Governing Urban India: Policy and Practice

Today, over half the world’s population, or about 4 billion people, live in cities and towns. One in every ten urban residents of the world are in India’s urban centers, a proportion that is expected to increase to one in five by 2050. Urban areas have increasingly become central to society, culture and the economy, that define who we are as a civilization. Thus urbanisation in India presents enormous opportunities and challenges in terms of governing the human, social, financial and environmental capital of this process. In this book, Dr. Ravindra brings to bear his decades of experience in grappling with this transformation, especially in his highly urbanized home state of Karnataka, and articulates the dissonances between governance, policy and practice. He chronologically outlines urbanisation in India, with a focus on aspects of governance that give context to the state of our cities. His immense knowledge of urban land, infrastructure, finance, housing, climate change and environment, and narrations of many personal experiences from the 1960s to the present, enrich this book. Touching upon the absence of adequate epistemology in the discourse on urban development which can capture the dynamics of our cities, the text suggests a few critical frameworks on planning for future urbanisation in India. Reflecting on our many failures in managing urbanisation, the book highlights integrated territorial approaches and questions power sharing in urban governance. In an era dominated by flagship urban schemes and programmes, the book re-centers the question of urban governance with the aim of providing avenues to make our cities ‘livable’ again.