The process of urbanization in India does not follow a linear path. It's rather skewed at three levels: conceptual, political, and economic. Mahatma Gandhi's emphasis on villages, with his sublimating yet biased ideological position that the real India lived in her villages, has led to creation of conceptual cobwebs at the level of political establishment.
Though Nehru did not exactly place the village at the heart of his socialist model of development, Indian cities have never got their due from the political system. Ironically, the political system, rather than being an instrument of a planned urban development, has become the very reason for the chaotic urban sprawl that most Indian cities look like today.
Interestingly, Gandhi never said neglect the cities. All the Mahatma meant was making villages so self-sufficient that villagers don't have to migrate to cities in search of livelihood. In the Greek political philosophy, the concept of city-state lays emphasis on a symbiotic relationship between the city and its surrounding villages with the latter serving as supply chain for urban needs. In practice, India's political system has neither been able to make villages self-sufficient despite its four-decade long flirtation with socialism nor has it really applied itself to the task of building its cities to cater to the hordes of migrant villagers.
A flawed interpretation of Gandhi's espousal of village being the centre of economic development has virtually displaced urban India from the polity. Indian cities exist only physically with all the evils of urbanization playing out so obscenely that a course correction seems almost impossible. The political system cares little for the evils of its own creation-inequitable distribution of population density, a complete collapse of urban infrastructure, regulatory distortions that have led to the parallel rule of land mafia in cities, and most seriously the absence of a holistic urban development policy. A classic example of this irony is Maharashtra, the most urbanized state in India in demographic terms.
Today, around 42% of Maharashtra is urban or semi-urban and the state planners reckon this percentage to go up by almost 10% by 2020. Yet, the state does not have an urban development policy in place on the lines of one for rural development. There is an urban development ministry but it exists merely as a political portfolio. The World Bank has estimated that each day adds around 1,200 people or 350 to 400 families to Mumbai's population leviathan.
Yet, the political system in the state as well as at the centre has failed on both fronts-either stopping this influx or planning for them. The July 2005 floods in Mumbai brutally exposed India's global city. Sadly, Mumbai is only the representative case of India's urbanization gone horribly wrong.
Remember, only Kolkata and Chennai, the two other metros, still have the archaic urban land ceiling and regulation act in force and Mumbai scrapped it only recently.
A major reason why Indian cities have never been at the centre of the planning process is their failure to emerge as a political constituency. India's political system, irrespective of which political party or combination rules, draws its oxygen from villages, not cities. Villages vote in large numbers, cities tend to be skeptical of the electoral process because they have hardly received anything in return. Populist promises like free power or loan-waiver are made to farmers, not to citizens, simply because they fetch votes. Most of India's elected representatives, legislators or MPs, not only come from rural hinterlands but they also speak, almost always in populist terms, for the villages only. Ironically, even the representatives who represent urban constituencies are often found vulnerable to populist pressures like protecting slums.
