World Student Community for Sustainable Development

by Shahid Sadruddin Nanavati

Sustainable development: Meeting the needs of present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs, was a definition produced by the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987). Sustainable development is a contested concept with a wide range of meanings. It is embraced by big businesses, governments, social reformers and environmental activists, all of which put their own interpretation on what sustainable development means. Stephen Lewis, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations points out that the message of the Brundtland Report, which spoke on issues of the poor and the homeless, and of literacy and of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged, has largely been disregarded by Western society which is interested in balance sheets and in whether a given project results in more or less than “permissible” levels of environmental degradation. Lewis says that the acceptance of the Brundtland Report by many poorer developing countries has been contingent on linking sustainable development with the question of poverty (White & Whitney 1992).

. . . that they have no time for the sophisticated constructs of economy and environment. . . on acid rain and water pollution and storage of radioactive waste and all of the classic western environmental issues from recycling on. . . . For them the crux of the debate is how you deal with poverty in human settlements and that’s all there is to it. Everything is focused on the poor, whether it’s water or sewage or disease or waste, or population growth. All of these are products of poverty. Everything else is academic, and I must say I agree completely — says Lewis (White & Whitney 1992).

The process of urbanization is now more rapid and massive and affects a greater part of the world than ever before, mainly because it is now rampant in the less developed countries, which still board 3/4th of the world’s people. The migration of hundreds of millions of rural folk to cities in these still chiefly agrarian countries is revolutionizing the life of humanity just as surely as are the other major aspects of economic and social modernization. The unprecedented rates of over-all population growth are helping, along with the rural-urban migration, to swell the populations of individual cities more than ever before. Necessarily, social, economic, and political problems of major significance are being created by the huge rural-urban migration and the rapid rise of megapolises in countries whose main orientation has until recently been agricultural.

This paper attempts at understanding the challenges posed by Indian cities on their path to sustainability. This paper uses primary as well as secondary research for working. The paper shows: a) how the rural regions affect the sustainable development of cities through migration and in retrospect also ruin their own virility and prospect of sustainable endeavour and b) Some models to use in generating a solution to the issue – to create a balance in urban and rural development for sustainability at both the ends.

Preliminary Overview

For many years, rural—urban migration was viewed favourably in the economic development literature. Internal migration was thought to be a natural process in which surplus labour was gradually withdrawn from the rural sector to provide needed manpower for urban industrial growth process. This was deemed socially beneficial because human resources were being shifted from locations where their social marginal product was often assumed to be zero to places where this marginal product was not only positive but also rapidly growing as a result of capital accumulation and technological progress. This process was formalized in the Lewis theory of development. However, as Richard Jolly states:

Far from being concerned with measures to stem the flow, the major interest of these economists (i.e., those who stressed the importance of labour transfer) was with policies that would release labour to increase the flow. Indeed, one of the reasons given for trying to increase productivity in the agricultural sector was to release sufficient labour for urban industrialization. How irrelevant most of this concern looks today (1970).

In contrast to the pro-migration viewpoint, Indian research and experience has made clear that rates of rural—urban migration have greatly exceeded rates of urban job creation and swamped the absorptive capacity of both formal-sector industry and urban social services. Migration can no longer be casually viewed by economists as a beneficent process necessary to solve problems of growing urban labour demand. On the contrary, migration today remains a major factor contributing to the phenomenon of urban surplus labour; a force that continues to exacerbate already serious urban unemployment problems caused by the growing economic and structural imbalances between Indian urban and rural areas. Migration exacerbates these rural—urban structural imbalances in two direct ways (Todaro M. 1997): First, on the supply side, internal migration disproportionately increases the growth rate of urban job seekers relative to urban population growth, which itself stands at historically unprecedented levels, because of the high proportion of well-educated young people in the migrant system. Their presence tends to swell the urban labour supply while depleting the rural countryside of valuable human capital. Second, on the demand side, urban job creation is generally more difficult to accomplish than rural job creation because of the need for substantial complementary resource inputs for most jobs in the industrial sector. Moreover, the pressures of rising urban wages and compulsory employee fringe benefits in combination with the unavailability of appropriate, more labour-intensive production technologies means that a rising share of modern-sector output growth is accounted for by increases in labour productivity. Together this rapid supply increase and lagging demand (what many now refer to as “jobless growth†) tend to convert a short-run problem of resource imbalances into a long-run situation of chronic and rising urban surplus labour (Todaro M. 1997).

