By Avny Lavasa
Cities are engines of India’s future growth, innovation and job creation: an oft-heard narrative. A recent article (‘These 15 cities can supercharge India’s growth. Here’s how we can ensure that they do’, IE, July 5) highlighted various urban problems and the need to solve them. Money required and policy prescriptions are well known, but the question is: Why are solutions still left wanting? Aside from broad policy prescriptions, can policymakers and implementers at the state and local levels envision and execute these?
The cited article mentions air pollution, solid waste management, water and traffic as major problems to be solved. It talks of using density incentives as a tool to promote affordable housing supply. Density control is part of development control regulations (DCRs) used by cities to control building activity and influence the built environment and real estate market of a city and its surroundings. But is the solution as simple as making DCRs less restrictive and allowing more density?
DCRs alone cannot solve Indian cities’ problem of housing, land and space shortage. It should be seen in conjunction with land use regulations that have contributed to the complexity of land governance in India, making reform and progress in our cities slow. This has led to sub-optimal utilisation of urban land, leaving unharnessed productive potential and value. Moreover, land being a state subject leads to variation in land use laws across states.
This article suggests some areas for consideration by states and cities (where applicable) as potential areas of reform to unlock the development potential of land.
It is useful to first categorise issues into themes that are operations- and practice-based. The Global Land Tool Network identifies the main tasks for land administration and management and classifies them as land tenure, land value, land use and land development. In India, there are also cross-cutting and procedural issues.
Land tenure and security include aspects of securing and transferring rights in land and natural resources, covering titling, land disputes, land acquisition, and managing informal settlements. Although extremely critical to land management, this requires a parallel and independent analysis, not covered in this article. Urban land titling undertaken by the government through a project called NAKSHA, where property cards will be issued, will lead to greater clarity on titles and claims but will require change in corresponding Acts governing shared ownership of land that differ across states.
Land use involves planning and control of the use of land and natural resources. While ambiguity in laws pertaining to conversion of agricultural to non-agricultural land constrains growth, a balanced approach is required to protect fertile land for food production and allow conversion of only redundant “agricultural” land for urbanisation. Clearer laws of land conversion will contribute to realising the full potential of land value.
Further, the regulatory framework must ensure efficient land use in private-led efforts as they need scale enabled by land pooling and subdivision laws. Laws preventing subdivision and land ceiling laws shrinking the economies of scale need to be reviewed carefully to promote realisation of fuller land value while curbing speculation, allowing land banks to keep prices within reasonable limits, especially for the needs of the poorer segments of the population. Adding complexity to this is that while possession-based usufructuary rights exist across residential land types in land records, conferring title in such cases is not a uniform policy. These issues continue to be entrenched in politics and an administrative maze of procedures resulting in inefficient land use.
Land valuation and taxation policies significantly influence the land market in urban areas. Apart from operating as a market for land, the urban land market also operates as a large investment market. In this process, land speculation takes a substantial amount of land out of the market. The absence of a tax on vacant land leads to inefficient utilisation of land use potential.
Land development is a key component of urban development. Building regulations control the maximum built-up space by imposing maximum floor area ratio (FAR), building height, ground coverage, margins, and setbacks. Height restrictions lead to losing developable space, resulting in suburban sprawl and imposing social costs due to artificial scarcity. Easing of building regulations could be through integrated transportation–land use planning. Transit-oriented development policies are an example of creating agglomeration-augmenting, congestion-minimising and resource-generating cities.
While recognising the challenge of providing adequate infrastructure to keep up with increased densities in Indian cities, there is consensus among policymakers that urban sprawl is perhaps a greater challenge. Restrictive building regulations are leading to conversion of more and more agricultural land to non-agricultural uses. While one could argue for increasing FAR, lack of political will and administrative capacity in enforcing regulations has to be kept in view while designing development control regulation reforms.
Current Indian urban planning maps, master plans and zoning regulations do not provide for the large informal sector. “Informality” is not acknowledged even though it represents real market dynamics. Reforming without integrating these dynamics is bound to create an artificial constraint on market activities. The conflict between formality and informality, modern planning and local conditions, market dynamics and legal and institutional frameworks needs to be reconciled by Indian planners.
Apart from the substantive issues, dilatory and complicated procedures pertaining to transfer of ownership of land, registration, and obtaining building permits, lack of uniformity in laws, and multiple agencies performing similar roles with conflicting regulations need a thorough review. In many states, we also need to bring greater convergence between the land registration process for land transactions, the property taxation system and the record of rights maintained by the revenue department. While some cities have managed the transfer of records between land revenue and municipal bodies relatively well, some others have not. A single department for maintaining digitised urban land records can lead to much better utilisation of land potential.
As Indian cities grow, they demand optimal harnessing of land use potential. We need to move from higher-level ideas to specific reform action by delving deeper to identify problems, specific root causes and devise reform strategies.
The writer is a civil servant
