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‘ Spatially speaking, India’s social science research has been predominantly focused on the countryside. Urban India, as an object of inquiry, has remained on the fringes. This was understandable for India was overwhelmingly rural for the first six decades of its independence. By 2011, however, India was 32 per cent urban and by 2031, not less than 40 per cent of the nation’s population will be in the cities. Therefore, it is highly important to start studying urban governance carefully. Those studies that have already emerged have focused on one city or two. This book is the first to compare urban governance across states, covering all of South India, a region which has experienced among the highest rates of urbanization, especially in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Scholars and practitioners of urban governance will greatly benefit from the insights and learning presented in this book.’ Ashutosh Varshney , Director, Center for Contemporary South Asia; Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences; and Professor of Political Science, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, USA U RBAN GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH INDIA This book examines the issues of urban governance and local democracy in South India. It is the first comprehensive volume that offers comparative frameworks on urban governance across all states in the region: Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The book focuses on governance in small district-level cities and raises crucial questions such as the nature of urban planning, major outstanding issues for urban local governance, conditions of civic amenities such as drinking water and sanitation and problems of social capital in making urban governance work in these states. It emphasizes on both efficient urban governance and effective local democracy to meet the challenges of fast-paced urbanization in these states while presenting policy lessons from their urbanization processes. Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, public administration, governance, public policy, development studies and urban studies, as well as practitioners and non-governmental organizations. Anil Kumar Vaddiraju is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Political Institutions, Governance and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. He pursued his education from Kakatiya University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi and is the author of several books, including F ederalism and Local Government in India (2017), Sisyphean Efforts? State Policy and Child Labour in Karnataka (2013), Peasantry Capitalism and State: Political Economy of Agrarian Societies (2013), Decentralized Governance and Planning in Karnataka (2011) and Land, Labour and Caste: Agrarian Change and Grassroots Politics in Andhra Pradesh (2008). U RBAN GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH INDIA Anil Kumar Vaddiraju First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Anil Kumar Vaddiraju The right of Anil Kumar Vaddiraju to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-21920-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28190-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS List of figures and tables viii Foreword by Amitabh Kundu ix Preface xiii Acknowledgements xvii 1 Introduction 1 2 Why urban governance? Why not rural? 14 3 Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh: urban primacy and urban centralization 30 4 Kerala and Tamil Nadu: rapid urbanization and dispersed urban growth 57 5 Urban governance, local democracy and the future 72 Index 90 vii FIGURES AND TABLES Figures 3.1 Population of Bangalore and Hyderabad, 1991–2019 32 4 .1 Urbanization in Kerala, 1981–2011 59 4 .2 Number of urban agglomerations in South India 63 4 .3 Urbanization in four South Indian states, 1991–2011 (percentages) 65 Tables 1.1 Urban population in states and union territories, 2018 9 1 .2 Urbanization in four South Indian states, 1991–2011 (urban population figures in percentages) 10 1 .3 Number of urban agglomerations in South India and all of India 10 2 .1 Contribution of cities to the national income in India (approximate estimates) 16 3 .1 Population figures of Bangalore and Hyderabad, 1991–2019 35 3 .2 The structure of urban system in Karnataka 35 3 .3 The structure of urban system in Andhra Pradesh 35 3 .4 A profile of Udupi and Dharwad in 2011 40 4 .1 Urbanization in Kerala, 2001–2011: a panoptic view 60 4 .2 The growth of Class III, IV and V towns in Kerala 60 4 .3 Population figures of Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram, 1991–2019 62 4.4 Percentage of urban population under the poverty line: four southern states 66 viii FOREWORD Intermediate or middle-order towns play a critical role in the development of the regional economy in most developing countries, India being no excep- tion. A large part of contemporary urban growth in India occurs outside the hegemonic power structure of globalization and metropolitanization. There is, therefore, a need to build a narrative from below, focusing on the small and intermediate towns and to bring dispersed urbanization into the centre of research and policy agenda, without remaining confined to the narratives linked with the global and national markets, state-level institutions and for- mal programmes and missions. Unfortunately, these middle-order towns have not received the impor- tance they deserve in the context of India’s economic development. While it is true that a section among political scientists, geographers, regional plan- ners, sociologists and economists have studied trends and pattern of growth of select such towns, they have focused on physical, morphological and cultural dimensions. Their researches mostly had a localized context, were descriptive in nature and rarely posed questions pertaining to the paradigm of development in the country. The volume by Dr. Anil Kumar Vaddiraju may be seen as an attempt to rescue urban studies from the paradigm of metropolis-based urbanization, a paradigm which envisions urban processes in the developing world respond- ing passively to forces in global capital. The scholar takes four southern states of India as case studies and focuses the analysis to district-tier cities, whose patterns of demographic growth, economic base, socio-economic character- istics and so forth have received little attention in understanding the political economy of development in the country. He highlights the diverse scenarios of urbanization across the states, comparing and contrasting the processes in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh with those of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, based primarily on an analysis of secondary data. Several international agencies have put forward the proposition that the success of globalization and development strategy in a less developed country depends on the speed with which producing, trading and banking institutions in its large cities get linked with the global capital market. They make ix