By IANS
New Delhi : Pointing out that rapid urbanisation had spawned problems where large swathes of the country’s urban population still lived in slums with not enough housing for the poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday called for speedier reforms in the urban sector.
“Urban housing stock, especially housing for the poor, has not kept pace with demand. As much as 30 percent of urban households live in single room units. This creates social and health problems,” Singh said at a national conference of leaders of local bodies and state governments here.
“It affects the education of young children. The demand for civic services has shot up exponentially,” said Singh while taking stock of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the government’s flagship programme.
The JNNURM, launched in December 2005, is a massive city modernisation scheme that envisages a total investment of over $20 billion over a period of 5-6 years. It is meant to improve the quality of life in cities.
Singh said that 63 cities had already made their city development plans and were in the process of preparing detailed project reports to access funds, with the lion’s share of investment going for improvement of essential services including water supply, sanitation and sewerage.
Talking about implementation of the JNNURM, the prime minister said: “We find differential performance in its implementation across states, with some doing well and others lagging behind. Cities that lag behind will find it increasingly difficult to catch up. Time is of essence.
“There was a time policy planners in India thought that our effort should be to limit the growth of the cities and prevent people from migrating into them.
“Today, our policies are better informed and we have begun to see urbanisation as an opportunity. All projections of the coming decade indicate that the process of urbanisation would accelerate rapidly. If we can manage this transformation effectively, the physical and economic regeneration of urban India is within reach,” Singh added.
He urged state and local governments to advance the timelines for implementation of these reforms so that the JNNURM’s objectives were met within the time specified and to work closely with the ministry of urban development and the ministry for housing and urban poverty alleviation.
In this connection, Singh also exhorted state governments to leverage funds and raise more from the market as the sum of Rs.500 billion provided by the central government was hardly adequate for meeting the infrastructure investment needs of cities and towns.
“The private sector can be encouraged to invest in urban development through public-private partnerships. Urban infrastructure and services and low-cost housing offer huge potential for such partnerships. State governments and cities must provide the enabling environment for the private sector to participate,” he said.