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Urban infrastructure, migration, Rural development

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(Author is a Chennai based freelance writer. Has contributed regularly at Business line and Samachar.)

While improving the urban infrastructure is very much essential, it cannot be at the expense of development of rural side.

While launching long ago the Rs.1 lakh-crore Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission aimed at improving the urban infrastructure and urban basic services in over 60 cities, our Prime Minister lamented at the continued failure "to address the needs of the poor-such as drinking water supply, sanitation, housing and social services to an increasing share of urban population.

He spoke about the relentless and rapid urbanization and the faster proliferation of slums, urban poverty, joblessness and crime. He felt the need for providing the urban poor the land rights at affordable rates. These sound good and are perhaps very necessary. But there is another side to this chronic problem that has to be tackled differently.

The migration of lakhs of rural people from villages to the cities swelling the populations has been there ever since the industrialization of the country commenced but is more pronounced since the liberalisation process was ushered in early Nineties. Such an internal migration can be considered as a natural phenomenon where the surplus labour is lured from the villages to provide the much needed manpower for urban industrial growth.

This can also be viewed as socially beneficial because people were being shifted from locations where their earnings were poor and living conditions harsh to places where life could be easier and more comfortable. But this has not happened as was expected.

The urban growth is much more than what it can absorb and provide jobs. The percentage of urban population to the total which was 26% in 1991 (Census 2001) is expected to grow to almost near 50% by 2030.It is pertinent to note that all this growth is not scattered in smaller cities adjacent to the villages but largely to the bigger and metropolitan cities. This is sure to result in urban centres breaking in their seams setting in the decay process sooner or later. Such urbanisation has already brought in its wake significant social, economic, and political problems.

A large army of jobless, illiterate unskilled men provide a hunting ground for undesirable groups to recruit. It is just not possible to sustain urban development despite all good intentions and investment of money for infrastructure to meet such a stupendous growth.

The liberalization that has been ushered since early Nineties has been urban-centric and that too in selected places and sectors where the demand is only for those with skills. Investors, particularly foreign, are choosy about the places and the type of industry where they wish to invest. They are not concerned about equitable development across the country.

IT industry crowd only around a few places and is not spread out in the interior parts. The service sector too is naturally prone to big cities. Even auto industries tend to cluster around big metropolitan cities. Close to ports. The opening of the economy has not helped growth of the vital agrarian sector and this segment is lagging considerably behind the services and manufacturing segments. There has been no foreign investment in agricultural and farm sectors resulting in very limited opportunities to the rural unemployed.

The trade liberalization without a corresponding emphasis on the rural sector is forcing lakhs off their lands, and the livelihoods of small farmers and landless labourers are put in great jeopardy. Although poor people in such marginal environments have an astonishing capacity to cope with hunger and poverty there is a limit beyond which the suffering cannot be endured.

Landless, jobless and with no social security, they look for greener pastures in the cities based mostly on hearsay and shift in large numbers to the harsh cities with nothing but high hopes and low skills. They find later that surviving in cities, finding a shelter to live and a job to earn is much more difficult.

Rural poverty may even appear preferable when they are forced to live in overcrowded city slums with no potable water facilities in poor hygienic surroundings leaving behind their long bonds with villages and its simple people.
The unskilled jobs that can be found or generated are far less than the numbers that migrate. The level of migration to cities has assumed dropsical proportions that it can no longer be seen as beneficial. They only heighten the unemployment problem in urban cities depriving at the same time the rural areas of labour force when needed.
The emphasis in our economic growth has been slanted toward the capital and knowledge intensive urban centers. With 75% of India"s population in villages, it looks unfair to have the lion"s share of the economic benefits going to the urban regions that house only 25% of the people. The villages of India are not in the growth picture at all. This lop sided development strategy cannot halt the unprecedented growth of urban centers and the concomitant slums.

The economic experts who shape the destiny of the country are working to attain an 9% growth but talk very little about the growth of agriculture. This is never in their radar and its growth is naturally sluggish at a meagre 2%. With agricultural growth on a low key we cannot stop the rural-urban migration and the day is not far when the food security that we pride ourselves today may also be in danger.

Rural labour will become scarce and urban population will grow unbridled with most remaining jobless or in informal sectors. The urban explosion is not a sequel to any demand for the unskilled labour in the cities but is the result of impoverished villages with little avenue for reasonable work through out the year. Such a denouement is the result of skewed policies of the government.
It places a heavy fiscal burden on both the central and state governments for providing urban services as can be seen from proposals like JNNURM.

While improving the urban infrastructure is very much essential not only to attract investors but also to ensure sustained development of the urban areas, it cannot be at the expense of development of rural side. There is a need for proper balancing of the requirements. It is true the urban poverty is more visible than the rural one.

The city slums and the inadequate and over strained urban facilities are manifestations of the migration of the poor and the poverty in villages. Tackling this problem of urban inadequacies and facilitating the lives of the urban poor into one of comfort will only encourage further migration.

The solution to the urban poverty lies in the villages. Pouring vast sums of money in the cities for improving the lives of urban poor and finding them jobs would be treating the symptoms instead of the malaise.

It is in this context the government should work for the development of rural segment as an overall national economic strategy. As Kemp Ronald Hope Sr. Says in his book Development in the Third World "rural development means the far reaching transformation of social and economic institutions, structure, relationships, and processes in any rural area.

It conceives of the cardinal aim of rural development not simply as agricultural and economic growth in the narrow sense, but as balanced social and economic development- including generation of new employment, equitable distribution of income, wide spread improvement in health, nutrition and housing, greatly broadened opportunities for all individuals to realise their full potential through education and a strong voice for all the rural people in shaping the decisions and actions that affect their lives."

The policies of the government should reflect such an integrated rural development with the money found for this purpose. There should be a strong commitment to usher policy changes that would secure equitable distribution of land rights, improvement of agricultural technology and the type of crops to be produced, market pricing of crops produced by subsistence farmers and transportation net works.

The available scant resources should also take care of rural development concurrently with urban development and directed at the unemployed. This alone will contain the urban migration to some extent.

K Parthasarathi

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