Exclusionary Urbanisation in South Asia

Abstract

Taking eight South Asian countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka as the units of analysis, the study analyzes the level of urbanization, urban people’s accessibility to basic amenities and a set of other economic indicators like poverty, unemployment, GDP growth rate, value added by industry etc. The paper begins by over-viewing this debate and goes on to analyse the relationship between urbanisation and economic development and its impact on quality of life and poverty in urban areas. It critically analyses the controversy in the literature, by drawing upon the empirical studies on the subject, focussing on South Asia. A detailed analysis of the pattern of urbanisation in South Asia and correlates of urbanization across different countries has been attempted. It also examines the policies and programmes at the national and regional levels to determine how they are responsible for ushering in an era of exclusionary urbanisation and deceleration in urban growth. The final section summarises the findings of the study.

One can put forward the thesis of exclusionary urban growth in most South Asian countries which is linked with formal or informal denial of entry to the prospective migrants and increased un-affordability of urban space and basic amenities by the rural poor based on an overview of the macro statistics. The spatial scenario of urban growth as projected by UNPD suggests that small and less developed countries in south Asia may record high population growth in their urban centres, but the growth rates have been projected to slow down during the next few decades. These have shown high pace of urbanization and rapid economic growth in recent years, backed up by foreign and domestic investment. Moreover, the structure of urban growth has been top heavy for most of the south Asian countries where a few large cities (million plus) account for a high proportion of urban population. An overview of the pattern of interdependencies among select development indicators suggests that the level of urbanization relates strongly and positively with that of economic development, and also with domestic/foreign investment, export base etc. There exists no definitive evidence suggesting that urban growth has resulted in increased access of people to basic amenities like drinking water and sanitation to the average people. All these would dampen the pace of urban growth notwithstanding the magnitude of absolute figures of increment that are large due to the pure demographic weight of the region. South Asia is unlikely to go the same way as that of Latin America in the second half of the last century.