Challenges and opportunities in an urbanising India

Introduction

India is in the midst of a fundamentally transformative urban awakening. In 1991, just under 220 million people lived in the country’s urban areas. This rose to 380 million in 2011 and is forecast to increase to over 600 million by 2030 (Ahluwalia et al., 2014). United Nations estimates suggest that an additional half a billion people will live in Indian cities in the next 35 years, more than doubling the urban population to almost 900 million by 2050. These processes of urbanization and urban growth are embedded in – and play constitutive roles in shaping – complex and interactive political, social, demographic, environmental and ethno-religious contexts.

While the developmental advantages to urban modes of living have been long discussed both in general and in the Indian context (e.g. Beall et al., 2012), urbanization in India comes with its own set of challenges. For instance, poorly managed urbanization processes have also been claimed to exacerbate the unequal distribution of rights, resources and opportunities; trigger communal tensions; discourage urban infrastructure investment and productivity; and undermine political legitimacy (e.g. Dupont, 2011). Since India’s economic liberalization began in 1991, both public and private interests have reshaped the Indian city to better support the country’s integration with global capital and its pursuit of market-led growth. However, these policies have also been accused of exacerbating inequality and eroding the quality of Indian democracy (Bannerjee-Guha, 2009; Kohli, 2006, 2012). From a policy perspective, successive post-liberalization governments have struggled to ensure that both political and financial capacity was developed at the urban level, reflecting long-standing realities that political power in federal India is controlled and meted out by the centre and the states rather than the municipal level (e.g. Kumar, 2006).

In particular, the recent Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was an underwhelming initiative, and its failures of local implementation left urban policy hamstrung by tensions between urban local bodies (ULBs) and states (e.g. Ghosh et al., 2009). Therefore, while there was a renewed focus on urban governance following the mandated decentralization of power to local governments in the 74th amendment to the Indian constitution in 1992 (Aijaz, 2008; Weinstein, 2009), Indian cities continue to face considerable governance, planning and management challenges (Roy, 2009; Ruet and Lama-Rewal, 2009). Such challenges are further aggravated where planning processes encounter urban informality (e.g. Roy, 2005) particularly in peri-urban expansion or in rapidly growing small and medium towns (Denis and Marius-Kanou, 2011; Swerts et al., 2012). Urban population growth places enormous pressure on existing infrastructure and services, and ULBs often lack the authority or capacity to make or implement policy independent from state or national bodies (Aijaz and Hoelscher, 2015; Baud and De Wit, 2009; Shatkin, 2014). These issues further intersect with themes of place-making in the city and rights to the city, which each are processes of contestation and change that shape – and are shaped by – the expansion of new urban geographies (e.g. Bhan, 2009; De Neve and Donner, 2007).

The complexities of governing India’s cities can also exacerbate issues of social, economic and political exclusion. Linked with urban economic modernization, post-liberalization India has seen an ‘invisibilization’ of vulnerable marginalized groups (Fernandes, 2004); and contrasting political and social visions of what the city should be (Dupont, 2007). Further, urban modes of living can magnify the unequal distribution of rights, or access to economic and political opportunities. Various vulnerable groups, including religious communities, social groups, the urban poor, and women and children can in different ways experience real or perceived threats, discrimination or exclusion in political, social and economic realms (see Bhattacharyya, Sarkar and Kar, 2010). This also speaks to the complex relationship between politics and exclusion in today’s Indian city. Vulnerable groups are excluded not only by elite political and economic interests as one may expect under traditional neoliberalism; but also by middle-class civic organizations who have attempted to reconfigure the nature of urban citizenship in modern urban India (Anjaria, 2009). This has also arguably enabled conditions for antagonistic political rhetoric, and can disrupt political stability, exacerbate development cleavages along ethnic lines, and act as triggers to urban conflicts or forms of communal violence (Wilkinson, 2006).

