Although the 74^th Constitutional Amendment Act in 1992 had laid down the foundations for the autonomous functioning of the Urban Local Governments (ULGs), a large amount of control over policy decisions still rests with upper tier governments. One such policy issue taken up in this paper is State re-organisation. Given the scant attention paid to this issue, the current paper assesses the impact of it on the ULG finances and on its expenditure on core urban services of Hyderabad, a major metropolitan city. Besides analysing local government finances in terms of structure and trends, in the context of State reorganization (into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), the paper also assesses how effective spending on civic services has been against the financial norms for civic service delivery. We find that State re-organization has had an impact on municipal revenues and expenditures, which have both declined as a result. We also find that the municipal financial strength need not always translate into corresponding spending on urban civic services, thereby highlighting the importance of strengthening urban governance in order to improve the civic infrastructure service performance of the cities.

Academic interest in governance studies have moved steadily towards decentralization and grassroot governance. Although the role of political participation in local governance is universally noted, meager attention is paid to the unseen and invisible forms of political interaction that often tend to evade formal enquiry. The present paper is an attempt to explore the extent and nature of everyday politics in urban local governance. It focuses entirely on the elected part of the government from or around the city of Kolkata. Fifteen people who have held the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) post within the last three terms were studied via a series of unstructured, in depth interviews. It was found that MLAs wield considerable statutory and non-statutory authority in developmental decision makings within their constituency. Interaction with people of the constituency emerged as the primary mechanism through which MLAs come to know the issues of their region. Even though both regular meetings with common people as well as more infrequent discussion with the civil society was noted by the interviewees, people who had a closer relationship to the ruling political party were found to have a greater influence over the decision making of MLAs.

Background air pollution is a long-term resident and low-level concentration of pollution which is difficult to quantify and to which the population is chronically exposed. This study uses statistical techniques of clustering for estimating background pollution. The background levels of three key pollutants (CO, NO₂ and PM₁₀) in two urban locations of Lucknow were characterized over an 11-year period (2009–2019) using three widely-known clustering methods i.e. k-means, Finite mixture model and Hidden Markov model (hmm). For each pollutant dataset, the first cluster representative of the background pollution was studied where hmm clustering technique outperformed the remaining techniques, providing estimates of exposure related to background pollution in the form of its number of clusters, mean and standard deviation in the ambient air for all the air pollutants and sites studied.

Public investment in India in the erection of the socio-economic infrastructure declined over a period of 1960-61 to 2010-11. It deteriorated at the sectoral level and sector as a whole, relative to the non-infrastructural investment and growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country. Public investment in non-infrastructural projects increased and the Gross Fiscal Deficit (GFD) in GDP have not declined to the extent as this decreased in public infrastructural investment in GDP. Among infrastructural sub-sectors, energy is the only sector, which had a high relative share of public investment in infrastructure followed by the transport and commission sectors. A considerable interaction also found between the growth elasticity of GDP and energy infrastructure. In particular, per capita energy consumption, Energy Infrastructure Index (EII), electricity intensity in GDP have made a substantial impact on growth elasticity of GDP, and these were higher than any other energy indicators. Therefore, a small percentage increase in these infrastructural services generate a substantial impact on growth in the short-run and accelerated the steady-state growth of GDP in the long-run. As a result, this paper concludes that the shortage of energy infrastructure and electricity services with rise on restriction on energy consumption will lead to limiting the growth in GDP, increase the growth divergence at the sectoral level, and hamper the socioeconomic development of the country further.

India is currently the world’s third largest energy consumer after China and the United States. The energy required for India’s growing urban population is overdemanding and the industrial growth and economic development is constrained due to the acute energy scarcity faced by India. This study reviews the relationship between urbanization and energy consumption in the Indian context and investigates the impact of urbanization on the energy consumption pattern of India. India’s adoption of energy efficiency measures to cut down fossil fuel consumption can reduce carbon emissions in cities. The paper presents an insight into the existing ‘urban development and energy policies’ addressing energy efficiency in India. The review indicates that the ‘urban transport and infrastructure policies’ have addressed energy efficiency targets in their objectives while the ‘urban housing policies’ are more inclined towards providing shelter and basic services to all. The paper consolidates the suggestions to ‘design more energy-efficient urban development policies’ for India. The energy demand of India’s growing urban population necessitates the adoption of energy-efficient technologies for both production and consumption of energy in the cities in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 by 2030.

