The idea of a sponge city is to make cities more permeable, to hold and use the water which falls upon it, much like the natural sponge. A wide range of benefits are associated with the implementation of sponge cities; however, the main challenge lies in the implementation and availability of land because a sponge city needs to be abundant with spaces that allow water to seep through them.
Read MoreFor any efficient Public Transit system, ridership is an important factor. In India, majority of the cities rely on public transport. However, the public bus transit system is often inadequate and is in constant need of improvement. There seems to be no explicit ridership strategy in India, both at national and sub-national levels. The decline in bus ridership has been a common phenomenon across most Indian cities.
Read MoreIf done right, these forests can have massive benefits, but sticking the wrong trees in the wrong soils can prove to be equally harmful. Some reports claim that due to the rapid spread of this method in India, a majority of Miyawaki projects have been executed without the basic foundations. Another area of concern is lack of adequate space to create these urban forests.
Read MoreIn order to understand the gender equation of women in Urban Governance, we looked at the 100 cities under the Smart City mission. These 100 cities represent a diversity of region and size of cities across the country. Of the 100 smart cities, while as many as 35 city governments have women as mayors, only 14 have women as administrative head of the city government.
Read MoreAs Indian cities experience continued growth and associated urban challenges, such as air pollution, artificial flooding, and water scarcity, appropriate forest governance is vital. However, the mismatch between jurisdiction over and funding for forest management and the impacts of poor forest management leave cities at an impasse.
Read MoreAs we come up to the census year 2021, we looked at India's Census numbers from 2011, which are used to make policy decisions. We imagined, that if India were only a 100 people, how would we represent India's people?
Read MoreThe Constitution of India provided for special powers to certain regions to decide upon their local governance, according to their traditions and culture. The Constitution created two such categories through Article 234 under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules: Scheduled Areas and Tribal Areas respectively. While PESA was passed in 1996 and panchayats have been formed under it, MESA still has not been passed. Yet, municipal governments have been formed in Scheduled areas. The conflict that municipal governance faces in Scheduled Areas is because of this lack of legislative protections.
Urbanisation is inevitable and is taking place in tribal dominated areas as well. Urban areas need governance systems which are geared towards their particular needs.
Read MoreAccording to the Census done in 2011, there are 4041 cities or towns in India that are governed by an urban local body or city government. Wikipedia has pages for approximately 2,539 cities and towns across the country. About 2/3rd of India’s 4041 cities have a Wikipedia page but 90% percent of those pages have very little information. Through Nagarpedia, Nagrika has been creating knowledge that can enable citizens across small cities with the belief that augmenting knowledge regarding small cities enables not just policy makers and businesses but also citizens, by providing a fuller representation of all the dimensions of a city.
Read MoreWe are still a long way in India to making public libraries central to our urban existence. According to the 2011 census, India has only 4,580 libraries in urban areas, which roughly translates to one urban library for over 80,000 people. When you break down the types of libraries by sizes of towns, the picture is even more jarring. For our largest cities this number is dismal - one public library for almost 22 lakh people! The smallest of our towns which have the highest density of public libraries also have only one library for every 25000 people. As per the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) standards, there should be one public library for every 3,000 people.
Read MoreIn the past decades, various indices have emerged examining multiple dimensions of city living such as the real estate, mobility, sustainability among others. We analysed twenty-one popular global city indices to understand their origin, their focus, how Indian cities fare and which Indian cities appear in these indices. While many of them compare cities on the basis of their current standing on a set of parameters, there are others which rank cities based on their future potential such as ability to attract human resources, capital or HNWIs. With India opening up its economy in early 1990s, Indian cities have also become centres of attraction for global capital. As a result, Indian cities have started figuring in many such indices. This Nagrika Speaks article analyses some such rankings in which Indian cities have featured.
Read MoreOn 30th and 31st July 2020, we heard multiple perspectives at Arthan’s Tomorrow’s Liveable Cities which Nagrika help organize in partnership with BORDA. The conference brought to the fore the role of organisations in bringing all hands together and creating Tomorrow’s Liveable Cities. Based on the discussions and perspectives of the diverse practitioners from across various disciplines, we felt that three key themes emerged - Making people central to the cities, Using knowledge to improve our cities, and Enabling Organizations to serve citizens.
