Centre Plans To Bring City Periphery Under Urban Fold

NEW DELHI: The Centre is planning to define urban areas by including larger areas to many major cities and towns. A National Urban Commission is also being set up to focus on development of towns and cities by increasing their municipal limits. The move is set to change the rural-urban equation as the states are keen on classifying peri-urban areas as urban areas.

Peri-urban areas are defined as transition zones, or interaction zones, where urban and rural activities are juxtaposed, and landscape features are subject to rapid modifications due to high level of human activities. Peri-urban areas occupy changing spaces on the margins of towns and cities.

If peri-urban areas are reclassified as urban areas, the size of cities and towns would significantly increase. This, in turn, would lead to the inclusion of a substantial number of people into the urban fold.

“The Indian urbanisation scenario is characterised by two significant features: First, there has been a massive growth in the absolute number of people living in urban areas. Second, there has been an increasing concentration of urban population in class 1 towns and cities. Therefore, as mega cities are under severe strain, particularly in terms of making access to infrastructure services to the inhabitants, there is a need to devise a new urbanisation policy,” an urban development ministry official said.

The change will not only force the Centre and the states to significantly alter their economic policies, it would also have an impact on state revenues in the form of stamp duty, house tax and various other collections. The change could also effect a shift in the way corporate India spends its resources.

Despite the report of the National Commission on Urbanisation (1988) and the two successive National Housing Policies within a span of a decade, the government is yet to evolve a National Urbanisation Policy. The officials attribute this delay to constraints like insufficient municipal data with the state governments.

Continued concentration of urban population in large cities and existing city agglomerations and large variations in the spatial patterns of urbanisation across the states and cities are some of the trends of urbanisation in India. India’s population increased about 2.8 times between 1951 and 2001, but the urban population rose about 4.6 times.