Peri-urban areas and Census Towns have very little incentive to be officially notified as urban bodies. The panchayats in these areas would much rather remain outside the ambit of complex and onerous town planning regulations that the state governments impose on statutory towns. They want to retain discretion, a source of significant power and rents, over land use at the local level. Besides, the reality is that because annual plan expenditure designated for urban development is only 10 to 15 per cent of that allocated directly for rural development under various Government of India schemes, a Census Town that gets notified as a statutory town by the state government concerned risks losing access to valuable government funding. Historically, there has been a politically motivated bias to allocate more resources to rural rather than urban India. As a result, there is a strong tendency for unplanned urbanisation, leading, for example, to inadequate co-ordination in transport planning and congestion. Moreover, we end up systematically under-investing in urban infrastructure even as the challenge of waste management and sewage treatment in particular become increasingly daunting, and our towns and cities become progressively unliveable.
A lot of policy attention has been focussed on how to strengthen the fiscal base of urban local bodies in order to make them financially self-sufficient and on how to strengthen their administrative capacity at the local level. However, the fundamental problem is that urban India does not get the political attention it deserves.
The design of our parliamentary constituencies has a lot to do with this dysfunctional dynamic. For the past several decades, the urban voice in our country has been electorally under- represented thanks to the political establishment's reluctance to update the geographical boundaries of parliamentary and state Assembly constituencies. According to the Constitution, the readjustment of constituencies was to take place on a decadal basis following each Census. However, consequent to the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1976, a moratorium was imposed on the number of seats allocated and on the territorial limits of the parliamentary as well as Assembly constituencies until the population Census of 2001. For 30 years elections were thus held on the basis of the 1972 delimitation, leading to growing anomalies and widening intra- and inter- state disparities in the population per constituency, with many urban areas ending with a very large number of people per elected official. The Fourth Delimitation Commission was eventually constituted following the Delimitation Act of 2002 but it was not until 2008 that it finally completed its work of redrawing the constituencies based on the 2001 Census. The methodology of the Commission came in for a lot of criticism at the time and political opposition to the process meant that the north eastern states and Jharkhand were not even included in the delimitation process. Moreover, Parliament, through the 84th Amendment to the Constitution, once again froze the territorial contours of constituencies, this time all the way to 2026. This effectively means that the next delimitation exercise has been deferred until the 2031 Census, by which time our urban population is projected to rise to 40 per cent.
A quick and dirty analysis suggests that after the latest delimitation exercise, though about a third of the overall population is urban, of the 543 constituencies for the Lok Sabha, only about 85, or under 15 per cent, have a majority urban population.* Unless our cities and towns, which together contribute an estimated 70 per cent to the country's gross domestic product, acquire a stronger political voice they will not get the resources, the administrative capacity or the governance autonomy they need to thrive and grow. Given this context, what are the prospects that urban India will be able to exert any meaningful political influence any time soon?
Although the Congress and its allies did very well in the urban constituencies of the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the focus of the United Progressive Alliance-II has been unabashedly rural. The disappointed urban voter is likely to look for an alternative. But will any national party such as the Bharatiya Janata Part, that needs to cobble together diverse political constituencies, be able to deliver on a focussed urban agenda? History suggests not. An interesting question is whether or not the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) could emerge as such a force.
A plausible hypothesis is that the urban voter is materially different from the rural voter. The average urban voter is younger, better educated, economically better off, more aspirational, and less caste conscious than his rural counterpart. Urban women are also more likely to identify with gender specific issues than rural women. Arguably, this stylised class of voter is looking for performance on basic deliverables from the state, and may be more willing to embrace a new political vocabulary such as that offered by AAP. This voter is also likely to be a citizen of "Facebook Nation". India has 92 million Facebook users today, of which about 50 million are located in, or around, the country's 33 top cities. This is a community that AAP could and should mine for its crowd sourcing-based funding strategy. It all sounds very neat, and if it were empirically validated, a focussed and targeted campaign from AAP could yield impressive results. But I suspect that the reality will be messier. The urban vote could well be much less uniform than our stylised caricature, making it harder for AAP to cobble together a coalition with sufficient commonality of interests. AAP seems itself to be struggling to define what it stands for. Whatever happens, the next elections promise to be particularly interesting and probably represent the best chance yet for urban India to find political expression.
The author is executive chairman, IDFC
* Based on the share in each constituency of the population living in urban agglomorations and statutory towns using Census 2001 and 2011 data.