26/04/2019 - Urban Development

KEY POINTS

Successes

·        JNNURM covered a wide variety of sectors from roads and transport to water and sanitation.

·        AMRUT covers roads, transport, water and sewerage, while JNNURM intended to promote self-governing cities.

·        A major achievement of the current urban programme, AMRUT though, has been in decentralising the project sanction process.

·        The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) was launched as a “bold, new” initiative to cater to the ambitions of the urban middle class, escalate the country’s digital transformation and justify the current government’s commitment to the eternal aspiration of modernity.

Failures

·        Waste management was isolated and  transferred to the massive sanitation programme — the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM).

·        AMRUT focused only on big cities as opposed to the JNNURM that covered smaller towns as well.

·        JNNURM also uncovered the lack of capacity of local governments with small and medium towns struggling to complete projects.

·        Centralised administration under JNNURM.

·        The Smart City mission largely covers traditional infrastructure projects which are already eligible under AMRUT, causing overlapping.

Lessons learnt and role of local government

·        Prevention of overlapping the objectives in schemes and integrating them thereby saving time and financial resources.

·        Devolution of powers in administration is the need of the hour, simultaneously increasing the human resource capacity and technical skills at local level.

·        Proper planning at state level and district level via District planning committee and Metropolitan planning committee.

·        The Centre will have to undertake timely data reporting protocols to ensure the proper functioning of its schemes.

·        Moreover, one approach cannot work for urban areas of different sizes. We also need to reconsider the simplistic rural-urban binary in formulating policy.

·        A graded urban policy that addresses the needs of the smallest urban settlements will be more effective in catering to every section of society.

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