Articles by Meera Mehta

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission adopted a reform-linked funding approach, the culmination of two decades of active debate and experimentation in the urban development sector. Yet, progress of both fund utilisation and reforms under the programme has been tardy. As a second phase of the mission is planned, the three major themes of importance are decentralisation, especially in the fiscal arena, commercial financing of infrastructure projects, and service delivery to the urban poor.

Commission on Urbanisation Meera Mehta Dinesh Mehta The critical area of concern in regard to the Final Report of the National Commission on Urbanisation relates to identification of appropriate policies and programmes to achieve the aims specified by the commission. Here the commission's claim that it "has identified in almost every case, viable programmes that merit our most urgent consideration" is questionable. The policies and programmes set out in the report are neither explicit nor always the 'most relevant'. At times, important concerns have been simply ignored.

This paper deals with the structure of housing supply in metropolitan Ahmedabad over the last two decades. The nature of accretion to and the spatial distribution of housing stock, the principal participants in the housing market and the beneficiaries of the existing arrangements are discussed. An attempt is made to understand the nature of state intervention

Concepts, Indian Evidence and Policy Implications Meera Mehta Despite the failure of the 'modern' sector to absorb labour supplies from the rural areas, large-scale unemployment has not been rampant in the metropolitan centres, as would be predicted by competitive models. The surplus labour unable to gain entry into the 'modern' sector has been generally found to be absorbed by the rest of the urban economy which has been loosely termed as the informal sector It is only in the last decade that this sector has become a focus of research in the area of urban labour markets.