Context: As India transitions to an urban-centric era due to significant demographic shifts, challenges arise in addressing infrastructure needs and governance across urban and rural areas. The existing policy frameworks and flagship programmes like AMRUT and Swachh Bharat Mission often fail to integrate the urban-rural continuum, leading to inefficiencies and inadequate infrastructure development.

Financial Decentralization and Constraints

• Centralization Issues: Recent years have seen over-centralization of finances, with local bodies facing severe financial constraints. The 13th Finance Commission highlighted the "asphyxiation" of local bodies due to tied grants linked to central schemes.

• Impact of Property Tax and GST: The rise in property tax should ideally align with the State Goods and Services Tax (SGST) to prevent loss of tied grants. The disconnect between these components risks diminishing financial resources for towns.

• Tied vs. Untied Grants: Financial devolution has increasingly favored tied grants over untied ones, limiting the flexibility of local bodies and impacting their ability to address local needs effectively.

Issues with Existing Urban-Rural Programmes

• AMRUT and Urban-Rural Continuum: The Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) targets urban infrastructure but excludes contiguous areas like census towns and urban villages, which are significant in the waste flow cycle.

• Swachh Bharat Mission Limitations: The Swachh Bharat Mission addresses solid and liquid waste management separately for urban and rural areas. This division creates inefficiencies, as integrated waste management solutions are needed for peri-urban and urban areas.

• Missed Opportunities for Integration: Both AMRUT and Swachh Bharat Mission could benefit from collaborative planning at the district level to address infrastructure needs more holistically and reduce bureaucratic centralization.

Need for Governance Reforms

• Revisiting Constitutional Amendments: The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments aimed to address urban and rural challenges but now require strengthening to better reflect contemporary needs.

• District Planning Committees, which should ideally lead planning and resource allocation, have often become extensions of district bureaucracy rather than autonomous entities.

• Case Study of Kerala: In Kerala, integrated management of urban and rural issues, such as the withdrawal of a landfill site due to combined local governance, demonstrates the benefits of unified oversight.

Viewing social and economic transformation

• Discussions on social and economic development and environmental issues and their inter-linkages are not complete without acknowledging the rural-urban continuum. 

• Viewing social and economic transformation through this lens will help identify challenges for improving both urban and rural governance and opportunities for enhanced access to employment, services, institutional resources and environmental management. 

• The institutional connections between rural and urban areas operate at different levels for various development sectors. 

• The key challenge of decision-making is to build rural-urban partnership and  to achieve this, a systems approach is recommended where the city and the surroundings form a city region for which a perspective plan is prepared integrating rural and urban plans within a common frame. 

Conclusion

• The city and the rural areas will finally move towards a post-urban world where the rural-dichotomy will no longer exist. It is important that the rural urban linkages are better mapped, for which satellite-based settlement data and its integration with Census data may be useful.