Environment and Urbanization ASIA

This article re-examines the suburbanization of Indian cities by calculating population density gradients, for a large number of urban agglomerations, using recent data and Mills’ two-point method. In the next step, we estimate multiple regression models to explore the determinants of suburbanization. This study presents several methodological advances over previous research, by incorporating new measures of transport infrastructure, air pollution and city–suburb income ratios as determinants of suburbanization of Indian cities. Our results clearly show that suburbanization is higher in urban areas with higher population and lower central city–suburban literacy ratios. We find some evidence that suburbanization is higher in urban areas with more road transport infrastructure, consistent with our expectations, though results concerning air pollution run counter to expectations. However, these could relate to caveats regarding the data and methods.

Indian coastal cities are susceptible to climate-induced disasters, like cyclonic storms, floods and sea-level rise, all while existing urbanization challenges amplify vulnerability. Enhancing a city’s resilience capacity is a pertinent issue when there are plans to re-develop several of India’s cities into ‘climate-smart’—this needs a comprehensive city-wide loss and damage assessment. For empirical purposes, this study attempts a loss and damage assessment of the textile industry in Surat city, western India to floods. The advantage is that it estimates indirect loss and damage and also considers compensation as a positive externality—mostly ignored by disaster assessment agencies. The results suggest that: (a) an average of 49 days was required to come back to normalcy when the flood water remained for 4 days; (b) most of the labourers out-migrated during post-flood scenario, and hence, shortage of labour was reported as major issue; (c) the mean loss and damage was approximately ₹1.51 million, around 23 per cent of an industry’s total profit, with ₹1 million indirect losses, which reinforces it to be factored into the disaster’s impact cost assessment and (d) owners’ risk perception about potential impacts of future floods is moderate, which may lead to a lack of investment in planned adaptation. Such type of study provides insights into the city’s resilience capacity to future disasters, urging to conduct such analysis across the Indian cities.

India has the worst sanitation situation in the world. Over the past century, Indian political leaders have made public statements expressing the intensity of the problem, deeming sanitation more important than political freedom, independence and religion. Recently, two prominent political parties—National Congress and Bharatiya Janata—argued about who deserves credit for improving India’s cleanliness. In response, this article is guided by the question: Does it matter which political institutions are supporting sanitation improvements in India? Using two theoretical lenses, agenda setting and political control of bureaucracy, this article discusses (1) the problem, politics and policies in India’s sanitation policy subsystem, and (2) mechanisms to align policy preferences across levels of government. Utilizing an agenda setting conceptual framework, the discussion highlights the role of international organizations in problem identification; party ideology and values and capacity issues that challenge the policy arena. The discussion turns to alignment of policy preferences across India’s multi-level governance structure, pointing to monitoring to reduce principal-agent problems, drawing from political control of bureaucracy theory. Given that national political leaders observably support sanitation, this article proposes that aligning policy preferences between national political institutions and local implementation agencies is imperative for achieving sanitation policy goals in federalist India.

Land has recently been looked upon as having substantial value in the Indian cities, especially in Mumbai. However, the allocation of land is a contested area with conflicting views and experiences. Governments intervene in land allocation through legislations for achieving equity but they do so without understanding the institutional structure and changing political, social and economic order. The Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act (ULCRA) is a piece of legislation through which Indian government made an attempt to redistribute urban land by limiting private ownership of it and confiscating the surplus. A critical review of its performance in India points to the difficulty of achieving such lofty goals in the complex real world, wherein different players actively use a variety of tactics to protect their interest, and also negotiate the outcome in the event of its repeal. The weak institutional capacity of the government and the changing governance framework render the outcomes detrimental. The experience of Mumbai city presented further points to the fact that the multiple actors thus have evolved their strategies to protect their interests through lobbying, corruption and legal wrangling. The experience of ULCRA, therefore, points to ground-level impediments to implementation of law and varied responses of the actors so as to preserve (or, even enhance) their particular interests. ULCRA also went against the decentralization of urban governance that began after the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act.

The delivery of urban environmental services is among the functions devolved to local governments. As public services, they are routinely evaluated typically using ‘hard’ performance measures. The current trend of local governance incorporates citizens’ perspectives in assessing service performance. In this study, the importance and ‘usefulness’ of citizen satisfaction surveys in local urban environmental management are explored using the case of the local government of unit (LGU) of Quezon City, Philippines and its experience with the Citizen Satisfaction Index System (CSIS). For Quezon City, citizen satisfaction ratings are an important indication of city performance. For the Environmental Protection and Waste Management Department (EPWMD), data and information is considered ‘useful’ if it is (1) able to help craft the future directions of the Department, (2) able to help identify the services that can be removed, (3) able to reflect actionable community feedback, (4) presented in the form of disaggregated data and evidence and (5) easy to interpret by the users. In applying the criteria to evaluate the data and information generated from the CSIS 2014 and 2016, the study demonstrates the merits of using ‘soft’ performance measures in appraising and improving local urban environmental services.

The Chinese government has announced a trial programme to provide for private purchase of new battery-operated electric vehicles (EVs) and for plug-in hybrids in five cities. We investigate the potential impact of these subsidies and charging facilities on demand for EVs, using data from a survey of potential car buyers in China. Building on the understanding of factors and incentives that would likely encourage households to adopt EVs would help to improve policy interventions. Data collection is based on experimental design and stated choice methods through an Internet survey. Choice alternatives include a conventional gasoline, a plug-in hybrid and a pure electrical vehicle. In addition to subsidy and charging facilities, we also investigate the impact of common vehicle attributes such as purchase price, cruising range, refuelling time and the socio-demographic effect. Applying a multinomial logit (MNL) model, we find that subsidies would significantly encourage households to choose a plug-in hybrid or an EV. Compared to pure EVs, people in China are more willing to accept plug-in hybrids at present. Compared to the price factors, charging facilities are less of a concern when households consider the adoption of an EV. Willingness-to-pay and market share simulation are computed based on the estimated parameters for further analysis.