Abstract:
As the world entered into a new century, the developing countries are no more content with what the advanced countries would dole out as development assistance; these are one and all claiming their rightful place under the sun. No country, even a low development country, is prepared to accept poverty and anti-growth as facts life or situations preordained, and are in haste to bridge the growth arrear and attain a reasonable level of economic development. The entire third world including many of the low developed and developing countries, is in fact clamouring for economic growth and to narrow down the arrears in such growth in relatively much shorter time. Many of these countries had many years of poor growth or economic stagnation and now want to bridge the age-old gap in economic growth by energizing a period of accelerated development.
In India, as in other developing countries, urbanization is most evident in the country's metropolitan areas. Interestingly, as per Census 2001, the aggregate population of the 35 metro cities accounts for more than one third (37.81%) of the country's total urban population, which is spread over more than 5,000 towns. It, therefore, becomes apparent that these 35 metropolitan cities should be the focus of a sustained, countrywide effort to regulate and contain rapid urban growth by channelising the flow and direction of economic growth along more balanced and spatially oriented paths.
Evidence from many developing countries, suggests that sound public policies are lacking to guide urban economic growth. As a result, the transformation that is taking place there is invariably haphazard, often inconsistent, competitive, and self-defeating. There is a need of building up planning from the grassroots level, for intimately associating the people with the plans and for integrating state, regional, sectoral, district, area, and even local schemes of development into a Central National Plan.
