Challenges to the Preparedness of India’s Cities to Battle Coronavirus Disease

By Soumyadip Chattopadhyay, Simi Mehta and Arjun Kumar

By Soumyadip Chattopadhyay, Simi Mehta and Arjun Kumar

The Perspective

Symmetric to the global trends, urbanization in India has spread rapidly. This has led to the reordering of the urban periphery through complex processes of displacement of the central population to the margins and the creation of new functional nodes away from the traditional core. Adaptation to such realities came to a grinding halt when the lethal pandemic coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hit the country. As has been evident, people of urban India –especially those living in slums and peri-urban areas are more vulnerable to the rapid spread of COVID-19. This has brought to the fore the importance of the ways in which the city governments are working to combat the spread of the pandemic. There is no denying that the interrelated dimensions of mobility and demographic change, infrastructure, and governance influence the preparedness of urban India in the pandemic outbreak management, from disease prevention to mitigation and possible responses. 

Dynamics of Demography in Cities and COVID-19

High population densities in cities are major factors influencing the spread of disease. According to the Census 2011, India experienced a 37.14% decadal growth in the number of slum households with104 million people living in slums in 2013 (as per the data of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA)). Almost 2/3 of statutory towns in India have slums. An overwhelming majority of the families living in the densely populated areas of slums and peri-urban areas are migrant workers who are engaged in urban informal activities characterized by low wages, severe competition, tenuous job security with the need to travel daily to the city core to earn their livelihoods. Lack of work opportunities during the lockdown period has already forced many of them to return back to their villages. Such mobility pattern, owing to myriad social and political-economic factors bears the risk of the spread of contagious disease to the peripheries.

This points to the fact that infrastructure development for the benefit of this section of the urban population has not been adequate. A vast majority of the urban population living in slums and peri-urban areas lack access to basic urban services including water, electricity, sanitation, and solid waste management and housing facilities. As per the estimates of the Technical Group on Urban Housing Shortages (2012-17) housing shortages are projected to increase to 34 million by 2022. According to the National Sample Survey (NSS) (2012), slums are incredibly packed spaces where3/4 of India’s slum tenements are cramped within 2 hectares (or 0.02 sq. km.). In such a situation, an outbreak of coronavirus in places with unsafe and precarious living conditions where even the basic preventive measures like social distancing and frequent hand washing are oxymoron could easily turn into a grave public health emergency. Indeed, the outbreak of contagious diseases is less of a ‘natural’ disaster, but emerges alongside social and spatial inequalities in housing and access to basic services. 

Governance Deficits

The deplorable state of urban services is typically attributed to poor financial health and lack of planning, which in turn are linked to weak institutional capacities and the absence of effective governance structures of the Indian cities. The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (1993) promised to improve the delivery of basic services by devolving resources and decision making powers to local governments. Political empowerment is weakened by infrequent elections of ULB and most states in India rest the executive authority of the city governments on the state-appointed commissioner with the mayor and city councilors having very little authority over the city management, let alone on emergencies like COVID at the city level. Although, city governments in India are expected to have complete authority to carry out functions including water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, public health, and slum improvement, yet the actual devolution of responsibility to the municipalities, even after 25 years of decentralization, can at best be described as partial. 

State governments control key healthcare infrastructure such as hospitals, clinics, and primary healthcare centers and even these institutions lack human resources, including medical officers and skilled staff. Overlapping institutional roles and responsibilities raise questions as to who should deliver urban basic services and the problems become far severe in case of managing and preventing potential outbreaks. This is very evident in the recent war of words between the Kejriwal government in Delhi and the municipal governments over the inadequate beds in hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

Capacity Constraints

The infirm financial health of the ULBs has a regressive impact on their capacity to provide basic services. Assignment of finances is completely left to the discretion of the state governments and ULBs can levy and collect only those taxes that are specified by the state governments. Municipal finances are in a grossly unsatisfactory state as they collect far less revenue than what is necessary to cover even the cost of providing urban basic services, let alone tackling any health emergencies.

Lack of enough number of skilled staff at the ULB level is another major drawback as there is far less emphasis on the institutional capacity of local government. Appropriate institutional capacity enables ULBs to make policy decisions and implement them, in the manner they want, to produce the outcomes they desire. Building municipal capacity to prepare action plans in advance for better preparedness on the ground, providing emergency response training, and improving coordination with other key departments (e.g., National Disaster Response Force) should feature in any urban national policy framework.

The Way Forward

In essence, spatial and structural characteristics of urban India indicate cities, especially slums and the suburbs are likely to remain hotspots for diseases like COVID-19 in the coming months. An ability to monitor rural-urban and inter-urban migration will be crucial to mitigating the spread of this disease. Therefore, it would be useful to plan and implement a slew of short term measures including aggressive and affordable testing, tracing and quarantine infected persons, and provision of door-to-door drinking water and mobile toilet facilities to densely populated slum and peri-urban areas. This pandemic also provides an opportunity for genuinely empowering ULBs that should not go waste.

About the Authors:

Soumyadip Chattopadhyay is an associate professor of economics at the Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan and Coordinator, Centre for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS), and Senior Fellow at Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), New Delhi.

Simi Mehta is CEO & Editorial Director, IMPRI.

Arjun Kumar is Director, Impact, and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), New Delhi, and China-India Visiting Scholar Fellow, Ashoka University.  

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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this insight piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the IndraStra Global.