Development, Inclusion and Sustainability

The growing social, economic, and environmental challenges of our times have posed some pressing concerns in the development path of the world. In the post-pandemic world—marked by polycrisis—progress on a majority of Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, in the areas of poverty, hunger and climate, has been slow, or has stalled or reversed.

The observed pattern of change in employment conditions in India in recent periods has justifiably aroused widespread concern. Employment conditions, it turns out, actually worsened quite substantially during 2011–2017, a period of high economic growth.

There has been much discussion around India’s demographic dividend resulting from a faster growth of the working-age population vis-à-vis the total population.

Poverty dynamics encompass the duration of experiencing poverty and elucidate the transitions into and out of poverty. Evidence concerning poverty dynamics is crucial for policymakers in formulating effective anti-poverty strategies. Additionally, healthcare payment significantly influences the dynamics of poverty. Utilizing panel data is pivotal for gaining a deeper comprehension of poverty dynamics. In the absence of such data, this study constructs a synthetic panel dataset by merging two rounds of cross-sectional surveys conducted in Nepal in 2003/04 and 2010/11 to evaluate poverty dynamics. It’s important to note that the incidence of poverty estimated from the hybrid dataset may not be directly comparable to estimations derived from conventional approaches. The findings reveal that chronic poverty, without adjusting for healthcare payment, stood at approximately 21% for both 2003/04 and 2010/11. Furthermore, healthcare payment contributed to a 1% increase in chronic poverty. Movements into and out of poverty, such as transitions from non-poor to poor and vice versa, signify transient poverty. Healthcare payment also influences transient poverty, with payments increasing the transition from non-poor to poor while reducing the likelihood of households moving from poor to non-poor status. Chronic poverty is prevalent across all regions and among marginalized ethnic and Dalit (occupational caste) groups. Tailored anti-poverty policies are necessary to address both chronic and transient poverty. Policies aimed at stabilizing short-term income fluctuations, such as increasing access to credit facilities, services, remittances, and social safety net programs, may be more effective in addressing transient poverty. Conversely, policies focusing on structural or long-term interventions, such as developing basic infrastructure, enhancing social and political inclusion, redistributing assets, and promoting capital accumulation, are imperative for addressing chronic poverty.

The concept of development has matured from being indicative of aggregative progress to being sensitive to inequality and exclusion within the whole, giving rise to the coinage Inclusive Development. While India is doing quite well as a macroeconomic entity, increasing inequality and social tension puts up questions regarding nature of its developmental process and whether it has been sufficiently inclusive. Issues like labour market discrimination, (in)effectiveness of policies like reservation in education and employment, and growing inequality in the country have been flagged by several researchers in recent years. The present paper explores the role of intergenerational stickiness in perpetuating such disparity across social groups in India. Results suggest that though mobility rates are converging across social groups in recent decade, inequalities in basic indicators of human capital and livelihood outcomes are still quite high. It is suggested that the State should focus on providing quality education and skill for all so that livelihood opportunities become universal and inclusive, and the growth process becomes sustainable.

In this paper, it is examined whether inequality in human capital in today’s generations reflects unequal opportunities which individuals inherit from their parents due to their belonging to a particular social group or caste category. To do so, we specifically examine the role of parental education on child's educational attainment. We have taken India Human Development Survey data (2011–2012) in this paper and tried to find out the effect of father’s/mother’s education on the educational attainment level of son/daughter particularly for different social groups, General Caste (GC), Other Backward Castes (OBC), Scheduled Castes (SC), and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India. Intergenerational transfer can be understood in three ways: Persistence (same attainment of education between generations/no improvement), Downward Mobility (if education attainment falls from one generation to another), and Upward Mobility (if education attainment increases from one generation to the other). We focus particularly on upward mobility and persistence because only through these mechanisms human capability formation takes place. We further analyse this upward mobility to identify which pathway (Father-Son/Father-Daughter/Mother-Son/Mother-Daughter) is playing a more significant role in this transfer mechanism, whether father’s education or mother’s education play the same or different role, whether son’s level of educational attainment is the same or different for that of daughter to capture any gender differential in the transfer mechanism.

