India must accept it is urban and reap the benefits; Modi has tapped into aspiration that offers new challenges and opportunities

June 11, 2014 3:31 pm

India must accept it is urban and reap the benefits

By David PillingAuthor alerts

Modi has tapped into aspiration that offers new challenges and opportunities

One of the main reasons Narendra Modi scored such an overwhelming victory in last month’s general election is also one of the least recognised: India is far more urban than it likes to think.

According to official statistics, not to mention India’s nostalgic idea of itself as a country that “lives mainly in its villages”, more than 30 per cent of the population is urban. But that wildly underestimates the true number. If “urban” India is defined by population density and includes former “villages” whose life has been turned upside down by roads, the internet, satellite television and the availability of non-farm jobs, more like 70 per cent of citizens are living something approximating “city life”.

Mr Modi, the new prime minister, realised this. He tapped into the sense of aspiration that this rapid urbanisation has engendered. The paternalistic Congress party did not. It continued to talk to the villages, having failed to recognise that it was addressing a dwindling constituency.

Even official statistics are striking. In 1951, there were only five cities with a population above 1m and just 41 above a meagre 100,000. At that time, most of India’s 360m people lived in 560,000 villages. Now there are at least 53 cities, or “urban agglomerations”, in the term used by demographers, with a population above 1m and three above 10m. By 2031, six cities – Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad – will have 10m-30m inhabitants each. Today, cities with such unfamiliar names as Kozhikode, Vijayawada and Jamshedpur have joined the likes of Philadelphia and Barcelona in the million-plus club. India’s population, now 1.2bn, is expected to peak at 1.6bn in 2050.

The really interesting developments are happening outside the biggest cities altogether. India’s statisticians define “urban” as meaning a place with more than 5,000 people; at least 75 per cent of male inhabitants working in non-farm jobs; and with a population density of more than 400 per square kilometre. But if density alone is counted, then, as far back as the 2001 census, 68 per cent of Indians were already urban.

Indeed, it is in the towns and peri-urban landscapes, where rural and urban India blend into one another, that the biggest changes are taking shape. Rajiv Kumar of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi estimates that more than half of people living in so-called villages derive at least part of their income from activities other than farming. Yamnaji Gule, who 40 years ago was driven by hunger from his village in Maharashtra to work in Mumbai delivering tiffin lunch boxes, says younger people these days prefer to work in the factories that have sprung up near his village.

India is more urban than it admits. This has big implications, not least for business, which can anticipate the needs of the new aspirant class

India, then, is more urban than it admits. This has big implications, not least for business, which has much money to make if it can anticipate the needs – from toiletries to cars – of the new aspirant class.

From the administrative side, too, there are vital challenges and opportunities. For a start, more effort must go into planning cities. The country can no longer pretend that urban squalor is temporary and that migrants can simply return to their village land. The same goes for transport as well as housing, roads and sewerage. Of the 53 million-plus cities, only eight have integrated transport authorities, according to Jessica Seddon, an economist based in Chennai. Cities have been allowed to sprawl willy-nilly, depriving them of the cost and energy efficiencies that can result from density.

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Nor has welfare provision, still mostly directed at poor villagers, caught up with the new demographic realities. Creating the conditions for enough urban jobs, one of Mr Modi’s main election promises, will be another crucial task. If most men, half of whom are under 26, have cut ties with village life, they will become frustrated and potentially dangerous if they do not find gainful employment. Without jobs, the supposed demographic dividend may become more like a time-bomb. Male violence could also increase because of the sex imbalance that has resulted from selective abortions of female foetuses.

On the other hand, social mores are changing fast as more people break free of the influence of conservative villages. Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party does not have a reputation for being socially progressive. If there is not to be an ugly conservative backlash against such shifts, the prime minister will need to steer his party to the side of tolerance.

Properly run and supported by appropriate legislation, the country’s “cities could be engines of poverty reduction”, in the words of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. As countries such as China have found, urbanisation can do wonders for productivity growth and wealth creation. India’s 53 biggest cities alone, home to 13.3 per cent of the population and occupying just 0.2 per cent of the land, produce nearly a third of national output. The 100 biggest cities produce 43 per cent.

Mr Modi owes his job in large part to the ranks of new urbanites. He should now make it his mission to put India’s cities to work.