Read MoreIt is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” says Sherlock Holmes. The present article also is an allusion to the importance of facts before findings - the historical link between data and decision making in cantonment towns.
Read MoreIt is necessary for city governments to be enabled to take on more and ensure the health of their residents. It is also imperative that the role played by our city governments builds on their competitive advantage of being the closest to citizens. Being the country with the largest number of locally elected representatives in the world, India has the opportunity to utilise this competitive advantage to make governance more localised. This would be aided by the relatively larger trust that the citizens place in local representatives as compared to other government agents like state level officials and police.
Read MoreUrban research has been disproportionately focused on big cities. Consequently, the knowledge that informs the thinking and decisions for the future of urban India is also largely derived from larger cities. How can the information deficit on small cities and towns be bridged?
Read MoreCitizen participation is a crucial factor in the Swachh Survekshan. It takes into account how aware and active the citizens are in their city. The objective of citizens validation is to motivate the local governments and the citizens to collectively be responsible for keeping the city clean. The sample flyer created by #nagrika provides information related to the direct questions asked to the citizens.
Read MoreInnovative city solutions based on their context while also incorporating the common good practices such as enforcement of rules, imposing fines, creating awareness and building capacity of their human resources. Vengurla created a statement by converting its dump yard into a park to show the level of commitment towards cleaning the city. Allappuzha utilised a mix of technological innovation and community mobilisation and produced successful models of low cost household and community composting solutions. Ambikapur nurtured women-led SHGs and made them key to the waste management process. Through their waste management programs, small cities and towns across the country show us how collaboration, innovation, and addressing the context can create lasting change in our communities.
Read MoreGrowth in cooperative banks reflects the trust communities and shareholders have shown in them. Is transforming into a commercial bank part of natural evolution for cooperative banks? Are they merely copying the business models and aspirations of commercial banks? In the face of lack of options, this is the only way for them to grow? Banking sector should introspect and search for these answers such that the growth in cooperative banks is not at the cost of the communities and those who need them.
Read MoreNagrika has been conducting a pan-India mapping of the implementation status of 74th Amendment and municipal functions enshrined in the 12th Schedule. This is being done as part of a knowledge partnership project. The project is an urban governance study led by Praja Foundation, a non-partisan organisation working towards enabling accountable governance. Praja's initiative aims to advocate policy changes that will change the way Indian cities are governed. It is multi-year project in nature, with ground research as the foundation being used to form a pan-India network and influence change across the country. The Nagrika team have already visited 16 out of the 29 states, which are part of the study.
Read More2018 was (yet another) year of cities, big and small. It was in continuation of the many previous years through which cities (and citizens) have been resurging as a dominant political, economic and social unit, independent of their regional, state and national level identities. This has been a slow and steady but a definite process with various planned and unplanned factors contributing to the resurgence. These include political and constitutional provisions that gave greater powers to cities and citizens; evolution of government programs, their funding mechanisms and institutional structures; an increased sense of civic participation from citizens; limited capacity of centralised governance institutions to monitor and deliver; technological enablers such as internet and mobile phones. Bottomline-Cities are here to stay! Pun intended.
Read MoreCommunities have evolved through multiple forms of political organisations where source of power is either in hands of one (monarch), a few (oligarchy), or many (democracy). Democracy, which literally means ‘power to the people’ was one of the early forms of political organisations that intended to give power to the citizens. It is interesting to note that it was communities and cities that provided the initial template for democracy that got translated at national level. Now we are coming back to conforming these templates at a city level. We indeed have come a long way where courts have to intervene to allow citizen's participation in functioning of urban local bodies from the times when the first urban local bodies in India could only be formed if residents of the city made an application for their formation.
Read MoreOur work has ensured that smaller cities become part of policy agendas of urban policy making. With an extremely small and talented team, we have been putting our best efforts to produce this knowledge. We continue striving to create quality and reliable publicly available knowledge that can can empower decisions of citizens and city governments.
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