Rural India

Until a recent past, with 80% of India in rural regions, it was reasonable to say that “Villagers in India manifest a deep loyalty to their village, identifying themselves to strangers as residents of a particular village, connecting back to family residence in the village that typically extends into the distant past. A family rooted in a particular village does not easily move to another and even people who have lived in a city for a generation or two refer to their ancestral village as our village.” But today, the scenario has changed — migration has obliterated this factor of life from villages and, this new trend of greater urbanization has created a profound social, environmental, political and economic dilemma for all segments of society. Rural poverty is bad enough, but its problems are compounded when families leave their rural homes to seek a livelihood in overcrowded city slums, leaving behind deep-rooted traditions and ties to the extended family and the village seniors.

For India, development programs have been geared towards economic growth (as measured by GNP or per capita income). Once economic growth occurs, the planners believe, it is followed subsequently by many other changes in the areas of demography, stratification, polity, education and family (Chandrasekhar 1972; Dandekar and Rath 1971). It is with these hopes that immediately after independence, India, a young country and a large and promising democracy, moved in the direction of modernization. The first five year fiscal plans were totally geared to industrializing and developing the economy (Desai 1972; Davis 1968). Consequently, investment in economic growth has been biased toward the capital intensive urban centers, despite the fact that 80 % of India resides in the rural areas. The poor from the rural areas have no other option but to seek a livelihood in the urban centres. The rural-urban imbalance in development provides an explanation for the unprecedented growth of urban centers and slums (Srinivasan, 1997).

The Indian Planning Commission has targeted 8% growth for the Tenth Five Year Plan. Agriculture, the mainstay of villages, cannot grow faster than 2% at the most (Mukherji S., 2002). So, it is inevitable that either, (a) villages get relatively impoverished or (b) massive rural-urban migration results. The probability is that both will happen. At this rate, if no corrective steps are taken, in another 20 years, rural incomes will be 1/8th of urban ones or urban populations will quadruple, with slum populations going up by an order of magnitude (Mukherji S., 2002). Either way, the current growth paradigm is not sustainable either socially or politically.

In the developed countries of the West, the rural to urban migration and the urbanization are associated with a vertical shift in the labour force from the agricultural sector to the urbanised-industrial sector, whereas in the developing regions as India, migration is from rural agricultural sectors to urban informal sectors. Mukherji says that this is a typical manifestation of under-development, poverty, and spatial disorganisation of economy of underdeveloped sectors of the society, which arose partially as a result of past colonisation and its adverse consequences on space economy (1981). These displacements are not due to structural changes within the labour force as seen in the West, but as a dislocation of uprooted workers and peasants from the marginalised countryside to involuted urban centres. This displacement in India is a typical characteristic of urban growth that has outpaced industrialisation. It is a system of underdevelopment, and it tends to compound further underdevelopment (Mukherji S. 2002)

Urban India

The Indian urban population rose from a small figure of 25.6 million in 1901 to 212.8 million in 1991 (Census, 2001) that is 26% of the total population – urbanised. Many problems could arise due to such heavy influx of population and the immediate ones that show up on the radar are socio-economic and environmental problems. The UN says that if urbanization continues at the present rate, then 46% of the total population i.e. 634 million people will be in urban regions of India by 2030 (UN, 1998). If such an exodus is not checked and corrected, it would lead to extreme urban decay and malice where urban sustainability would then become one big utopian vision.

