Splintering urbanism is a reality that has roots in the neo-liberal paradigm of urbanisation, which started nearly three decades back in India. Cities have suffered from the fragmentation of access, control, and pricing of network infrastructure, including water supply. The fragmentation is due to political-economic processes-neoliberalism-that have changed the ways cities are governed and services provided.
The Himalayas are the youngest range of mountains in the world and are still in the formative stage. The plate movements between the Indian and Eurasian plates continue to keep the entire region from Kashmir to North East in seismic zone IV and V. This means that the entire Himalayas are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes and landslides.
This year’s budget is a bag of misplaced government spending priorities and misses some crucial challenges facing urban development.
The last full Union budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government continues to be plagued with the idea that “the private capital will ameliorate some of the basic problems of India and that large capital-intensive technologies will usher in development, including inclusive development.”
How fallacious is this argument? We have seen this in the past three decades. The structural difference brought in by Manmohan Singh’s budget in 1991 was to “shift India’s economy away from the hands of the government to the hands of private enterprise, and embraced free trade.
For cities to develop it is essential that decision-making power is given to the local administration — holistic and sustainable city-specific development cannot happen in a top-down approach where the Centre or state decides.
A prerequisite for development is uniformity in the governance structures from top to bottom. This is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while inaugurating a metro project in Mumbai on January 19. He called upon the people of Mumbai to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the municipal corporation elections, which are long overdue. He exhorted that the ‘triple engine’ governance model — the Centre, the state, and the Mumbai corporation — should be run directly or in partnership with the BJP for the development in the metro city.
‘Another important aspect of urban infrastructure is linked to urban governance, which is in a shambles in most parts of the country.’
A report by the World Bank, released in November last year, on financing India’s urban infrastructure needs, focuses on private investments ameliorating urban problems. The push to attract private capital, since the 1990s, followed by the urban reforms under the United Progressive Alliance I regime, the Smart City mission, and now this report, continues to plague India’s policy paradigm in the urban sector.
The Haldwani case presents a classic case of answerability to the poor by various development authorities who have designed and planned cities in the past.