Urban Inequalities Threaten India’s Road To Sustainable Development

Soumyadip Chattopadhyay

According to the Sustainable Development Report (SDR) 2025, India has ranked 99th out of 167 countries.

According to the Sustainable Development Report (SDR) 2025, India has ranked 99th out of 167 countries. This is an improvement over the ranks of 112 and 109 in 2023 and 2024 respectively. However, India’s progress has not been uniform across the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Major challenges remain in achieving seven goals with SDG 11 featuring prominently among them.

As part of the ‘2030 Agenda’, SDG 11 envisions cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The SDR 2025 considers four major indicators under SDG 11 and they are ~
(i)proportion of urban population living in slums (percentage); (ii)annual mean concentration of PM 2.5 (µ/m3); (iii)proportion of urban population with access to improved piped water sources (percentage) and (iv)proportion of urban population with convenient access to public transport.

For the first two indicators, India’s scores have stagnated while there has been a decrease in the score for the third indicator in 2025. Contrary to the SDG 11 benchmark of universal water coverage, only about 65 per cent of urban households in India have access to improved water through pipes in 2022. Use of water is determined by peoples’ access to water from unpredictable daily supply. For example, as per the PRAJA’s report on ‘The Status of Civic Issues in Mumbai’ (2024), water is available on average for 5.37 hours. Even the available water is of questionable quality.

The NSSO (2019) report indicates that almost half of the urban households had to treat drinking water received from all sources. Challenges of achieving SDGs by 2030 is perhaps nowhere more evident than for those living in slums. Slums in general have the worst living conditions with inadequate access to basic services and housing and are also home to large number of informal residents with insecure tenure. Compared to the Government of India’s water availability norms of 135 litres per capita per day (lpcd), slums in Mumbai receive on average 45 lpcd of water.

Such inadequacy entails huge cost burden on the slum residents as they depend on water tankers that are almost thirty times costlier than the metered water supply. A 2020 report of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations reveals that almost 44 per cent of slum households live in inadequate houses that are non-pucca and either obsolete or congested.

Unplanned urbanization coupled with the commodification of land and housing, have generated deep social and spatial inequalities. Further, these inequalities intersect with gender, religion, ability or similar other dimensions to produce different layers of social as well as economic marginalization in the cities. In addition, the urban poor are more vulnerable to the incidences of high level of pollution and extreme weather events. Most of the big cities face heavy flooding due to precipitation and landslides during monsoon are common in the hill towns.

With typically poor access to basic amenities and dilapidated built environment, the urban poor cannot simply cope with loss of income and livelihood opportunities and illnesses. So, appropriation of SDGs’ call for‘leave no one behind’ is extremely crucial for India’s quest towards urban equality and more sustainable futures. In India, urban development is a state subject. State governments exercise their discretion over implementation of urban policies outlined by the central government.

Funds from the central and state governments continue to be the major source of financing urban infrastructure. Of late, there has been increase in the budgetary provisions for urban development. Yet, the incidence of deficient urban services persists or even deepens. All the central flagship urban programes in last two decades emphasize full cost recovery and building financially sustainable urban infrastructure. While these narratives are crucial but they have exacerbated the existing socio-spatial inequalities in access to basic urban services like water.

India’s two largest urban programs ~ JNNURM and Smart City Mission (SCM) ~ have prioritized larger cities and their commercially viable zones. Under the SCM, projects related to water, sanitation and health account for only 18 per cent of the total completed projects while the corresponding share for “smart mobility” is 20 per cent and only 2 per cent of the entire transportation budget is focused on buses. In the case of housing, affordability remains a key issue for the low-income group/economically weaker section (LIG/EWS) households in the cities.

PMAY (U) provides for interest subsidy on home loans taken by eligible LIG/EWS beneficiaries. However, eligibility is linked to creditworthiness that a majority of these people lack, resulting in their exclusion. On a positive note, the PMAY-U 2.0 has attempted to better programme inclusiveness through increasing EWS specific amount of financial assistances and providing for credit risk guarantee to the urban poor taking housing loans under the credit risk guarantee trust fund (CRGFT).

There is considerable overlap between SDG 11 targets and constitutionally mandated functional domain of the cities. However, in most states, the state government agencies continue to exercise strong operational control over urban services that are either not devolved or partially devolved to the cities. Cities are bereft of revenue generation power and even lack incentives to generate funds for provisioning of basic services over which they have little control.

Sustainable provision of urban services is linked to cities’ ability to match their revenue capacity and their expenditure responsibilities. As per the RBI (2024) report on municipal finance, more than 50 per cent of the municipal corporations in India have failed to cover even half of revenue expenses through their own sources of revenue between 2020-21 and 2022-23. Lack of financial autonomy would be much more severe for the smaller cities. Quite expectedly, financially weak cities could neither attract private investors not access capital market to meet revenue shortfalls.

Flagship urban programmes contain proposals like 24/7 water supply that are crucial for achieving SDG 11 targets. But they do not address water shortages in parts of the city (such as informal settlements) that are still disconnected from water networks and resort to informal arrangements. Experiences of smart cities expose elite capture of urban governance as people are found to deliberate on everyday urban problems through online surveys and platforms.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act provides for Ward Committees to institutionalize peoples’ participation in preparation of city development plans at the ward level. Yet, absence of ward committees or their irregular nature of annual/monthly meetings in majority of Indian cities limits the scope of participatory opportunities. This has increased the risk of making city development plans more elitist and unresponsive to the urban poor. The SDGs can be strategically used to achieve the goal of urban equality. Augmenting public investment is a key for narrowing the service deficits.

Cities should be empowered and made accountable to design locally responsive plans and to decide on the taxes and fees for financing them. Policy thrust towards exploring private sources of financing should be complemented with regulatory mechanisms to safeguard interests of the urban poor. Redesigning of urban policies must also specifically focus on inclusion of people and local knowledge in ward-level planning. In essence, a more people-centric approach offers the potential to transform urban policies that equally value all peoples’ needs and therefore is fundamental to the realization of fairer and more equal cities.

Soumyadip Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor, Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketa.

The article was first published in The Statesman as Deprived Cities on September 14, 2025.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.