Table Of Content‘ Spatially speaking, India’s social science research has been predominantly
focused on the countryside. Urban India, as an object of inquiry, has remained
on the fringes. This was understandable for India was overwhelmingly rural
for the first six decades of its independence. By 2011, however, India was
32 per cent urban and by 2031, not less than 40 per cent of the nation’s
population will be in the cities. Therefore, it is highly important to start
studying urban governance carefully. Those studies that have already
emerged have focused on one city or two. This book is the first to compare
urban governance across states, covering all of South India, a region which
has experienced among the highest rates of urbanization, especially in Tamil
Nadu and Kerala. Scholars and practitioners of urban governance will
greatly benefit from the insights and learning presented in this book.’
Ashutosh Varshney , Director, Center for Contemporary South Asia;
Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social
Sciences; and Professor of Political Science, Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs, Brown University, USA
U RBAN GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL
DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH INDIA
This book examines the issues of urban governance and local democracy
in South India. It is the first comprehensive volume that offers comparative
frameworks on urban governance across all states in the region: Karnataka,
Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The book focuses
on governance in small district-level cities and raises crucial questions
such as the nature of urban planning, major outstanding issues for urban
local governance, conditions of civic amenities such as drinking water and
sanitation and problems of social capital in making urban governance work
in these states. It emphasizes on both efficient urban governance and effective
local democracy to meet the challenges of fast-paced urbanization in these
states while presenting policy lessons from their urbanization processes.
Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of
political studies, public administration, governance, public policy, development
studies and urban studies, as well as practitioners and non-governmental
organizations.
Anil Kumar Vaddiraju is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Centre
for Political Institutions, Governance and Development, Institute for Social
and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. He pursued his education from
Kakatiya University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of
Delhi and is the author of several books, including F ederalism and Local
Government in India (2017), Sisyphean Efforts? State Policy and Child
Labour in Karnataka (2013), Peasantry Capitalism and State: Political Economy
of Agrarian Societies (2013), Decentralized Governance and Planning in
Karnataka (2011) and Land, Labour and Caste: Agrarian Change and
Grassroots Politics in Andhra Pradesh (2008).
U RBAN GOVERNANCE
AND LOCAL
DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH
INDIA
Anil Kumar Vaddiraju
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Anil Kumar Vaddiraju
The right of Anil Kumar Vaddiraju to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
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ISBN: 978-0-367-21920-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28190-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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CONTENTS
List of figures and tables viii
Foreword by Amitabh Kundu ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
1 Introduction 1
2 Why urban governance? Why not rural? 14
3 Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh: urban primacy and urban
centralization 30
4 Kerala and Tamil Nadu: rapid urbanization and dispersed
urban growth 57
5 Urban governance, local democracy and the future 72
Index 90
vii
FIGURES AND TABLES
Figures
3.1 Population of Bangalore and Hyderabad, 1991–2019 32
4 .1 Urbanization in Kerala, 1981–2011 59
4 .2 Number of urban agglomerations in South India 63
4 .3 Urbanization in four South Indian states, 1991–2011
(percentages) 65
Tables
1.1 Urban population in states and union territories, 2018 9
1 .2 Urbanization in four South Indian states, 1991–2011
(urban population figures in percentages) 10
1 .3 Number of urban agglomerations in South India and
all of India 10
2 .1 Contribution of cities to the national income in India
(approximate estimates) 16
3 .1 Population figures of Bangalore and Hyderabad, 1991–2019 35
3 .2 The structure of urban system in Karnataka 35
3 .3 The structure of urban system in Andhra Pradesh 35
3 .4 A profile of Udupi and Dharwad in 2011 40
4 .1 Urbanization in Kerala, 2001–2011: a panoptic view 60
4 .2 The growth of Class III, IV and V towns in Kerala 60
4 .3 Population figures of Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram,
1991–2019 62
4.4 Percentage of urban population under the poverty line:
four southern states 66
viii
FOREWORD
Intermediate or middle-order towns play a critical role in the development
of the regional economy in most developing countries, India being no excep-
tion. A large part of contemporary urban growth in India occurs outside the
hegemonic power structure of globalization and metropolitanization. There
is, therefore, a need to build a narrative from below, focusing on the small
and intermediate towns and to bring dispersed urbanization into the centre
of research and policy agenda, without remaining confined to the narratives
linked with the global and national markets, state-level institutions and for-
mal programmes and missions.
Unfortunately, these middle-order towns have not received the impor-
tance they deserve in the context of India’s economic development. While it
is true that a section among political scientists, geographers, regional plan-
ners, sociologists and economists have studied trends and pattern of growth
of select such towns, they have focused on physical, morphological and
cultural dimensions. Their researches mostly had a localized context, were
descriptive in nature and rarely posed questions pertaining to the paradigm
of development in the country.
The volume by Dr. Anil Kumar Vaddiraju may be seen as an attempt to
rescue urban studies from the paradigm of metropolis-based urbanization, a
paradigm which envisions urban processes in the developing world respond-
ing passively to forces in global capital. The scholar takes four southern states
of India as case studies and focuses the analysis to district-tier cities, whose
patterns of demographic growth, economic base, socio-economic character-
istics and so forth have received little attention in understanding the political
economy of development in the country. He highlights the diverse scenarios
of urbanization across the states, comparing and contrasting the processes in
the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh with those of Tamil Nadu and
Kerala, based primarily on an analysis of secondary data.
Several international agencies have put forward the proposition that the
success of globalization and development strategy in a less developed coun-
try depends on the speed with which producing, trading and banking institu-
tions in its large cities get linked with the global capital market. They make
ix