Pattern of Movement: Large groups of landless, unskilled, uneducated, illiterate labourers and petty farmers leave their villages and go to distant large towns or cities like Bombay, Delhi and Madras. They do not go to their neighbouring smaller town centres or districts — because these regions have already reached their saturation point and fail to provide even the minimum services to the migrants. The only alternative that is left to the migrants are the large unknown metropolises — only seen in movies as glamorous beds of comfort and wealth. Although the realisation is bitter, their arrival causes undue stress to the urban system which is now to deal with pavement dwelling, slums, squalors, disease, crime, and ultimate degeneration. The urban system breaks down often due to these stresses — water shortage, electricity, transportation, education, housing, security and other services fail. When migration into urban regions continues, ongoing and increasing demands are made on the local economy which is anyways struggling for sustainability. This causes a major drain on economy. In some cases, drains on public funds do not stop at local coffers but instead invade national revenue pools, thus forcing adjustments in national priorities. Of course, this last scenario, where it occurs, is not the only way in which national development potential can be impacted by the urban influx. Since metropolitan areas house the strengths of national economies, the efficiency of those economies is impeded by anything that impairs the efficiency of the city (David McKee, 1994).

An ardent observer of the urban scene, Frank Lloyd Wright was quite skeptical of the viability of the twentieth-century metropolis. In a medical analogy, he suggested that, “To look at the cross section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumour” (Wright, 1958). Broadening his analogy, he maintained, “In the light of the space needs of the twentieth century we see there are not only similar inflamed exaggerations of tissue but more and more painfully forced circulation: comparable to high blood pressure in the human system”. And as colourful as Wright’s analogies may seem, there is little doubt that many major metropolitan areas face problems of congestion and over-concentration. That being the case, various planning procedures and urban renewal schemes may be out of step with actual needs.

In recent years, most advanced economies have become service oriented. That being the case, it should not be surprising that large cities have become service oriented as well. Traditionally, it may have been the industrial or manufacturing sector which played a larger causative role in city size than did service activities. However, the latter appear to have become more influential in determining the physical growth patterns of large metropolitan complexes in advanced economies (David McKee, 1994). Despite such problems, it appears as though the processes of economic development and urbanization are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, the actual processes of growth and change in Third World metropolitan areas have received surprisingly little attention. “Cities grow in size as a natural consequence of improvements in agriculture and the expansion of industry” (McKee and Leahy, 1974). It has been suggested that dual labour markets exist in the urban areas of the Third World “not just between agriculture and manufacturing” (Tisdell, 1990). This duality in urban labour markets may have the potential for impeding development. Whether such an impediment is strictly local in nature or wider in scope depends upon how it impacts the needs of the modern sector and how government priorities must be adjusted to deal with the negative externalities of dualism in an urban setting. Neoclassical thinking implies that as surplus labour enters the urban employment market, it must be absorbed if ongoing economic progress is to be achieved. Unfortunately, many fledgling urbanites lack the skills needed to function in their new environment; thus, their arrival “merely relocates the surplus labour problem in a setting which makes it more difficult to control” (McKee and Leahy, 1974). When natural increases in urban populations are considered along with in-migration, the labour absorption issue takes on even more serious proportions.

Informal Sector

A major focus of development theory has been on the dualistic nature of developing countriesâ€^TM national economies—the existence of a modern, urban, capitalist sector geared toward capital-intensive, large-scale production and a traditional, rural, subsistence sector geared toward labour-intensive, small-scale production. In recent years, this dualistic analysis has also been applied specifically to the urban economy, which has been decomposed into a formal and an informal sector (Todara M. 1997). The bulk of new entrants into the urban labour force seem to create their own employment or to work for small-scale, family-owned enterprises. The self-employed were engaged in a remarkable array of activities, ranging from hawking, street vending, letter writing, knife sharpening, and junk collecting to selling fireworks, engaging in prostitution, drug peddling, and snake charming. Others find jobs as drivers, cabbies, mechanics, carpenters, small-scale artisans, barbers, apprentices, and personal servants (Todaro M. 1997). Given the unprecedented rate of growth of the urban population in developing countries that is expected to continue and the increasing failure of the rural and urban formal sectors to absorb additions to the labour force, researchers are devoting more attention to the role of the informal sector in serving as a panacea for the growing unemployment problem. The informal sector is characterized by a large number of small-scale production and service activities that are individually or family owned and use labour-intensive and simple technology. Such enterprises tend to be operated like monopolistically competitive firms with ease of entry, excess capacity, and competition driving profits (incomes) down to the average supply price of labour of potential new entrants. The usually self-employed workers in this sector have little formal education, are generally unskilled, and lack access to financial capital. As a result, worker productivity and income tend to be lower in the informal sector than in the formal sector. Moreover, workers in the informal sector do not enjoy the measure of protection afforded by the formal modern sector in terms of job security, decent working conditions, and old-age pensions. Most workers entering this sector are recent migrants from rural areas unable to find employment in the formal sector. Their motivation is usually to obtain sufficient income to survive, relying on their own indigenous resources to create work. As many members of the household as possible, including women and children, are involved in income- generating activities, and they often work very long hours. Most inhabit shacks that they have built themselves in slums and squatter settlements generally lacking minimal public services. Others are less fortunate. Many millions are homeless, living on the pavements of Calcutta, or Bombay (Mumbai) or other megapolises. The important role that the informal sector plays in providing income opportunities for the poor is no longer open to debate (Todaro M. 1997). Thus the burden on the informal sector to absorb more labour will continue to increase unless other solutions to the urban unemployment problem are provided. Moreover, the informal sector has demonstrated its ability to generate employment and income for the urban labour force and is already absorbing an average of 50 % of the urban labour force (Rokowski C. 1994/Todaro M., 1997).

