts the States of
Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, as also the
Union Territories of Delhi, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Diu Daman and very
marginally the States of Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The total area
under the influence of the project is estimated to be 4, 36,486 square
kilometres. The project is located along a 1,483 kilometres long
dedicated rail freight corridor (DFC) largely from north to south on the
western side of India, with an area of influence of about 150
kilometres on both sides of the DFC. As the concept paper states,
“High impact market driven nodes are proposed to be identified along the
corridor to provide transparent and investment friendly policy and
facility regimes under which integrated investment regions and
investment areas would be set up. These regions are proposed to be self
sustained industrial townships with world class infrastructure, road
and rail connectivity for freight movement to and from ports and
logistics hubs, served by domestic and international air connectivity,
reliable power, quality social infrastructure and provide a globally
competitive environment conducive for setting up businesses”. This is
the concept, but in reality what is likely to happen is an unregulated
ribbon development along improved roads and railway tracks in which in
the growth nodes land would be provided, which would be built upon,
though not necessarily in a planned manner. In almost every new
industrial township whereas the infrastructure for the industry may be
of a reasonable standard, generally township development for people
other than those working in the industries is highly unsatisfactory and
what we have is a massive proliferation of Soweto type slums, or the
Favelas of Rio de Janeiro. What could happen, however, is that these
new nodes or townships could eat into cultivable village land, finish
agriculture and seriously disturb the settlement equilibrium, at least
within the region in which such development takes place.
In other words, there is no guarantee that the present settlement
equilibrium will not be seriously disturbed in the near future,
especially because we as a nation seem to be totally incapable of taking
a holistic view of anything and then preparing a complete plan. I have
already given five small suggestions on how rural India can be self
sufficient and, therefore, sustainable. A rural settlement is generally
in consonance with the environment because the scale of the settlement
is not sufficiently large to cause widespread environmental damage.
Urban settlements, on the other hand, are not only large enough in scale
to enable man to seriously change the environment through human
intervention, largely hostile intervention and because an urban
settlement converts land from cyclical and seasonable agricultural use
to a one time urban use in which brick and cement replace the tilled
soil, the impact cannot be reversed. In terms of service requirements,
in dense urban settlements, the requirement is of complex composite
services, whereas in a rural settlement these services can be household
based and they are not very extractive in terms of a call on natural
resources. When the settlement equilibrium is disturbed the problem of
servicing the city becomes so difficult that ultimately every city in
India becomes a disaster zone. This does not mean that we cannot
industriliase or urbanise in a manner which takes note of the
environment and protects it, but it does mean that going by our
experience we just do not plan or manage in this manner.
In fact, if at the macro level there is still a basic equilibrium of
settlements, at the regional and at the mili level and at the intra city
micro level, there is a very serious imbalance. So much so that in
practically every major city in India we have a parallel existence of
two cities. The first is a planned city for which there is a
development plan or master plan. That probably covers about thirty per
cent of the city. There is a parallel unplanned city of the
unauthorised construction, the slums, the unserviced segments, which lie
outside the ken of the planning process and where the people have
helped themselves to land because the State has failed to provide. When
interventions take place in such a situation they are bound to be ad
hoc and almost totally politics driven. The prime example of this is the
unauthorised colonies of Delhi which, at every election, are
regularised, no development takes place and five years later they are
regularised again. However much the National Commission on Urbanisation
may talk about settlement equilibrium, the fact remains that this
equilibrium is seriously endangered in our large cities and this has
denied the people equity. A society which lacks equity cannot be said to
be balanced and, therefore, more than equilibrium in spatial
distribution we need equity in city planning and city administration.
One naturally likes to end on an optimistic note. The National
Commission on Urbanisation was able to identify twenty-four urban
corridors or spatial urban regions, further divided into forty-nine
Spatial Priority Urbanisation Regions (SPUR) which are well distributed
throughout India. The Commission also identified 329 cities and towns,
generally in the small and medium category, which have a potential for
growth and have been designated as Generators of Economic Momentum
(GEM). These are evenly distributed throughout the country, they are
located in one or another SPUR and if planned investment is done they
would be able to grow in tandem with the rural hinterland which they
serve. In other words, the Commission has given a blueprint for urban
growth which supports and enhances the basic equilibrium of the
settlement pattern. Perhaps the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission (JNNURM) is partly a result of the concerns expressed by the
National Commission on Urbanisation, but whereas the programme aims at
enhancing the infrastructure of the existing towns, it does not go far
enough in encouraging urbanisation in the manner suggested by the
Commission.
Ultimately all activities take place on land and, therefore, anything
which disturbs the land use pattern automatically disturbs the
settlement balance. Sad to say India does not have a national, a State
or a meaningful city land use plan. For example, in India six percent of
its land is arable, thirty percent either under forest or is fit for
afforestation and about ten percent is uncultivable waste. A sensible
land use policy would try retain this balance and design land use in a
way that there is minimum disturbance of agricultural land and land
which either is or potentially can be under forest. By accident Gujarat
has moved towards a sensible land use policy in that much of the
industry is now being attracted by districts such as Kutch where land
does not have an opportunity cost because it is unsuitable for
alternative purposes and, therefore, its conversion to industrial or
urban use has the minimum impact on the environment. This is in sharp
contrast with what happened in the past in which great chunks of fertile
land in central and south Gujarat was given over to industry. Once we
have a land use policy in place, maintenance of the settlement
equilibrium would become much easier.
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