Urban development (Urban Housing, Water/electricity, environment, migration, transport, organised and unorganized employment)

Most of the states in India are undergoing rapid urbanisation, leaving a distinct mark of urban transformation behind in terms of development consequences. New schemes and programmes are introduced annually to boast of urbanisation (infrastructure) of rural areas and strengthen the current rate of urbanisation in India, through one of the flagship programmes of JUNNURM both in metropolitan cities and rural areas. In Urban areas, huge amount of investments are being made for transport, to build roads, highways, airways, housing etc to turn them into global cities. However, what is interesting to look and highlight is the fact that India has developed its own trends of urbanisation and especially the way to link rural areas in the gamut of urbanisation. There are equally electrifying source of resources/infrastructure, more skilled employment opportunity, civic housing facilities, better health and sanitation living. Though the process and consequence of urbanisation have been widespread both in rural and metropolitan regions, the issues of SD of city remains to be resolved to make the process of urbanisation to be actually sustainable. Rampant/rise in in-migration and out migration in the cities is putting up pressure on land creating problem of illegal urban housing/urban slums, environmental degradation by building structures on fragile lands like Mumbai. Hence, providing equal and quality civic amenities like electricity and water becomes a problem wherever cities are divided into urban slums and metropolitan centre. Also in economic terms, Urban cities are centre for huge mass of organised and unorganised labour who are generally migrant population. It's an employable zone for unemployed however; one of the issues we are still grappling is with providing social security to these workers. Nonetheless, India is not far behind to compete with and establish global standard cities for which it has to face one of the ongoing challenges of SD of cities, i.e. imbalance in production and consumption for city development and management.

Most of the policies and programmes for Urban development are integrated and outcome of other policy measures. However, one of urban specific national programme introduced by government is – Jawaharlal National Urban Renewal Mission. This is one of the comprehensive urban development plan made so far, which emphasise on issues right from urban housing, governance, civic amenities and reforms. Alongside another supportive programmes are also introduced like National Poverty Reduction Strategy, National Mission on Enhanced energy efficiency, national mission on sustainable habitat, national water mission, total sanitation campaign etc all aimed at achieving MDG's and making more planned city. However, lately private planners too have entered in contributing heavily in urban infrastructure projects under PPP model.

There is an immense potential to integrate practices of ESD through various means to trigger Sustainable urban development. One way could be successfully adopted under JNURM is PEARL (Peer Experience and Reflective Learning). It is launched to facilitate networking among JNNURM cities to encourage cross learning and knowledge sharing and exchange of best practices in urban governance and reforms. Also Total Sanitation Campaign gives strong emphasis on Information, education and Communication, capacity building and hygiene education for effective behaviour change with involvement of Panchayat raj institutions, Municipal corporations, CBO and Ngo's. Many such ESD programmes can thus be introduced for the urban planners, institutions and community members living in city through formal education, informal training, clean enterprise development, community based initiatives, information dissemination through internet and consultations with planners and urban policy makers.