The process of urbanization in India is linked to two mechanisms: one, administrative and the second, demographic and economic. Either of these qualifies a place to be urban with the first being named as statutory town and the second as census town. While statutory towns are notified under the government acts, census towns are identified by the Census Commissioner and the Registrar General of India. This leads to a variation in the number of towns in the state. A state in which the government is active in putting a rural settlement or census town under a municipal body there is increase in the number of its statutory towns alongside overlaps with census towns. Since census towns are governed by gram panchayats and statutory towns by municipalities, it is hypothesized that one of the reasons for the persistence of these urban categories may be due to genuine differences between the two in terms of basic infrastructure. This is an issue that is considered in the paper. The paper first analyses the extent of overlap between statutory towns and census towns in 20 major States and NCT Delhi, followed by an examination of differences between the two set of towns with respect to basic infrastructure. This part of the analysis has been undertaken on towns with a population of less than 20,000 persons. The Census of India database has been used for the entire exercise.

Rgional development of an area is associated with its growth of socioeconomic facility creations. The process of urban growth is also allied with regional development, since regional development, urbanization, and socioeconomic growth are somewhat genetically interconnected. The optimal growth of urban centres is governed by the success of fulfilling the needs of basic services commensurate with the affordability of the local people. The hierarchical growth of urban centres in terms of facilities invites regional disparities through a notion of ‘ranking’, a common differential mechanism or indicator introduced in developing economies. As a result, some of the ULBs enjoy superior facilities, some suffer from even lack of essential services in relation to their population size. To solve such regional imbalances, looking for a rational micro-level planning model turns to be an essential need. This study analyzes to gain an understanding of the spatio-temporal variations on the functional potentiality of urban centres and their growth and development over the period 1971-2011. The Barrackpore subdivision is known as an industrial zone in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. The area consisted of 16 municipalities or urban centres. The study explores to find out 'influence’ zone and hierarchical growth of each urban centre over the four decades. Further, it examines how the small urban centres gradually attained their hierarchical status based on functional weightage, how the geographical area started extending by the facility influences, and lastly how the socio-economic conditions started rising. A ‘relative ratio’ indicates the functional level that measures the adequacy or inadequacy of facilities in all urban centres. The finding indicates that the ratio of ‘facilities to population’ was more in 1971 than in 2011. During the 40 years, despite an increasing number of facilities provided, those proved to be inadequate or insufficient to support the needs of the increasing population. The range of zone of influence was reducing over the time period as the functional potentials improved in every small urban centres. Proper planning recommendation is an absolute necessity for all of the inadequate urban centres; when regional imbalances would give way to regional development.

The present study investigates the reason behind the increasing incidence of crime in the state of Delhi. The result of this study is based on both primary as well as secondary published data. The primary data was collected through random sampling with a structured questionnaire. This study revealed that high population density and high mobility areas like the East, South, West, and the North East districts witnessed high crime rate compared to the Central district, New Delhi, North, and the West districts of Delhi. Further, there is a positive relationship between the parameters: population growth, increasing number of vehicles, and total number of crimes commited in this area. The study reveals the vulnerable spots like crowded areas, isolated places, parks, shades, and vacant plots to be more prone to crime. In urban areas, 30 percent of the respondent did not use public transport for fear of crime and 18 percent felt the police response to be poor; however, 42 percent felt that the presence of police gives them a feeling of safety. This study employed statistical tools like correlation, regression techniques for analysis of data and GIS, GPS for mapping, and monitoring of the places. 

Statistically, half of the world’s population today lives in towns and cities (Hannah and Max, 2018). These urban areas are not only host to various economic activities, but are also instrumental in shaping people’s culture, lifestyle and beliefs. They are home to diverse communities which coexist through complex urban arrangements. Whilst each of these communities have their own distinguishing characteristics due to the nature of urban lifestyles, these communities and their underlying ideologies have also evolved over time.  One such case is the Muslim community in Margao, which is a medium size town in the state of Goa, India. As a community that has witnessed a great deal of transformation in recent years, a case study, a case study is drawn on it. The objective here is to understand the perception of Muslims towards issues pertaining to religious space and identity. Multiple methods have been used in the study, mixing both primary as well as secondary data. To carry out the analysis, three parameters have been considered, namely; religion, space and identity. A survey was conducted amongst 150 respondents from six different locations of Margao.. The five point Likert scale has been used to reveal the variance in opinion of the Muslim community. The research indicates that there have been some positive changes in context of religious freedom, festival celebration, respect to religious sentiments and one’s sense of security in the company of other communities. Nonetheless, some level of discomfort remains visible within the Muslims community vis-à-vis other religious groups in business partnership.

The Hafta Bazaars or Weekly Markets are informal marketspaces operating on specific days and times where people buy household items. Among Delhi’s weekly markets, there exists an unconventional weekly market known as the Mahila Bazaar. Similar to the famous Ima Keithal market of Manipur, in this weekly market all vendors are women. Many of the women vendors of Mahila Bazaar obtain their selling material through a barter system where in exchange of utensils they collect clothing. This is probably the only such market in Delhi where this practice is still continuing. Despite having such interesting attributes, this women-centered market has not received much attention within academic or cultural studies. This paper is therefore a pilot study to explore the social, operational and financial aspects of the Mahila Bazaar.