India's urban change to get expert help

India’s urbanisation has become an opportunity to address the challenges of poverty, inclusion, sustainability and deepening democracy. But, dealing with these challenges requires a multi-disciplinary approach and needs inputs of a whole lot of experts from many disciplines.

Hence, the Indian Institute Human Settlement (IIHS), Janaagraha and the Yale University have come together to deliberate on the problems facing the country on Wednesday.

At a time when the absolute number of the urban population is increasing, the number of urban poor is also on the rise. Mahatma Gandhi had said, “India lives in the villages.” But, over time, the proportion of the urban population has been increasing faster and so has been the problems stemming from the lack of infrastructure carrying capacity and stress on resources. This has meant the need to strengthen the rural and urban connection.

 

But, the lack of aggregated primary data has been a hurdle to being able to deal with many of the issues. “Responding to the challenges and opportunities of urbanisation will require massive policy changes,” said Aromar Revi, Director of IIHS. This will require leadership from the Union government as well as state governments across the country, he added.

IIHS, Janaagraha, and the South Asian Studies Council at Yale on Wednesday announced the launch of the ‘India Urban Conference (IUC 2011): Evidence and Experience’. The conference brings to the forefront key challenges that India faces at the city, state and central levels in addressing urbanisation. The conference has initiated a multi-stakeholder dialogue on achieving inclusive and sustainable urban development. It will also create a platform for India’s youth to help shape India’s urban future through ‘san-kranti’: a nationwide student challenge. This initiative seeks to support and enable informed policy making and promote social action, by opening up a dialogue between stakeholders at the city, state and central levels on these themes.

The conference series opened at Yale University, New Haven, USA in April 2011. This first IUC 2011 conference brought together leading international scholars of South Asia and was titled ‘Urban India: Historical Processes and Contemporary Experience’. The second IUC 2011 conference, to be held in Mysore from 17th to 21st November 2011, is a mega event which aims to bring together nearly 1,000 urban stakeholders, inclusive of policy makers, academics, students, civil society and practitioners, and industry stakeholders. The conference series will close with a policy conference in Delhi on November 22, 2011, which will open up a debate on reframing India’s urban policy agenda in the run up to the development of the XII Plan.

The IUC 2011 will use both evidence and experience from cities and sites of innovation, and interrogate eight broad themes, i.e. ‘Land and Infrastructure’, ‘Urban Water’, ‘Urban Education’, ‘Urban Health’, ‘City in Public Culture’, ‘Urban Governance and Citizenship’, ‘Financial Inclusion and the Urban Economy’ and ‘Urban Planning’.