[Urbanstudy] India’s Urbanisation is Dangerously Exclusionary and Unequal

[Vinay Baindur]

http://thewire.in/2016/05/05/indias-urbanisation-is-dangerously-exclusionary-and-unequal-33693/


India’s Urbanisation is Dangerously Exclusionary and Unequal
BY NIRANJAN SAHOO <http://thewire.in/author/niranjan-sahoo/> ON 05/05/2016
<http://thewire.in/2016/05/05/indias-urbanisation-is-dangerously-exclusionary-and-unequal-33693/>
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Indian cities are on slow but sure paths towards religious- and caste-based
crises. To ensure just and harmonious social growth, it is vital to reverse
the current trends.
[image: Ahmedabad rooftops. Credit: Flickr]
<http://i0.wp.com/thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ahmedabad.jpg>

Ahmedabad rooftops. Credit: Flickr
In popular imagination, the city is often viewed as a liberating space
where rigid social structures make way for secular transformations.
Particularly in the global South, the city is synonymous with social
mobility and emancipation. Taking into account the transformative
potentials of cities and towns, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Dalit icon and key
architect of the Indian Constitution, exhorted the oppressed communities to
leave the “narrow-minded” villages for city life.

The Dalits and other marginalised sections have not disappointed Ambedkar.
The last decade saw an approximately 40% jump in Dalits opting for urban
living. Cities have historically remained prime locations for India’s
religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians;
<http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-26/news/65886912_1_urban-areas-population-muslim>
compared
to 29% of Hindus, an impressive 40% of Muslims and Christians live in urban
areas. In short, the socially oppressed and spatially disadvantaged
continue to flock to cities and towns to escape degrading social practices
of segregation and discrimination, and also, importantly, to move up social
mobility ladders.

How are Indian cities placed today in terms of their cosmopolitan character
and liberating potentials?

*Indian cities, spaces of discrimination*

Evidence regarding current forms of urbanisation would leave Ambedkar a
disappointed man.

The findings of many recent studies on Indian cities indicate that while
cities still remain the best hope for social mobility
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3379882/> for millions of
oppressed and marginalised communities, they increasingly mirror India’s
rural social and cultural realities, its entrenched caste system and social
customs. Residential segregation and identity-based discrimination are on a
steady rise in urban spaces. According to a recent study of spatial
inequalities
<http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/22/review-urban-affairs-review-issues/spatial-inequalities-big-indian-cities.html>
in
10 Indian populous cities (based on ward level census data), rapid growth
in cities has not reduced spatial segregation by caste or religion. Dalits
and Adivasi are still heavily concentrated within certain geographical
areas of cities, mostly in unauthorised settlements and poor neighbourhoods.

Our own study of three Indian cities
<http://file.prio.no/publication_files/prio/Milkian,%20Sahoo%20-%20Supporting%20a%20More%20Inclusive%20and%20Responsive%20Urban%20India,%20PRIO%20Policy%20Brief%203-2016.pdf>
has
taken a deep look at ongoing urbanisation patterns and comes to some key
conclusions. “Urbanisation, Exclusion and Climate Challenges
<https://www.prio.org/Projects/Project/?x=1571>” is a unique study
conducted collaboratively by scholars from Norway and India of two partner
institutions, Peace Research Institute, Oslo, and Observer Research
Foundation, India. It examines ongoing climatic events in relation to
India’s rapid urban growth.

To untangle the crosscutting themes, the scholars conducted extensive field
studies and qualitative surveys stretching over three years. They paid
close attention to the dynamics linking various parameters such as
household income, socio-religious identity and migration history to levels
of participation in civic activities and urban governance processes.

*“Black holes” of urban planning*

While broad conclusions cannot be extrapolated from the study to apply to
every Indian city, the conclusions drawn do potentially present the
nation’s urban planners and policy makers with several lessons (see graphs
below).

The first lesson the study presents us with is that the poorest
neighbourhoods or slums (of the surveyed cities) are overpopulated by
Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and recent migrants. Even cities such as Pune
that are more efficiently planned than other cities are not immune to this
disturbing trend of residential segregation.

Secondly, the location of a neighbourhood greatly determines the services
it receives. Survey after survey found that slums and informal settlements
located on city peripheries do not receive basic services such as drinking
water, sanitation, healthcare and food stamps. The urban planning processes
in place, in the cities surveyed, seem to largely disregard people living
in informal settlements – a phenomenon we call “planning black holes.”

Thirdly, location alone is not the sole determinate in accessing services.
In fact, neighbourhoods located in the centre of Varanasi and of Ahmedabad
are no better off than the ones located on the peripheries of those cities.
Deeper probing found that quite often, the socio-religious characteristics
of the neighbourhoods in question determine the municipal services
available to them.

For instance, our study reveals that settlements with large populations of
Muslims and of recent migrants are more likely to face greater levels of
discrimination and institutionalised apathy in the context of basic
services. A comparison of the neighbourhoods of Juhapura and Yogeshwar
Nagar in Allahabad serves as an illustration. Juhapura is a predominantly
Muslim ghetto and Yogeshwar Nagar is a slum with an overwhelmingly Hindu
majority. We found that the former suffers from a lack of municipal
services such as wide, all-weather roads, satisfactory drainage and
sanitation and reliable drinking water. Similar trends were observed in
Bajardiha, a Muslim ghetto located in central Varanasi.

Of course, Ahmedabad and Varanasi are cities with long histories of
communal conflict, and findings about them cannot be said to characterise
every city. Even so, the trends observed should serve as a warning for
India, a country that is experiencing unprecedented levels of
communalisation and polarisation in its politics and society.

The fourth lesson is that exclusion plays out in complex ways. Recent
migrants, irrespective of their socio-religious identities, are the most
excluded of all groups. This clearly points to the absence of reliable
municipal governance and enabling institutional processes to draw new
groups into the existing service delivery systems.

*[The locations of the neighbourhoods in the graphs above are as
follows. **Ahmedabad:
EWS Odhav, Ganeshnagar, Juhapura, Yogeshwarnagar. Pune: Annabhau Sathe
Nagar, Indira Augyogik, Shivaji Nagar. Varanasi: Bajardiha, Lohata,
Madhuadih, Nagwa, Rajghat.]*

To cut a long story short, India’s current mechanisms of urbanisation offer
few opportunities for its disadvantaged citizens, especially for its
religious minorities, new migrants and poor. Cities are not only mimicking
rural social and cultural structures of inequality and exclusion, but they
are also creating faultlines for future conflicts. This current form of
urbanisation that is producing “urban winners” and “urban losers” should
alert urban planners and key policy makers to the necessary reforms.

It is well known in development literature that such unequal access to
resources – which are, in India, basic services – can curb human
development potentials, lower the quality of life, create conditions for
communal political rhetoric and exacerbate development cleavages along
religious and ethnic lines.

It must be reiterated that caste and religious differences greatly coincide
with social and political mobilisation and can unleash civil strife and
social unrest. In short, Indian cities are on slow but sure paths towards
crises of various kinds, and it is vital to reverse the current trends of
segregation and inequality.

*Niranjan Sahoo is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi. This
article is a part of the ongoing study “Urbanisation, Exclusion and Climate
Change” supported by the Peace Research Institute, Oslo.*
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