The State Invented Urban Poverty

On Saturday (16^th January 2010) I have attended a lecture (The Urban Lecture Serious) organized by Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi along with Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (JCCD), Bangalore. The topic was on "Indian Urbanisation in a Global Perspective" by Prof. Edward L Glaeser, Fred and Fleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Harvard University.

Prof. Ed Glaeser gave his talk on “An Urban Future”

In sum, the lecture was attended by a well attended with first hand experience of urbanization.

First the representative of JCCD has presented a brief about what they do in their Centre. It was said that the REED Programme has achieved a wide spectrum in terms of research and advocacy programms. The full form of REED stands:

• R-Regional Perspective
• E-Empowering Government (local bodies etc)
• E-Enabling Government (local bodies etc) and citizen
• D-Direct Accountability

And then Prof. Ed Glaeser gave a talk mainly on the broader aspects of the following:

• Evaluation of urban arena in US
• Death of distance and decline of costing moving goods
• Traditional State functions
• People living in the urban cities in poverty are not bad thing!
• Urban role in civilization (exporting of goods, cloth cities, food cities)
• The gift of urban density
• Idea oriented cities and importing of ideas (Athens imported of ideas from Greek, Baghdad imported of ideas from India etc)
• The most skilled cities in US
• Urban intercontinental gateways
• What is good and bad about urban poverty?
• The role of Economics and Choice in urban poverty
• Urban governance, etc

Prof.Abhijit Banerjee pointed out in a study in Udaipur district of Rajasthan the round trip and short term migrant were found a significantly higher than the permanent migrant.

It was also said that the new two wheelers have revolutionized the Indian scenario of urbanization especially after the liberalization.

There were many more discussion on the contemporary issues of urbanization in India and the globe.

There were many interesting questions also which are not studied in the experience of US urbanization.

However, what is discussed is the difference of rural economy contribution to urban economy and vice-versa. It includes both building both physical and social infrastructure development.

At the end everybody in some or other way felt that the ultimate culprit in the urban poverty is The State failure of policy.