Urbanisation

Waterfront development projects have been promoted in the name of flood control, beautification, and urban development. However, they only replace the river’s natural riparian edge with a concrete riverfront, facilitating further encroachment on and destruction of the riverbed. The Gujarat government promulgated the Vishwamitri Riverfront Development Project as a “smart” solution to the river’s deterioration, completely ignoring environmental safeguards.

In the rapid urbanisation of Kathmandu Valley’s periphery, the practices and logics of dalal middlemen are fundamental to the uneven transformation of land from agricultural to residential uses. Far more than just mediating urban change for personal profit, this ethnographic portrait of dalals illustrates their active role in producing an emerging peripheral locality through engagement with local demands, a detached state, and the growing interest of private capital.

If India's experiment with "smart" urbanisation is to succeed, there is a critical need for investing in the priorities of youth, creation of jobs they aspire to have, spaces they can engage with and thereby connecting them with the city. Rather than an undue emphasis on "harnessing technology" for the betterment of citizens, the focus should be on inclusive urbanisation, where no one is left behind.

This paper examines the performance of four southern states in various economic and social sectors during the past decade, comparing and contrasting them with each other and the average all-India figures in these sectors. Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have done the most to initiate reforms in recent years. Kerala is moving in this direction too, after initial delays, as is Tamil Nadu. As the four states face several individual and common challenges in the coming years, they need to deepen reforms and tailor strategies in keeping with their particular circumstances, in their quest for growth.

This paper attempts to assess the changes in workforce structure and the system of governance associated with macroeconomic reforms and their impact on the rate and pattern of urbanisation in India. The analysis of development dynamics in the 1990s shows that there has been an all-round decline in the growth of employment. Income growth and incidence of poverty have been extremely uneven across states. Thus a slowing down in the rate of urbanisation and concentrations of demographic growth in developed states seem to be the logical outcome. The process of urbanisation has also become exclusionary in nature, as only a few large cities with a strong economic base are able to raise resources for development, leaving out small and medium towns.