• Posted: Thu, May 3 2007. 12:13 AM IST

LIVEMINT.COM

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Can India afford its villages?

The answer to the problems of our rural economy paradoxically lies in urban development

 

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About 700 million Indians live in villages. Clearly, there is little scope for urbanization in their case by having them migrate to existing cities—those are already bursting at the seams. Practically all Indian towns and cities are unplanned and inefficiently use land and other resources. They are inadequate even for current residents, leave alone the idea of adding hundreds of millions of more people to them. The country requires new urban centres to accommodate the hundreds of millions of people who need to be in such centres.

 

In fact, the answer to Mumbai’s or Delhi’s problems is, interestingly enough, that these cities lose their centrality to the Indian economy as other regional centres come up and mass migration to large cities ceases. People tend to forget that New York (or London) was once considered an unlivable, hopelessly polluted city. At least part of the solution to the city’s problem lay in the creation of other centres such as Chicago, St. Louis and the cities of the west which relieved the pressure on New York itself.

 

India has a choice of futures, say, in 2030. Will the majority of Indians continue to live in 600,000 small villages engaged in near-subsistence agriculture or will they be in living in 600 well-planned vibrant cities (or 6,000 towns of 100,000 population, for that matter) working in non-agricultural sectors and enjoying a rich social and cultural life?

Depending on how we use our resources, the latter future can be a reality. Achieving that reality would be the greatest challenge for India and arguably, the most rewarding as well. Rather than trying to trap people in villages and agriculture, the focus should be on the creation of new urban centres which will lead to economic growth and development of people.

 

Atanu Dey is chief economist at Netcore Solutions in Mumbai and author of the Rural Infrastructure Services Commons (RISC) model. Reuben Abraham is director of the Cornell/ISB Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab at the Indian School of Business. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com