There are also larger pan-India issues that are relevant for the country’s cities. Key among these are the threats posed from current and future environmental change, and how this can compound other challenges in urban settlements (Gasper et al., 2011). Reflecting this urgency, India has been pointed to as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the world (Cruz et al., 2007; INCCA, 2010). In countries such as India, urban settlements are frequently located in areas that face greater exposure to physical hazards, are more vulnerable in their infrastructure and built environment, face rapid urban population growth, have large low-income populations housed in precarious locations, and lack the requisite governance, technical and financial capacity to address the impacts of climate change (McCarney, 2009). As such, the impacts of environmental change will be most starkly felt in urban areas of developing countries (Hunt and Watkiss, 2011). This will include a greater prevalence of extreme weather events (IPCC, 2012) and exacerbated impacts of slow-onset changes such as sea-level rise, flooding and inundation, and desertification and water scarcity (Satterthwaite and Dodman, 2013; Simon, 2014).

Moreover, the impacts of environmental change are modifying the spatial terrain of cities and the resources available within them, creating and extending new geographies of urban vulnerability (Kovats and Akhtar, 2008); and presenting distinct challenges to governance, inclusion and planning (Chu, 2016; DePaul, 2012; Dodman et al., 2013; Satterthwaite et al., 2007; Tanner et al., 2009;). Concerted discussion surrounds the ways in which environmental change will affect processes of urban governance (Boyd and Ghosh, 2013) and urban political economies (Mukhopadhyay and Revi, 2009); how it could exacerbate or create new forms of exclusion and deprivation (INCCA, 2010); how it is altering patterns of migration to and settlement in cities (Kumar and Viswanathan, 2013); and the challenges surrounding the creation of policy responses that integrate adaptation and mitigation approaches (Boyd et al., 2015; Revi, 2008; Sharma and Tomar, 2010). These issues are creating demands on policy-makers and urban residents to find new formal and informal responses to how they plan and live in urban settlements (Alankar, 2015); how to adapt cities or policies to manage the effects of environmental change (ACCCRN, 2015; TERI, 2014); or how to mainstream adaptation in governance processes (McManus, 2015; Revi, 2008).

Framework for this special issue

This special issue collects six articles which reflect on how the above issues are already being faced in today’s urban India. The articles address interactions between three key themes drawn out in this introduction: urban governance and planning; social economic and political exclusion and the conflicts this may engender; and issues related to climate change in Indian cities. These themes reflect the pillars of a joint three-year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway on Urbanising India (URBIN) that was undertaken by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF) between 2013 and 2016. Reflecting the multidisciplinary and multi-thematic nature of the project, the articles in this special issue engage with the three pillars of this project; and in different ways address how these shape dynamics of governance, inclusiveness, security and prosperity in urban India.

In her article ‘Planning the Millennium City: The politics of place-making in Gurgaon, India’, Shoshana Goldstein uses the case of Gurgaon, Delhi’s ‘millennium city’ satellite, to examine how economic liberalization has created a new duality of the public and the private. Tracing the history of Gurgaon from village to globally connected service hub, Goldstein uncovers the myriad processes by which Gurgaon’s residents make claims of residency and belonging in the city. In looking at the political-economy of private, real estate development in Gurgaon and the inequalities and governance failures that this has produced, the article locates the challenges of formal planning relative to the historical legacies of post-colonial bureaucracies and urban informality (see also Mathur, 1996; Roy, 2009). To examine this further, Goldstein uses place-making – an approach to planning and design that draws on communities’ capacities and experiences to create and form meaning in public spaces (e.g. Schneekloth and Shibley, 1995) – as a means to understand how different actors make sense of Gurgaon’s shifting trajectories. Here the case is made that place-making in Gurgaon is itself a form of planning in its own right, one which is deeply political and involves a range of stakeholders making claims on the city.