Exploring Solutions?

Over the past four decades, governments in developing countries have adopted many explicit population distribution policies and programs to deconcentrate urbanization and facilitate a more balanced spatial development. The closed city programs were aimed at reducing migration to metropolitan regions through such instruments as tax incentives, limitations on investments, and demolition of squatter settlements. Rustication policies and programs were designed to resettle urban residents in rural areas. So-called accommodationist policies and programs attempted to improve urban housing and services and deconcentrate the growth of large cities by promoting dormitory towns and satellite cities (Cheema S. 1993).

Governments also promoted intermediate-size cities and regional centres by extending support services to them, improving their infrastructure, and strengthening linkages between intermediate-size and large cities. Integrated rural development programs were implemented to provide agricultural inputs and social services, increase infrastructural investments, and improve agricultural productivity and income. Finally, land colonization programs were introduced by several governments to resettle residents from overpopulated rural areas to frontier regions or underutilized areas. The policy instruments commonly employed for this purpose were the transfer of land titles and the provision of credit and other facilities to increase the productivity and income of settlers (Cheema S. 1993).

The experience shows that the above policies and programs failed to affect population redistribution significantly and, indeed, that cities have continued to grow rapidly. In most cases, population redistribution was not the primary objective of the policies and programs. The reasons for the insignificant impact of these policies and programs vary, depending on the economic and political contexts of the developing region. Two reasons, however, seem to be the most common: First, the objectives of spatial strategies were not adequately reflected in governmentâ€^TMs sectoral decisions, which shaped public and private investments (Fuchs 1983). Thus, most of the programs could not be implemented. Second, these policies could not offset market forces that overwhelmingly favoured the concentration of social and economic activities in large urban centres (Rodwin 1987).

As per the Nanavati report of 2002… as a matter of policy, the Indian government has concentrated its investment (and employment too) in cities to the neglect of rural areas. Even the little that is spent in villages is wasted in microeconomic interventions to help individual villagers and not the macro economy of the village as a whole. For instance, the government has no employment generation schemes for cities; yet, there are plenty of jobs and high-paying ones too. In villages there are a variety of job creation schemes for the poor but few jobs of any kind to be had, let alone well-paid ones. The reason: The government invests in the macro economy of cities and in villages it tackles only at the microeconomic level. It is time the government tackled the poverty of villages rather than the poverty of villagers. Villagers cannot get rich so long as villages remain poor, too poor to attract modern industry and commerce. As a thumb rule, at least 80 per cent of the rural population must make a living in non-agricultural occupations.

At the city scene, although population growth and accelerated rural-to-urban migration are chiefly responsible for the expansion of urban shantytowns, part of the blame rests with governments. Their misguided policies regarding urban planning and their outmoded building codes often mean that 80 to 90 % of new urban housing is “illegal.†For example, colonial-era like building codes in Bombay (Mumbai) make building a house according to official standards for less than US$5000 impossible. The law also requires that every dwelling be accessible by car. As a result, two-thirds of Bombayâ€^TMs land is occupied by 10 % of the population, while the innumerable slum dwellings and dilapidated old buildings cannot be improved legally. Also 70 % of the urban population is too poor to be able to buy or rent an officially “legal†house. Not to forget that Bombay city is only 67 sq. km. in size and has a density of almost 2000 people per sq. km. which is the highest is the world (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003).

