Over the last century, India’s landscape has urbanized considerably: the urban population has grown 14 times since 1901, and by 2050 up to 54 percent of India’s population will be urban. Much of this urban growth is occurring in large villages or small to medium sized cities , resulting in vast ‘peri-urban’ landscapes.
While rapid urbanization is increasing the wealth and spending power of India’s urban population, urban development has also resulted in changes to land use that have challenged traditional industries; agriculture, fishing, and forestry, which are common in peri-urban regions, all face new obstacles. Additionally, climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events have posed further issues for both urbanizing communities and these climate-dependent industries. For example, climate change is resulting in an increasingly variable monsoon season, which makes agriculture on the outskirts of cities precarious. Climate change is also increasing sea level and temperature, harming fishing and putting people at risk.
Therefore, climate change action needs to move beyond mitigation and disaster response. Decision makers must plan for climate resilience in ways that protect these vulnerable industries and communities.
The Interconnected Challenges of Urbanization and Climate Change
Case Study – Arnala:-
Consider Arnala village, one of 995 villages in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and located along the north-western coast. Arnala has a predominantly agrarian and fishing economy and a population of 19,350 people. Villages like Arnala demand attention because due to increasing levels of climate uncertainty and regional pressure, the youth in the village are gradually moving away from the village’s traditional industries.
Coastal, agrarian economies in India are under pressure from both climate change and urbanization, making the future of these industries highly uncertain.
Rapid urbanization in the region and poor waste management systems have resulted in a spike in water pollution, straining the fishing industry. Indeed, urban expansion in coastal cities (or their peripheries) often results in the deterioration of mangroves, threatening fish species and driving profits down for fisheries. Further, due to an overall rise in sea-surface temperature, many native species have already migrated upwards from the southern coast, resulting in species variations along both the east and west coasts of India. These new species are often undesirable to local markets resulting in reduced sales for anglers.
Adding variability to this trend, unseasonal rainfall and flash storms, now common to the region, result in a sudden cooling of the sea’s surface. This impacts fish in two ways: (1) fish recede to the sea bed due to lower surface temperatures, or (2) produce fewer or no eggs as fish primarily lay eggs only when the sea is warmer. All of this makes communities in peri-urban areas, which are dependent on natural ecosystems for their livelihoods, particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Effective and strict climate policies as well as stringent urban development policies can help address the needs of these communities. However, peri-urban areas are often subject to multiple and overlapping institutional and governance jurisdictions, making regulation and enforcement difficult. Therefore, several questions arise, such as: how can urban infrastructure benefit peri-urban communities who are dependent on traditional industries? How can urban planning empower peri-urban communities to adapt to the pressures of urbanization and climate change while planning for a gradual shift in their economies?
Fishing, a primary source in income in many of India’s coastal villages, is being threatened by urbanization and the effects of increasing temperatures.
Potential Policies for Building Resilience in Peri-Urban India
Many villages and towns within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region fear that urbanization may negatively impact their livelihoods. This anxiety stems from the fact that a majority of villages that have been agglomerated into urban governing bodies are stripped off their autonomy, losing control of their rural economies. These conflicts, coupled with climate uncertainty, create a rather complex political landscape for urban planning at a regional scale. Consequently, a multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary planning approach should be adopted to adequately address the needs of these changing communities.
1. Management of Peri-urban Areas: This should include developing guidelines for the assimilation of villages into urban areas. These guidelines should ensure effective regulation to protect fragile ecosystems, and enforcement of building codes to control unplanned developments. State-level regulations should help manage environmental risks as a way of regulating and guiding urban regional planning.
2. Capacity Building: Planning departments often only represent the needs of urban communities since they assume all city residents live, or will live, in an urban environment. However, to effectively manage urbanization in peri-urban areas, it is important to build institutional and planning capacities within planning departments to represent and manage both urban and rural aspirations for development.
3. Knowledge Management: Spreading information about the effects of climate change at the local level and empowering communities to diversify their incomes during off-seasons will be critical for contending with the dual forces of urbanization and climate change.
4. Inclusionary Policies: Local governmental and planning agencies need to develop guidelines that ensure that urban resilience planning accounts for gender and age.
5. Finance Allocations: The state and local governments need to ensure adequate public financing for urban climate resilience planning at both levels.
Arnala reveals the clear impacts of urbanization and climate change on the industries and ecosystems in the peri-urban community, it also presents many opportunities to forge self-sufficient and low-carbon peri-urban futures.It is clear that the only way forward is to adopt a climate resilience approach to urban planning—including defining key urban development guidelines to plan for resilience on the outskirts of rapidly growing cities.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.