Public goods provision influences a vast majority of the population in China. It directly affects the quality of life in general and has a strong effect on future socio-economic outcomes, directly affecting the prosperity of the next generation of Chinese citizens. However, the different rural and urban public welfare institutions challenge the public policy goal of inclusiveness. Levels of access to public goods vary a great deal for residents of urban sub-districts and rural villages and there are prominent differences in public goods provision even among urban sub-districts and rural villages across China. This paper investigates the impact of public goods provision on social mobility, particularly on upward intergenerational occupational mobility between 1989 and 2009 in China. This paper utilizes China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) questionnaire data to calculate the upward intergenerational occupational mobility by categorizing occupation hierarchies in (1) from lower to middle or to advanced class and from the middle to the advanced class occupation, and (2) from a non-public to a public occupation. Regression analysis using 60,836 representative household samples covering 9 provinces demonstrates low intergenerational occupational mobility within the study period. The upward intergenerational occupational mobility is reduced annually and in underdeveloped regions, it is lower than in the prosperous regions. Further, our empirical analysis shows that despite the differences in public goods provision (education, hospital/health services, sanitation, tap water, transit services, etc.) between rural and urban regions and the differences across four regions, public goods can facilitate upward intergenerational occupational mobility. However, the difference among sub-districts or among villages matters. Residents with public goods available in their sub-districts or villages experience between 2 and 30% higher upward intergenerational occupational mobility compared to those with limited access to public goods and the difference is starker in rural areas. The findings imply the significance of an equitable distribution mechanism of public goods and its role in achieving a more inclusive society in developing countries in general and China in particular. The local governments should focus more on enlarging the coverage of public-goods beneficiaries at the micro (i.e., household/neighborhood) level than on smoothing the regional gap or rural–urban gap in terms of the total amount of public goods provision at the macro level.

Drawing upon the historical framework in Urban Flood Risk Management: Looking at Jakarta (2022), coupled with new research on current flood mitigation strategies in Jakarta, it explores the implications of various approaches tried but none wholly successful to effectively deal with flooding and overall water management. Kusno’s recent study, Jakarta: City of a Thousand Dimensions (2023), identifies a variety of initiatives proposed or tested to address flooding over the past three decades reflecting the views of experts, politicians, community advocates and development interests. Their conflicting positions have not worked and have engendered a paralysis of action. Simultaneous application of multiple mitigation and adaptation strategies aimed at reducing overreliance on subsurface water and addressing surface water pollution can create a path forward to a healthier and more equitable urban environment.

This chapter deals with the structure of urban inequality and infrastructural violence along the spatial and social dimensions in the cities of Patna and Delhi.

Urbanisation in India has been rapid and largely unplanned. Utilising the GIS and the Census 2011, this paper attempts to visually map the level of urban services and amenities available to the residents of Patna, Bihar. We focus on the key services such as sanitation, drinking water access, health, and housing quality to understand the level of stress on the urban service delivery system. This article also ranks administrative wards in Patna on the basis of availability of urban services using interval ranking scheme. We find huge inequality in the access and availability of services in peripheral areas of the city compared to centrally located wards. We find that areas with low density and higher presence of informal settlements are worse off. Finally, we discuss strategies to reduce the existing inequalities in the urban service delivery system to achieve inclusive development.

Urbanization is a strong indicator of productivity and growth. The world is getting increasingly more urbanized. India has been rather slow to urbanize. However, an aspiring India which has in recent decades demonstrated its potential for high growth cannot remain far behind the rest of the world. Even at the present low level of urbanization, the stresses and strains of urban expansion are being felt acutely. This paper raises some of the issues that pose a challenge to sustainable urbanization. India already has some of the largest urban sprawls in the world, while small and medium category towns are neglected, and newly emerging towns remain unrecognized and uncared for. Urban finances are in poor shape and urban governance is weak. Water supply in the towns is inadequate, sanitation poor and proper urban drainage system in bad shape in big and small cities alike. Urban environment is at great risk. Among many issues of sustainability, this paper particularly focuses on migration, poverty and urban crimes. Urban growth is largely supported by rural to urban migrants. Majority of these migrants are poor. Migrants face many difficulties in the cities. The most important is the problems of housing. They have to live in unhygienic conditions. Migrants face a variety of biases and discriminations. The pressure of limited provision of urban amenities is often blamed on migrants. They are blamed even for creating crime prone environment. Migrants loose family and community support when they move to the city, and quite often they have to leave behind even their entitlements for subsidized food etc. There is no job security in the cities, and in times of crises, they are the worst sufferers. They constitute the majority of the urban poor. The food-centric concepts of poverty are not quite relevant for measuring urban poverty and for identifying the urban poor. Residential, occupational and social vulnerabilities are the defining features of urban poverty. Crime rates are generally higher is urban areas, and crimes rates have been rising over time. Residential mobility, poverty, increasing inequalities, family disruption, lack of informal social control, and population heterogeneity are some of the factors that are suggested as contributing to the urban crime prone environment. Also, the failure of justice system and ineffective policing may be responsible for not keeping the crime rates under check. The situation is India is far from satisfactory in respect of the adequacy of police personnel, their training and their working conditions. While abatement of sociological factors behind crimes requires a sustained social and political movement over a considerable period of time, the quality of governance and policing can go a long way is alleviating the crime situation in the near future.

India’s current urban population is around 377 million, likely to be nearly double by 2030.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) flowing from it. Both, the (earlier) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and SDGs are a part of the larger goal of achieving higher levels of Human Development.