New urban territories in West Bengal: Transition, transformation and governance

Abstract

The census town, a category of settlements that has a status between rural and urban, has become a very significant feature of the current urbanisation process in India. A majority of these new urban territories are located away from metropolitan areas and big cities. Despite their marginal locations, these new towns have contributed significantly to the overall urbanisation of some states. In West Bengal, although they are little industrialised, census towns have developed through a process of spontaneous urbanisation, with all its shortcomings, through the transfer of capital directly from the agricultural to the commercial sector. These settlements are ideal cases of denied urbanisation, where the territory adopts an urban shape, but infrastructure and services remain in the hands of poorly equipped rural local governments, or panchayats. Until recently, trade and commerce were the mainstays of these settlements’ economies. Since the beginning of the last decade, real estate developers and private industrial and mining companies have begun to show a keen interest in these settlements, as they are outside the purview of the stringent rules and regulations applicable to statutory towns. In these marginal urban territories, access to and transformation of land is far easier. Some of these towns retain their ‘census town’ status for decades without achieving an urban status, even if they fulfil the threshold conditions. The lack of an efficient governance mechanism has been an advantage for numerous actors in private development who have been transforming the territories. Based on empirical research in Barjora, a census town of West Bengal, this chapter looks at the nature of the urbanisation occurring in these towns and tries to trace the role of different actors in the transformation of territories. The chapter explores the complexity of governance structures that influence the growth of these census towns and suggests policy options for better governance of such territories.