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Inequality in cities

The recent U.N.-Habitat report on the world’s cities finds addressing inequality and achieving sustainability as the two major challenges facing them. The Indian cities are showing an increasing trend in inequality and this is attested by the rising values of the Gini coefficient, a tool used to evaluate inequalities. To their credit, they have served as engines of growth and functioned as sites for wealth production. Their contribution to the national GDP, according to a World Bank estimate, is more than 60 per cent. While acknowledging this kind of urbanisation as the best opportunity to “stave off entrenched poverty,” the report points out that cities are turning into contested terrains where spatial inequalities are pronounced. Access to urban services and housing, and participation in the “formal sector of the economy” have not been the same for everyone in a city. Spread of slums, lack of sanitation, and rising deficit in housing stock for the poor are both the constituents and manifestations of these inequalities, and the situation is likely to worsen as cities register higher economic growth.

Indian cities flourish as a real estate market, but they also contribute to the rising deficit in housing stock. The national housing and urban policy 2007 places the housing shortage at 24.7 million units, 99 per cent of it pertains to the low income groups. Related to this is the fact that one in every four urban Indians lives in slums. The slum population in cities such as Mumbai has reached the 50 per cent mark. The informal sector in urban areas has accommodated an increase of 360 per cent of ‘marginal workers.’ The report warns that such extreme spatial divisions in cities exacerbate insecurity and social unrest and divert public and private resources from productive investments. The urban policies and projects needed to bridge the disparity can be ushered in only through “regulatory, distributive and redistributive capacity of the state,” and they cannot be left entirely to the market. Such an approach, it says, can produce desirable results as in western Europe where the cities are more egalitarian. Its recommendations for building “harmonious cities” by adopting inclusive urban planning, and effecting innovative institutional reforms to promote prosperity and minimise inequity need to be implemented without any reservation.

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