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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In a diverse country like India, where each State is socially, culturally, economically, and politically distinct, measuring Governance becomes increasingly tricky. The Public Affairs Index (PAI 2021) is a scientifically rigorous, data-based framework that measures the quality of governance at the Sub-national level and ranks the States and Union Territories (UTs) of India on a Composite Index (CI).
States are classified into two categories – Large and Small – using population as the criteria.
In PAI 2021, PAC defined three significant pillars that embody Governance – Growth, Equity, and Sustainability. Each of the three Pillars is circumscribed by five governance praxis Themes.
The themes include – Voice and Accountability, Government Effectiveness, Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality and Control of Corruption.
At the bottom of the pyramid, 43 component indicators are mapped to 14 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are relevant to the States and UTs.
This forms the foundation of the conceptual framework of PAI 2021. The choice of the 43 indicators that go into the calculation of the CI were dictated by the objective of uncovering the complexity and multidimensional character of development governance
The Equity Principle
The Equity Pillar of the PAI 2021 Index analyses the inclusiveness impact at the Sub-national level in the country; inclusiveness in terms of the welfare of a society that depends primarily on establishing that all people feel that they have a say in the governance and are not excluded from the mainstream policy framework.
This requires all individuals and communities, but particularly the most vulnerable, to have an opportunity to improve or maintain their wellbeing. This chapter of PAI 2021 reflects the performance of States and UTs during the pandemic and questions the governance infrastructure in the country, analysing the effectiveness of schemes and the general livelihood of the people in terms of Equity.
Growth and its Discontents
Growth in its multidimensional form encompasses the essence of access to and the availability and optimal utilisation of resources. By resources, PAI 2021 refer to human resources, infrastructure and the budgetary allocations. Capacity building of an economy cannot take place if all the key players of growth do not drive development. The multiplier effects of better health care, improved educational outcomes, increased capital accumulation and lower unemployment levels contribute magnificently in the growth and development of the States.
The Pursuit Of Sustainability
The Sustainability Pillar analyses the access to and usage of resources that has an impact on environment, economy and humankind. The Pillar subsumes two themes and uses seven indicators to measure the effectiveness of government efforts with regards to Sustainability.
The Curious Case Of The Delta
The Delta Analysis presents the results on the State performance on year-on-year improvement. The rankings are measured as the Delta value over the last five to 10 years of data available for 12 Key Development Indicators (KDI). In PAI 2021, 12 indicators across the three Pillars of Equity (five indicators), Growth (five indicators) and Sustainability (two indicators). These KDIs are the outcome indicators crucial to assess Human Development. The Performance in the Delta Analysis is then compared to the Overall PAI 2021 Index.
Key Findings:-
In the Scheme of Things
The Scheme Analysis adds an additional dimension to ranking of the States on their governance. It attempts to complement the Governance Model by trying to understand the developmental activities undertaken by State Governments in the form of schemes. It also tries to understand whether better performance of States in schemes reflect in better governance.
The Centrally Sponsored schemes that were analysed are National Health Mission (NHM), Umbrella Integrated Child Development Services scheme (ICDS), Mahatma Gandh National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SmSA) and MidDay Meal Scheme (MDMS).
National Health Mission (NHM)
INTEGRATED CHILD DEVELOPMENT SERVICES (ICDS)
MID- DAY MEAL SCHEME (MDMS)
SAMAGRA SHIKSHA ABHIYAN (SMSA)
MAHATMA GANDHI NATIONAL RURAL EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE SCHEME (MGNREGS)