Future and success of India will depend on small towns

One is a historic city, one that served as the entrepot to the Mughal Empire - a city with a population over 40 lakh, which plays host to a cluster of IT, oil and gas firms. It offers a way stop on the proposed bullet train route, while its gem markets and port offer access to the world markets.

A tunnel road connecting it to Mumbai, along with a modular cargo terminal, offers opportunities for growth.

Another city, located at the centre of the Indian peninsula, has been taking advantage of its geographic position, with multi-modal international hub projects that seek to convert it into a major cargo hub with integrated road and rail connectivity.

Development

A newly approved metro line, access to high speed rail routes, ten-lane flyovers, along with SEZ development are turning this into a boom town.

A third city, famed as the capital of the Holkar state under Maharani Ahilyabai, has transformed itself into the commercial capital of central India, with over two million residents.

With a large industrial hinterland and regional connectivity across India, the city is poised for massive growth. Such examples of competitive advantage (Surat, Nagpur and Indore respectively) are replete across India's urban landscape.

We need to accept this new paradigm - most of India's expected manufacturing jobs will be created here, instead of in the overstretched megacities.

Urban India has grown significantly over the last decade (up by 90 million people; Census 2011). However, this has been remarkably skewed, with the majority of the urban population concentrated in the largest cities (only 27 per cent of our urban population lives in small and mid-sized towns).

India's growth is increasingly found in small towns - of the likes of Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Indore, Kochi, Coimbatore and Jaipur. Such cities, while primarily state capitals, have significant competitive advantages over the metros.

India has over 350 towns with populations between one and five lakh people, and over 42 towns with a population between five and ten lakh people. Their growth needs encouragement, particularly through better provision of public services.

The state of urban services continues to be poor. Consider the supply of water - the average duration of water supply to an urban household tends to range between one and six hours, compared to 24 hours in China and 22 hours in Vietnam. Per capita water supply to each household may vary significantly (37 lpcd to 298 lpcd).

Most households in such urbanised areas continue to lack metering for water connections, while leakages usually account for 70 per cent of the total water supplied. With nearby urban sources of water increasingly polluted, most such rising cities increasingly have to source water from 100-200km away.

Fixing this is not a hard task, though our institutional apathy seems to have made it so.

The Karnataka government launched the Karnataka Urban Water Sector Improvement Projects (KUWASIP) in 2005, with focus on providing a 24x7 urban water supply system through the PPP model to Belgaum, Gulbarga and Hubli-Dharwad. Rigorous delivery standards were defined, with services priced at above O&M cost, while variable rates were introduced to cut consumption.

Within a few years, piping losses were reduced from 50 per cent to seven per cent, given significant investment in the transmission network, while over 25,000 households regularly receive 24x7 water supply now.

Sanitation

Sanitation remains another bugbear. Of the 5,100+ cities/towns in India, the vast majority do not have a functioning sewerage network. Nearly half of the households in metropolitan cities like Hyderabad do not have sewerage connections, while 18 per cent of all urban households follow open defecation. The vast majority of the sewage plants owned by the government remain non-functional or in poor condition.

Waste collection covers less than 50 per cent of the households of most small cities, with waste mostly dumped on the public commons - whatever is collected remains unsegregated. With sanitation offered national spotlight by the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, it remains a significant urban priority.

Consider the example of Alandur, a small suburb of Chennai in Kanchipuram, which has, through volunteer donations, managed to construct a 137km sewer line, while covering 5,670 manholes and connecting 23,700 households, thus transforming its sanitary landscape.

While in 2000, over 80 per cent of its households utilised septic tanks, by 2005, the vast majority of them had been connected to sewerage network and a treatment plant.

Transport

Rajkot managed to solve its solid waste issue through urban planning. Its annual production over 300 tonnes of solid waste, earlier mostly dumped, is now segregated and processed at a modern solid waste processing plant. Waste destined for landfills has been cut down by 85 per cent, while 40 tonnes of biofertilisers is produced daily.

Public transport is another constraint.

India is increasingly a car economy, with public transport comprising just 22 per cent of all urban transport in India. Just over one-fourth of India's Tier-3 cities have a regular city bus service and most such bus services are loss-making (Report on Indian Infrastructure and Services, 2011).

India's public transport, meanwhile, continues to relatively decline, comprising just 1.1 per cent of total vehicles in 2001.

Local examples can inspire - Indore has built a bus-based public transportation system in the past decade. It ran an open and competitive bidding process for bus route operators, which ran them on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. Buses are tracked via GPS, helping to monitor performance and service standards. Surat has managed to replicate a similar model on a BOT basis.

The Indian consumer market is expanding towards the hinterland. Such consumers are better connected, want greater value, and seek differentiated products, as opposed to a cost plus focus. Such cities require careful encouragement and support for removing infrastructural constraints.

A focus on public transport, water supply and sanitation would go a long way in making these cities livable.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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