This book examines the impact that decentralisation reforms, initiated in the early 1990s, have had on small towns in India. It specifically focuses on small towns in Uttar Pradesh, one of the most densely populated and poorest states in India. Although considered home to one of the oldest urban civilisations, India remains one of the least urbanised regions in the world. At the same time, the country has many million-strong metropolises that are among the world’s largest megacities, as well as a multitude of small and medium-sized towns and cities. This paradoxical urbanisation, against a backdrop of reforms, has interested the scientific community to gain a more nuanced understanding of the changes and challenges involved. This book analyses an urban environment often overlooked by researchers and public authorities, namely, that of small towns. These towns are of vital importance as this is where the bulk of future urban development will take place. However, decades after implementation of the reforms, the majority of reviews and assessments have focused on large cities and so the impacts of the reform on small towns are still poorly understood. This book includes extensive primary data about political, technical and financial municipal issues in small towns of northern India and, is therefore, of interest to students, researchers and planners working on urban and regional studies in the global South.

This book is one of the first ethnographic works on small-town stringers or informal news workers in Indian journalism. It explores existing practices and cultures in the field of local journalism and the roles and spaces stringers occupy. The book outlines the caste, gender, class and region-based biases in the production of Indian-language journalism with a specific focus on stringers working in Telugu dailies in small towns or ‘mofussil’ areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, states in south India. Further, it captures their daily work and processes of news production, and the precarious lives they often lead while working in small towns or mofussils. The author, by using Bourdieu’s field theory, introduces the journalistic practices of stringers working on the margins and how they negotiate the complex hierarchies that exist within the journalistic field and outside it. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, media sociology, journalism and media studies, labour studies and Area studies, especially South Asian studies.

Studies how habits of governance create institutional rigidities that dislodge law-given local autonomy to improve urban public services.

​This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanization. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.

The Indian Constitution provides local institutions with the status of local self-governments. The Constitutional status means that the local governments are on par with the Central and State governments. In that status they can plan for their economic and human development. This fact, however, is undermined in practice at the state/province level. The provision provided in the 74th Amendment Act of the Constitution for creating and activating District Planning Committees (DPCs) is the responsibility of the state governments. This often is also in contradiction with the interests of the realpolitik of the state level. Often DPCs are not constituted, and if constituted, they are dysfunctional. The creation of the institutions for local level independent planning and budgeting itself is a political process. This is the story not only in the backward states of India but also in states such as Karnataka that have historically been more progressive than other states with respect to local self-government. This book is a study of the Tumkur district in rural Karnataka. Karnataka is traditionally known as a state which championed the decentralisation process. The state is also known for the ‘Karnataka Model’ of development, wherein rural decentralisation combined with the advanced information and biotechnology led economic development process is supposed to constitute such a model. In that context this book examines the devolution process to local governments, the process of the integration of plans—rural with urban plans and different sectors with each other—and the implementation of district level plans. The book is a product of primary research in Karnataka, India and brings to light various aspects of decentralised planning in Karnataka that are instructive for the other Indian states as well as many developing countries where currently decentralised planning is implemented.

Offering new insights into the political economy of contemporary India, this book considers how and why unequal patterns of economic growth have taken shape within the context of a democratic and decentralising political system, and how this has impacted upon the processes of economic development.

Metropolitan Governance is an indispensable book for understanding the governance of metropolitan cities. The book covers an insight into the governance in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. The participatory metropolitan governance is also of interest to the students of sociology, social work and geography. The students of public administration would find it useful to study the decentralisation of powers from centre to state to local level government. For academicians engaged in service delivery in metropolitan areas, it brings in clarity regarding role of varied stakeholders in governance.