Institutional challenges

Urban Governance
74th amendment act has been implemented half-heartedly by the states, which has not fully empowered the Urban local bodies (ULBs). ULBs comprise of municipal corporations, municipalities and nagar panchayats, which are to be supported by state governments to manage the urban development. For this , ULBs need clear delegation of functions, financial resources and autonomy. At present urban governance needs improvement for urban development, which can be done by enhancing technology, administrative and managerial capacity of ULBs.

Planning
Planning is mainly centralized and till now the state planning boards and commissions have not come out with any specific planning strategies an depend on Planning commission for it. This is expected to change in present government, as planning commission has been abolished and now focus is on empowering the states and strengthening the federal structure.

In fact for big cities the plans have become outdated and do not reflect the concern of urban local dwellers, this needs to be take care by Metropolitan planning committee as per provisions of 74th amendment act. Now the planning needs to be decentralized and participatory to accommodate the needs of the urban dwellers.

Also there is lack of human resource for undertaking planning on full scale. State planning departments and national planning institutions lack qualified planning professional. Need is to expand the scope of planners from physical to integrated planning- Land use, infrastructure, environmental sustainability, social inclusion, risk reduction, economic productivity and financial diversity.

Finances
Major challenge is of revenue generation with the ULBs. This problem can be analyzed form two perspectives. First, the states have not given enough autonomy to ULBs to generate revenues and Second in some case the ULBs have failed to utilize even those tax and fee powers that they have been vested with.

There are two sources of municipal revenue i.e. municipal own revenue and assigned revenue. Municipal own revenue are generated by municipal own revenue through taxes and fee levied by them. Assigned revenues are those which are assigned to local governments by higher tier of government.

There is growing trend of declining ratio of own revenue. There is poor collection property taxes. Use of geographical information system to map all the properties in a city can have a huge impact on the assessment rate of properties that are not in tax net.

There is need to broaden the user charge fee for water supply, sewerage and garbage disposal. Since these are the goods which have a private characteristics and no public spill over, so charging user fee will be feasible and will improve the revenue of ULBs , along with periodic revision. Once the own revenue generating capacity of the cities will improve, they can easily get loans from the banks. At present due to lack of revenue generation capabilities, banks don’t give loan to ULBs for further development. For financing urban projects, Municipal bonds are also famous, which work on the concept of pooled financing.

Regulator

There is exponential increase in the real estate, encroaching the agricultural lands. Also the rates are very high, which are not affordable and other irregularities are also in practice. For this, we need regulator, which can make level playing field and will be instrumental for affordable housing and checking corrupt practices in Real estate sector.

Infrastructural challenges

Housing
Housing provision for the growing urban population will be the biggest challenge before the government. The growing cost of houses comparison to the income of the urban middle class, has made it impossible for majority of lower income groups and are residing in congested accommodation and many of those are devoid of proper ventilation, lighting, water supply, sewage system, etc. For instance in Delhi, the current estimate is of a shortage of 5,00,000 dwelling units the coming decades. The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) introduced the concept of “Housing Poverty” which includes “Individuals and households who lack safe, secure and healthy shelter, with basic infrastructure such as piped water and adequate provision for sanitation, drainage and the removal of household waste”.

Safe Drinking Water
The safe drinking water sources are also found to be contaminated because of water in the cities are inadequate and in the future, the expected population cannot be accommodated without a drastic improvement in the availability of water. The expenses on water treatment and reuse will grow manifold.

Sanitation
The poor sanitation condition is another gloomy feature in urban areas and particularly in slums and unauthorized colonies of urban areas. The drainage system in many unorganized colonies and slums are either not existing and if existing are in a bad shape and in bits resulting in blockage of waste water. This unsanitary conditions lead to many sanitation related diseases such as diahorrea and malaria. Unsafe garbage disposal is one of the critical problem in urban areas and garbage management always remained a major challenge.

Health conditions
The important indicators of human development are education and health. The health condition of urban poor in some areas are even more adverse compared to rural areas. As many as 20 million children in the developing countries are dying consequent to drinking water. About 6, 00,000 persons are losing their lives on account of indoor air pollution (Jagmohan, 2005).

The National Family Health Survey, 2006-07 has envisaged that a lot of women and children are suffering from nutritional anaemia and diseases like tuberculosis and asthma are occurring in good number. Providing health care services to the growing urban population is major challenge before the government health care delivery system.

They have to take the help of private players as public health facilities are poor. In case of migrants, they cannot take the benefit of government policies, so they have to pay very high charges, which keep them in the vicious cycle of poverty. Urban education system also is becoming elite in private institution due to limited seats and high charged fee. The condition of public educational institution is dismal.

Urban public transport
As high income individual are buying more private vehicle and use less public transport. Such huge number of vehicles in cities is causing more traffic jam, which in turn decreases the efficiency of public transport. Also the penetration of public transport is less, which make people use private vehicle. Public transport
is less disabled friendly. There is also lack of infrastructure and poor maintenance of existing public transport infrastructure