Therefore now, the critical issue that must be addressed is the extent to which local and national governments can formulate development policies that can have a definite impact on trends in urban growth. Clearly, the unquestioning pursuit of the orthodox development strategies of the past few decades, with their emphasis on industrial modernization, technological sophistication, and metropolitan growth, created a substantial geographic imbalance in economic and non-economic opportunities and contributed significantly to the steadily accelerating influx of rural migrants into urban areas. Is it possible or even desirable to attempt to reverse these trends now by pursuing a different set of population and development policies? With birth-rates beginning to decline in India, the problem of rapid urban growth and accelerated rural — urban migration undoubtedly will be one of the most important subjects.

At MIT, with the help of Prof. John de Monchaux, the author, Shahid Sadruddin Nanavati is formulating models for sustainable rural development — which would not only hold the rural population in their rural

environments voluntarily but also attract previously migrated villagers back to their rural base. Although the model may not be dealt with in depths here in this paper, a schematic review of the same should relate to the reader its substance. The model is based on the principle of increasing the fiscal base at rural levels. There have been many successful government interventions in creating cooperatives and local self-help institutes in India, and the government has helped foreign NGOs too at various levels in their works. Unfortunately at various instances the NGOs try to work directly with the rural people at micro-level without involving the government and its machinery. The main reason being that the government is a slow moving arm and that it is plagued with bureaucracy and corruption. True to some extent in their accusations, unfortunately this attitude makes the NGOs a target of displeasure and boycott at various levels of government policy developments and actions. The works of NGOs remain at the individual or micro-levels only and do not rise up to the market standard of helping the whole region for overall benefit.

Model 1: Working with the Government or Rather – Making the Government Work — A Case Study:

In deep rural regions of India, due to small land holdings, poor soil, irregular monsoons and very limited possibilities of irrigation, the Adivasis (tribals) and farmers have little income and mass migration potential to neighbouring townships. There are no industries in the area which can provide employment and thus be the source of additional income. Animal Husbandry and Milk Production was seen as a partial answer. Hence ‘Dediapada Centerâ€^TM — a rural region of South India, through some social workers and NGOs introduced dairy farming and invited the governmentâ€^TMs attention. The Government showed a keen interest in this experiment and forced commercial banks to reach out to the poor in tribal areas and guarantying subsidies and loans for the projects.

In dairy farming, each litre of milk fetches Rs. 12/- or 25 cents. A milk yield of 4 litres would give Rs. 48 ($1.00) a day. After deducting for fodder and labour, the farmer would get Rs. 28. Compare this with the fact a whole days labour in someone elseâ€^TMs field would fetch him only Rs. 12. When the tribals and farmers realize this, more and more of them wanted to join this project. The already migrated villagers that were in cities and were jobless there, returned to their villages to join the project and thereby reduced the strain on the urban system there.

The government machinery funded by NGOs knew that in an area where the people are not used to keeping cattle for the production of milk and where there is no market for the milk within reach, it is necessary that the farmers be trained for forming a Co-operative. The Government helped the ‘Dediapada Centerâ€^TM to help the people form this Registered Milk – Co-operative Society. Help was given to them in organizing themselves, in administrative work, in using the Government policies and Banks to get subsidies for buying suitable animals from outside the district, in training the Adivasis and farmers for the running of the Cooperative and generating transport and marketing of the milk. Today the milk co-operative is self sustaining and self-sufficient. It obtains the loans, buys the buffaloes, makes cattle feed available, provides insurance and medical facilities for the animals, collects and transports the milk. The milk yield (1994-95) was 13,456,735 litres as a daily average and got an income of Rs. 57,149,920 ($1,142,998). The milk cooperative helps more than ½ a million people get a healthy living sustenance of upto $10 a day. The standard of life too has changed dramatically not only in the villages but also the neighbouring urban regions which were previously burdened by these migrating villagers.

Thus making the government machinery move is very important mainly because it has a solid infrastructure, influence, power, and ability to generate resources and policies for implementation of major works.

