NIUA-HUDCO Study 2015The present study focuses on cities with population of 0.1million to 1 million and is based on secondary data. In addition, in the two case-study cities of Shahjahanpur and Tumkur, discussions with several stakeholders, officials and functionaries responsible for designing, implementation and management of basic infrastructure, including housing, formed the basis of the study.
The report analyzes the trends of urbanization, economic growth, structural transformation, employment and wage differentials, poverty, basic infrastructure, housing and levels of the social indicators in class I non-metropolitan cities; and between the non-metropolitan cores and their peripheries. The study concludes with some policy recommendations that emerge from the analysis of the different aspects of non-metropolitan India. In this section, a categorization of the cities have been attempted in terms of their economic performance and the status of basic infrastructure and housing in them, along with an exercise attempting at the prioritization of government and HUDCO’s investments in the basic infrastructure and housing sectors.
The central message of the report is that the non-metropolitan cities are extremely important from a policy perspective as the quality of housing and infrastructure is poor in these cities as compared to the metropolitan counterparts. Also, such cities are seldom able to mobilise financial resources on their own or able to access institutional funding to a great extent.