Abstract: Noted scholars have argued that urbanisation in India is dysfunctional, sans industrialisation, dependent on a largely informal tertiary sector and totally unsustainable ( Bhalla, 2004 ). I posit in this article that whatever the nature of urbanisation—'top heavy', tertiarised and sans industrialisation—India needs to promote urbanisation since we can demonstrate that poverty is better fought through urbanisation than by only focussing on rural development programmes and the population living in 600,000 small and scattered villages and hamlets which are unlikely to attract substantial private investment in public infrastructure. I argue in this article that there is a need to shift the policy focus to promoting urban growth, albeit the segment of the academia that discourses on over-urbanisation in India. The situation wherein the agricultural sector which has a share of 60 per cent employment and 25 per cent share in GDP (1999–2000) is not sustainable. However, the current approach to urban residential planning that merely carves out areas required for high, middle and low income as well as economically weaker sections that leaves out perhaps more than 50 per cent of people living in urban areas must drastically change. At present, this segment of the city population occupies areas with very poor basic services.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-11-25
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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