Similar to Goldstein’s study of Gurgaon’s history and contextualization of the politics of how citizens, planners and other stakeholders create meaning in the city, Kristian Hoelscher engages with the evolution of policies that have shaped the Indian city in recent decades. In particular Hoelscher focuses on the current Smart Cities Mission launched by the Modi government in June 2015, which currently views Smart Cities as offering

good quality but affordable housing, cost efficient physical, social and institutional infrastructure such as adequate and quality water supply, sanitation, 24 x 7 electric supply, clean air, quality education, cost efficient health care, dependable security, entertainment, sports, robust and high speed interconnectivity, fast & efficient urban mobility. (GoI, 2014: 4)

The article situates the Smart City within debates on India’s urban informality (Roy, 2005, 2009) and post-liberalization trends towards decentralization, globalization and urban-led market democracy (Bhan, 2009; Ruparelia et al., 2011). In doing so, Hoelscher traces the evolution of how the term has been used by different actors to different ends. From this it is suggested that the Smart City concept as it has emerged today is linked to the urban e-governance initiatives in the 2000s and large-scale development of greenfield urban infrastructure programs. However, this has more recently evolved from a focus on new-build private cites to more participatory programs involving retrofitting and redevelopment in existing cities. The article also echoes an emerging literature that cautions against the Smart City as an elite-driven project (Datta, 2015; Shiraz, 2014), while also seeing it’s potential to renew urban development policy in India (see also Aijaz and Hoelscher, 2015).

Tara van Dijk, Amita Bhide and Vinay Shivtare unpack the linkages between urban policy, civil society participation and urban informality. Their article ‘When a participatory slum sanitation project encounters urban informality: The case of the Greater Mumbai Metropolitan Region’, grapples with the complicated nature of participation and bureaucracy in urban India, using the case of a community sanitation scheme to show how participatory approaches to community development can be undermined by the machinations of local urban politics. Focusing on a community toilet block installation project in the Nirmal Mumbai Metropolitan Region Abhiyan, the authors highlight how the de facto exercise of localized urban political power overrode and undermined a civil society-led participatory approach to service delivery. Through a series of interviews with key stakeholders, they offer a nuanced view of how participatory projects can be undermined when encountering informalized municipal administrations.

The article engages with debates about how the urban poor engage in political life (Harriss, 2007), and urban informal organization through forms of ‘occupancy urbanism’ (Benjamin, 2008) and ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston, 2008). The authors suggest that the poor are deeply embedded within the micro-politics of local government, with the project becoming co-opted by a web of distinct interests that saw it fail to deliver services or foment participation of excluded communities to the extent originally envisioned by both the state and civil society actors. Here we glimpse the challenges that both state and non-state actors face in ‘doing politics’, particularly where neo-liberal agendas promoting popular participation collide with entrenched, semi-formal socio-political relations (see also Coelho et al., 2011). Despite the attempts at designing inclusive urban projects, the article shows how the ‘micro-politics’ of the urban poor can frequently co-opt these ‘ideal outcomes’– either intentionally or unintentionally, such that the messy terrain of local politics may lead to outcomes that actually exacerbate exclusion further.

Jason Miklian and Ida Roland Birkvad examine dynamics of communal conflict among the urban poor in their article ‘Religion, corruption and conflict in the garbage dumps of Ahmedabad’. Following the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots that left thousands dead in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, poor urban residents were framed as agents who were manipulated for political gain to participate in communal violence. However, similar to authors who unpack the dynamics of communal conflict (e.g. Brass, 2003), Miklian and Birkvad use an examination of the waste management in Chandola in Ahmedabad to provide more nuanced findings on how religion, caste and class among the poorest in Ahmedabad affect the generation of urban communal conflicts. They show that: (i) mixed Hindu-Muslim communities in the poorest and most marginal urban areas of Ahmedabad live relatively peacefully together; and (ii) that these communities work together to challenge corrupt bureaucratic practices and form mutual bonds by ‘othering’ other communities, in this case Bangladeshi migrants. Here the article connects the social and political exclusion of the community to a type of resilience to conflict rather than a driver of it; questioning the often supposed ‘intractability’ of ethnic, caste and communal tensions among the lowest income groups.

