Sāmatvārtha : Transforming India's Welfare and Urban Policies for a Regenerative Future
This article discusses the need for a simpler approach to Indian welfare and urban policies for a regenerative future, highlighting the complexities and pitfalls of current systems.
Welfare & Urbanism - 1000s of policies, same old fallacies
Just like the taxation story, welfare and urbanism in India are no stranger to spaghetti convolution of policies. We will take a much briefer look into where the trend is heading towards, much dangerously so. Then we will finally explore potential simpler heuristics to solve these key pillars of taxation, welfare & urbanism for a regenerative solarpunk indic futurism.
Welfare State of Freebies
The welfare system in India is also a labyrinth of overlapping social welfare and security schemes for its citizens. These schemes are funded either by the central government, state government, or concurrently. Schemes fully funded by the central government are referred to as “central sector schemes” (CS), while those mainly funded by the center and implemented by the states are “centrally sponsored schemes” (CSS). In the 2022 Union budget of India, there were 740 central sector (CS) schemes and 65 centrally sponsored schemes (CSS). The funding for these CSS’s in 2022 was ₹ 442,781 crore. There were 157 CSs and CSSs with individual funding of over ₹ 500 crore each.
While the intent of these schemes are noble, ground realities reveal a stark disparity. The challenges lie not just in often flawed policy design, but also with the last-mile implementation hell-hole. Concerns persist over corruption, bureaucratic inefficiencies, rampant leakages and market distortions, which dilute the intended impact of any welfare initiative. It’s the same control freak begets power creep behavior all over again! Means-testing morphs into a tool of rent-seeking and exclusion than of efficient welfare. I mean you get the idea, it’s the same story as taxes. India under Narendra Modi focused on Direct Benefit Transfers to tackle some of these issues, step by step, but now there is a new hydra in town - freebies!
There are no heroes in this story, from AAP’s free electricity and what not subversion in Delhi, Congress’s free electricity and bus rides in Karnataka, to BJP’s Ladli Lakshmi in MP. This is very dangerous policy making becoming a quick norm in India. There is no sustainability baked in, but rhetoric is selling like hot cakes and alcohol during election seasons. And now when the budget deficits are starting to hit real governance and welfare work, typical politicking on ‘federalism’ to ‘tax burden’ has begun to deflect away from fiscal responsibility.
The latest in this trend is the announcement by the congress party of ensuring INR 1L per annum cash benefit transfer to women from poor families. This is not great because it neither has the benefit of UBI (no means testing, universal upliftment of opportunity) yet has the pitfall of huge fiscal burden without much responsibility as well as typical implementation corruption and leakages. All in all these are dangerous policies considering everything, and if the political economy is getting settled on this hill, there needs to come a trojan horse which can cut through this trend and get better outcomes with much responsibility and with universal autonomy.
So while the intent behind the multitude of welfare schemes in India is commendable, and we are not questioning the need for welfare safety net, but we can indeed question if there are some easier approaches as well which can aggregate most of the intentions as categorized in above chart (Education, Food, Civic, Medical, etc. ) into effective and efficient outcome driven approach, possibly also avoiding the pitfalls of means-testing and while providing more autonomy to the citizen on the welfare they prioritize for themselves.
Masterplan for Urban Decline
Our cities, towns, villages are very much superorganisms like ant colonies. Some people move in, some move out, some stay put where they have been. Through these migrations, the superorganism also grows, evolves and sometimes even dies down. India is urbanizing. India needs to urbanize. But does urbanization only mean migration to bigger and bigger cities - with ever worsening civic amenities, or can it also mean a Cambrian explosion of more local urban clusters out of their rural past?
The urban planning process in India is characterized by a multiplicity of local bodies, rigid master plans, restrictive zoning regulations, whimsical solutions, etc. This often leads to inefficient land use and hinders the ability of cities to grow and adapt to changing needs. So when rapid urbanization leads to unprecedented growth in India’s cities, it strains existing infrastructure and resources. Bimal Patel recently revealed an interesting example of this, where setback rules have contributed to just dead parcels of land which could instead have been public streets or civic infrastructure centers, and simply reclaiming setbacks in a city like Mumbai can unlock loads of under-utilized land. This is just one random exhibit!
To quote from one of his public articles -
“The consequence of not focusing on land use efficiency is not small. In well-planned cities like London, Paris and New York, approximately 40% of the land is devoted to the public domain, 45% covered by buildings and 15% leftover as private open space. In stark contrast, for Mumbai (Island City), the proportion is 24% in the public domain, 24% covered by buildings and 52% leftover as private open space!”
Another exhibit for misguided urban policy can be the random rural/urban classification and respective regulations, which certainly don’t help when any city starts expanding beyond what ‘masterplans’ allowed for. This urban sprawl not only hampers livability but also contributes to environmental degradation and social inequalities. The influx of rural migrants into urban centers exacerbates issues such as inadequate housing, overburdened transportation networks, and insufficient access to basic amenities.
Couple these factors with poor local governance with plethora of corruption, shadow real estate economy to hide untaxed income or save further tax on capital gains, automobile centric worldview preventing prioritization of many necessary civic amenities & tree-cover, weird regulations from FSI to setbacks, disregard for natural ecosystems, etc. our cities are just somehow making it through. There is so much which can be expanded on each point, but hopefully you get the idea!
When we consider that India is 10x the density of the US, 5x of Europe and around 2.5x of China, this patch-fix approach to urbanism will lead us to nowhere great. Just as living organisms adapt to changes in their environment, urban landscape & cities require flexible planning frameworks that can accommodate evolving needs and challenges. Indians might love its Chandigarh, but the reality is that it’s the worst approach we can take to our urbanism. What India instead needs is 100s of Singapore & Kyoto - where natural ecosystems, cultural heritage and urban lifestyle can blend seamlessly with a regenerative soul. Also, way more trees and less asphalt at any random place!
Doughnut Economics Action Labs has come with with an exhaustive Urban Development Manual and Toolkit for any planner to gauge where their region stand, so we will not repeat that exercise and limit our approach to just address potential tokenized protocol for air-space, greenery & public space credits which can help accelerate this journey!
Authored by Moberation. Published by Brhat.