The country, which has poverty alleviation high on its agenda, has a few lessons to learn from the urban decentralisation models followed in Kerala and Madhya Pradesh (M.P) while getting spatial strategies drawn by States for their equitable development, School of Planning & Architecture Director N. Sridharan has said.
With the assistance of the World Bank, Madhya Pradesh worked out a plan of decentralising urban development in the eighties and has achieved good results. The focus was on developing cities across the State instead of the beaten models of urbanisation of large cities. The development of urban as well as rural areas reduced the levels of urban dominance in that State, he pointed out
Citing the example of Kerala, he said, under People’s Planning Campaign, the local governments in that State were delegated with powers to make decisions and granted discretionary budgeting to the tune of 30 per cent of the State’s development expenditure to salutary effects.
Sharing details of his study paper titled ‘Village and small town development through provision of urban services in India: A new approach to help the rural poor’ to be presented at the International Workshop on Rural-Urban Poverty Linkages to be held at Hangzhou in China early next month, Mr. Sridharan said State-level spatial strategies were essential to arrest urban-bound migration.
He stressed the need to focus on poverty reduction strategies in small and medium towns and in rural areas simultaneously than concentrating on the anti-poverty programmes in metropolitan cities. Besides, the concept of growth centres and cluster development has to be given tangible shape in the desired way lest development should become skewed.
A holistic approach to development would eliminate the scope for regional and sub-regional bias, he asserted and added that States could ill-afford to ignore the importance of local employment generation. Mr. Sridharan has recommendations for India under three heads: urbanisation and rural-urban linkages, poverty linkages and good practices in governance for poverty reduction.
