Revisit rural-urban divide for schemes, says PM-EAC paper
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, March 28: Stating that vested political interests block reclassification of expanded villages as urban centres, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PM-EAC) in a working paper has called for revisiting the rural-urban divide in schemes of the Central and the state governments.
“…de facto urban areas are often governed by panchayats which are less efficient in provisioning of public goods than urban local bodies,” said the working paper authored by Shamika Ravi, Member of the PM-EAC, which added “India needs a more dynamic approach to defining rural-urban areas which includes technological indicators like night-time light intensity”.
The working paper called for ‘trigger mechanisms’ which automate the transition from rural to urban settlement after the prescribed threshold is reached. “More fundamentally, the government needs to revisit the assumption of creating schemes based on the rural-urban divide which is a poor proxy for scarcity,” added the working paper.
It further argued that the rural areas benefit from a multitude of schemes from the central and state governments under the tacit assumption that rural economies that do not have the proximity of skilled individuals and capital are inherently poorer and need support. “Adjoining the tacit assumption of policy-makers is the incentives of elected political figures to bestow state aid upon large populations in order to increase their probability of winning the next election. The two motives occasionally clash whereupon politicians and their constituents have an incentive to keep newly developing urban areas ‘Rural’ for as long as possible,” stressed the PM-EAC working paper.
Incidentally, ‘Census Urban Settlements’ are those that are administratively urban; have a population greater than 5,000; 75 per cent of male population work in non-agriculture; and a density of 400 people per sq. km; and also bordering a core town of 50,000 people and have a high probability of urbanization
“…solid waste management and sanitation are on the backburner – leading to health challenges such as open defecation. Panchayats in de facto urban areas are ill-equipped in terms of human resources and take longer in setting up necessary ground infrastructure like police stations, courts, mass-transit, water-storage, energy, slum-management, and hospitals,” noted the PM-EAC paper.
It also called upon the Ministries to utilize the census and other settlement wide indicators to determine the definition of rural that best suits their particular program’s mandate. “If the end-goal is to provide government support in areas of scarcity, India should not utilize a badly constructed proxy measure for scarcity if a better alternative is available,” added the working paper.
It also urged upon the Ministry of Rural Development to withhold resources from centrally administered schemes if the settlement fails to start the transition and MHUA should offer financial assistance in the forms of schemes/newly minted transition fund and logistical support to settlements that start and pursue the legal process.
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