Model 2: Adding Market Penetration Service to Micro Credit Facility

In the case study above, without generating or tapping a market for milk, the whole operation would have failed. The market was explored and tapped by professional people at government and social networks levels. Thus much of the economy rests on an available market just as much as it would be based on the resources that are used. This is the crux of the developing regionâ€^TMs problems in times of Globalization. But the same could be used for the benefit of these regions if prudent national and international market penetration is done by NGOs and social organizations.

As may be known, the Grameen Bank is held as a model example of a successful micro-enterprise strategy that began in 1979 to help alleviate poverty and promote economic development in Bangladesh (Higinbotham Holcombe 1995, Yunas 1999). By late 1995, the Bank and NGOs covered about 25% of target group households with over US$ 400 million in outstanding loans. The remarkable and rapid growth of this and similar schemes inspired the creation of many such schemes in the developed world as well as the US. As a consequence of the 1997 Micro-credit Summit in Washington, over $1 billion was allocated to community development projects, including micro-enterprise loans. But a fine study of these projects concludes that micro enterprise programs are not the answer to the poverty problem (Servon 1999). Therearesomesuccessstories,buttheyare the exceptions. Most enterprises stay small and struggle for a long time before making a profit. These problems are mainly due to a lack of market penetration by the manufacturers who are mostly rural based and have no knowledge of the far flung markets that could be available to their products. Grameen Bank has helped over 2.4 million families with over $3.7 billion in micro-credits/loans (Grameen Foundation USA, 2003), but more than 90% of its people in rural regions are just around the poverty line. The main concern of rural enterprises is a smooth and constant market demand. It is very important for the NGOs, government bodies and philanthropists to act as marketing agents for the products — for which they are providing funds to manufacture. They should go into professional market research and update the rural people with the information and lead their products into healthy markets. The Indian government too should not shy from subsidizing the rural products over urban developed products and be open and brave in facing criticism for the same at local and international levels. All the developed countries have been doing this — Canada is helping its lumber, meat, maple, leather and other rural industries with subsidies. It regularly faces USA, Britain and other countries at various stages in protests. USA, Japan, Germany, Britain and other developed nations constantly go out of their way to subsidize their products over foreign goods — even after numerous treaties and agreements.

Without a market all micro-enterprise endeavour is futile and all efforts of sustaining villages or sustainable cities through this management methodology will remain unfulfilled. Therefore, a market needs to be explored, identified and created by the people who supply resources to the poor for manufacture of products. Under the present globalization currents, it is very important that the NGOs and social institutes take this up — because the rural Indian poor are mainly illiterate, ill-educated and ill-informed to stand the force of this new complex global paradigm which can have major adverse ramifications.

Conclusion:

Discussions of sustainable cities in Third World Countries bring up urbanization patterns which have frequently been based upon a number of commonly accepted premises. Less developed nations, it is asserted, are characterized by high rates of urban population growth, heavy rural-to-urban migration, and by a rapid expansion of urban slum and squatter communities, as existing housing facilities prove inadequate to fill the increasing demand for low-cost dwelling space. In a nut shell, cities in developing world are always plagued by the disease of migration from rural regions. With 75% of Indiaâ€^TMs population in villages, it is inequitable to have 90% of economic benefits going to the urban regions that house only 25% of the people. Naturally the populace from the rural regions will come to pick their share of benefits into the urban sector. In doing so, they bring down the city infrastructure and economy. Thus all are at loss from this migration — some exceptions are considered.

Democratically – How to prevent this rural to urban exodus has been attempted with two model solutions. The first being a case study which shows how a cooperative or community based development can foster economic gains. We saw how a “milk cooperative†brought back economic stability to the rural as well as surrounding urban regions. Second model works with philanthropists, NGOs and government institutions. It emphasises the fact that the rural sector needs a market for its goods. The institutions may supply the resources for manufacture but if they do not help the people with market development, then it is difficult for them to succeed. We saw that the Grameen Bank could not give major success to the people even after investing billions of dollars in their rural enterprises.

However in conclusion it may be stated that such models may not bring about total alleviation of rural poverty and get the city its sustainable development but it is definitely an attempt in the right direction.

- Shahid Sadruddin Nanavati, MIT, USA

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial publication of the paper and this paper may not be cited or used in references herewith.

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