Relatedly, the article by Sunil Santha, Surinder Jaswal, Devisha Sasidevan, Ajmal Khan, Kaushik Datta and Annu Kuruvilla focuses on migrant workers and their vulnerability to environmental related hazards in three Indian cities: Kochi (Kerala), Surat and Mumbai (Maharashtra). Here the authors take as their departure point how environmental and climate variability intersects with and exacerbates health inequalities. Presenting unique primary descriptive quantitative survey and qualitative interview-based data collected in case cities, the article examines how vulnerability to climate change and infectious disease is ‘embedded within the wider political economy of (migrant workers) day-to-day livelihood struggles’ and that this is ‘a condition that shapes and reshapes itself continuously and fiercely’ (Santha et al., 2016: 76)

Highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of urban vulnerability, Santha and colleagues demonstrate that decisions to migrate to cities are often driven by a lack of livelihood capabilities, caste or ethnic-based discrimination, and limited power or agency in rural areas. Further, while there are often livelihood benefits accruing to urban employment, migrant workers frequently experience a continuation of exclusion in cities, exacerbating their vulnerability to climate change and related health concerns. In connecting and contextualizing urban vulnerability and environmental change, the authors speak to an important emerging literature on urban climate impacts (Bulkeley and Tuts, 2013; Moser and Satterthwaite, 2010), and issues of justice in addressing climate change (Hughes, 2013); and illuminate critical policy issues.

Linking with the climate-related urban vulnerability that Santha and others discuss, the final article in this special issue examines the potential for transformative urban policy responses to environmental change. In their article ‘Instituting the climate resilience agenda into the governance process: Exploring the potential of new urban development schemes in India’, Divya Sharma and Seema Singh examine how new urban programs are considering issues of climate change, resilience, adaptation and mitigation in their design. In suggesting that India is on ‘the cusp of a major transformation in terms of how it translates and directs urbanization’ (Sharma and Singh, 2016: 91), the authors call for deeper consideration of how a climate resilience agenda can be integrated with existing urban institutions and disaster management protocols. Sharma and Singh suggest that due to a lack of interest or awareness of the impact of climate change on Indian cities, there has been slow progress in integrating a climate resilience agenda within Indian cities’ urban development planning processes despite clear entry points where this could have been possible. Complementing Hoelscher’s examination of the evolution of the Smart Cities agenda in this issue, Sharma and Singh consider the potential for the Smart Cities Mission to integrate climate resilience into new urban development schemes in the future.

Ways forward

Similar to other recent contributions examining the challenges of contemporary urban India (Ahluwalia et al., 2014; Chatterji, 2015; Shatkin, 2014; Tiwari et al., 2015) this special issue takes a multi-disciplinary view of Indian cities and their complex issues. Each of these articles makes a contribution to the literature that it is rooted in, and we hope the special issue as a whole contributes to understanding the dynamic challenges that Indian cities face. It should also be mentioned that while the contributions here traverse a range of different methodological and thematic perspectives, it is impossible to take up all issues relevant to the Indian city in such a limited space. As such, there are important dynamics of urban issues that we have not fully taken up in this special issue. These might include dynamics of gender, disability, transport, housing, rural-urban linkages and many others, and we encourage future research to engage with these themes.

Importantly for this special issue, articles here do not merely focus on highlighting only the challenges facing Indian cities. Rather, each of the contributions here point to various opportunities for better governance and service delivery, greater citizen engagement and inclusion, and proactive approaches to addressing environmental change. What these show is that while the challenges are many, there is a wealth of potential for civil society, the private sector, the state and other stakeholders to engage in ways to shape India’s urban future in a positive, sustainable and inclusive manner.