India's urban awakening balances migration risks, benefits (Feature)

By Siddhartha Kumar May 19, 2010, 6:01 GMT

New Delhi - As India gets ready to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games in October, tens of thousands of rural labourers have migrated to New Delhi to build world-class facilities for the participants.

But the more than 400,000 workers, half of them estimated to have moved from rural areas, live in sub-human conditions and lack basic facilities like toilets and electricity.

Their children play, often unattended, in the searing summer heat at construction sites amid the din of earthmovers. Most of them are malnourished and have no access to education.

New Delhi, the venue of the Games, and India's financial hub Mumbai - where an estimated 60 per cent of the population lives in slums - rank among the world's five most-populous urban areas.

New studies reveal that India's internal migration and urbanization will be on a scale that, outside of China, is unprecedented. India is expected to have the largest concentration of mega-cities - those with a population of over 10 million - globally, accounting for 25 of the 100 fastest-growing cities worldwide.

India's urban population grew from the 290 million reported in the 2001 census to an estimated 340 million in 2008. If urbanization and migration continue at the present rate, by 2030 some 590 million people, or more than 40 per cent of the total population, will live in urban areas, according to a report published in April by the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company's economics research arm.

'This urban expansion will happen at a speed quite unlike anything India has seen before,' said the report, entitled India's Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth.

Migration experts say that more than the pull of jobs in cities, people are actually pushed out from the economically backward rural areas due to low wages, drought and landlessness.

The government, which has long neglected urbanization, is now taking steps to check the exodus that could threaten India's cities - by setting up industries in backward areas and offering temporary employment through the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) programme, which promises one adult member in each rural household 100 days of paid labour.

'To prevent desperate migration to cities, our effort is to reinforce the rural infrastructure,' Indian President Pratibha Patil said recently. 'Even as urbanization increases, the rural economy will continue to be a principal tool for development and sustainability.'

Would internal migration bring chaos and disaster to India's already overburdened cities? Or is the phenomenon an opportunity that Indian policy makers have failed to recognize?

'India is still debating whether urbanization is positive or negative, and whether the future lies in its villages or cities. This is a false dichotomy - villages and cities are interdependent and symbiotic,' says the McKinsey report.

The research warns that a failure to manage urbanization could jeopardize India's high growth rates by risking widespread unemployment and blocking investment in cities.

It called for unleashing the potential of Indian cities, which it said were 'critical' for sustaining high growth rates as they were expected to generate 70 per cent of new jobs and account for 70 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Indian cities are typically poorly planned and are characterized by crumbling infrastructure, poor public transportation and water supply, and sprawling slums. India would require a massive investment of 1.2 trillion dollars to prepare its cities for the waves of migration that are expected over the next two decades, the report said.