It is now universally recognised that the progress of man depends upon social planning. Families, cities, economic development, education, in fact, every important phase of social life must be planned to ensure perfect harmony between man and his total environment. It was believed at one time that the human race cannot control and shape its destiny and that men make matters worse by interfering with the natural order of things and the natural scheme of social evolution. Today, this belief is utterly discredited. Already a great deal has been done to adapt the physical environment to man’s needs and to overcome the difficulties created by floods, drought, deserts, hostile climate, niggardliness of nature, vagaries of the weather, fuel shortage and paucity of industrial raw materials. The world today is rapidly changing, more rapidly changing than most of us imagine and are intellectually and morally prepared for. We must learn to plan the change or at least to anticipate the effects of the change and to plan adjustments to them. Till comparatively recently, men lived in village communities, and their culture, mode of living, food and social organisation were adjusted to their surroundings. Modern urban life has produced a new environment, creating new problems of adaptation. Unfortunately, most modern cities are a haphazard growth ; the effects of living in huge cities have not been fully anticipated ; the social, economic and psychological consequences of industrialisation and urbanization have not been fully considered ; and the steps which should have been taken to bring about an adjustment between man and his new environment have not been forthcoming in ample measure. This is particularly true in the case of underdeveloped regions.
The old controversy between town and village life is puerile. Much has been written against urbanization, but the objection really is not to urbanization but to the unplanned drift to the towns from the countryside and to centralisation in industry and administration which has created so many problems of a baffling nature. The critics of urban civilization regard it as representing social decay. They deplore its artificiality, its sophistication, its intellectualism and loss of instinctive activity, its denial of family life and blood ties, its loss of vitality and of the will to live manifested in the decline in birth rate and in the high rate of suicides. They also point to the growing evils of urbanization-juvenile delinquency, prostitution, addiction to alcohol and drugs of the most injurious kind, slums, crimes and suicides. This indictment of urban civilisation is manifestly highly exaggerated on many points and wholly unwarranted on many others. For a balanced view on this question we must take note of two fundamental points. There is no biological or sociological evidence to support the theory of decay. Most of the evils to which the critics of urban civilisation draw attention are not inherent in it but are the result of a lack of social planning and foresight. Urbanization has undoubtedly created many grave social and psychological problems, but it has also many outstanding achievements to its credit.
Life in villages is simple and unostentatious. The luxury of the towns, as seen in the dresses of the people, in the hotels and restaurants, in the various modes of entertainment, in the social ceremonies and in expensive dwellings, provides a sharp contrast to the simplicity, frugality and austerity of village life. People in the countryside are strictly bound by their customs and traditions and by family and communal codes of morality. Individualism is deprecated and deviations from prescribed behaviour are severely frowned upon. The force of custom and tradition is not so strong in the cities and departure from them is quite common. Villagers are generally religious-minded and superstitious because their occupations, such as agriculture and fishing, bring them into intimate relations with Nature and with what they regard as the supernatural phenomenon. The urban people largely living in the man-made environment and, more or less, independent of the vagaries of the weather are less superstitious and less aroused by the religious emotion of awe and fear. They have more confidence in themselves and in the ability of man to shape his environment and mould his destiny. Since the villagers live in a small compact community and generally know one another, their relations are direct, intimate and personal, whereas city-dwellers live in bigger communities and various associations and their relations are impersonal, indirect and lacking in intimacy. The members of a trade union are bound to one another by the ties of a common cause rather than by those of friendship and neighbourhood. In villages social regulation is much easier because of the rigidity of the social mores and the strength of family influence, whereas in towns and cities the impersonal authority of the law and the moral codes of the various associations constitute the restraining influence.
Many factors have contributed to the rapid growth of cities and towns. The most important factor, of course, is economic. In this country agriculture which till recently was organised on primitive lines and is still undergoing a process of rationalisation cannot absorb all available labour. The pressure of manpower on land is very heavy so that most people depending on agriculture for their livelihood can hardly make both ends meet. They are either petty peasantproprietors or tenants or agricultural labourers with only seasonal work and inadequate wages or members of the scheduled castes whose destitution and pitiable plight are hard to imagine. Unemployment and under-employment in rural areas have assumed staggering proportions. Individuals and families migrate to near or distant towns in search of employment and swell their numbers. Had the alien rulers not destroyed the country’s cottage industries and handicrafts, had our system of land tenure not been landlord dominated and had the Government assisted the farmers in making agricultural production scientific, migration of the country people might not have been on such a big scale. Today, the village economy is undergoing rapid development and conditions are being created in which rural pursuits will become viable, but so rapidly is population expanding and so readily are our well-to-do agriculturists taking to agricultural machines and electric power that there is little possibility of rural unemployment being reduced to any appreciable extent save through migration to towns. Cities and towns are centres of trade and commerce. Factories employing thousands of workers are set up in them. It is in cities and towns that courts and universities and colleges are established, films are produced, newspapers are published, radio stations are built, Government offices employing thousands of men and women function, restaurants and hotels are started and thousands of persons cater to the tastes of men and women of fashion. Men of taste who patronise works of art, lawyers, doctors, teachers, artists and intellectuals live in metropolitan or other big cities. Ambitious men determined to make their mark in life make towns and cities the seat of their activity. Migration from towns to villages is insignificant partly because those who are used to the amenities of urban life are reluctant, despite attractive Government offers to induce educated classes to go back to village, to settle in the countryside where civic amenities and modes of entertainment are of a very limited character.
Rapid urbanization has created a very large number of 96 highly complex problems, particularly in underdeveloped or developing countries. A critic has expressed the view that the underdeveloped areas are over-urbanized in the sense that the stage of their economic development does not warrant such urbanization. The paramount need in these areas is that their limited financial resources should be utilised to the maximum possible advantage. If the trend towards urbanization persists, the funds badly needed for investment in productive enterprises may have partly to be diverted to social investment, that is, the provision of civic amenities-water, sewerage, schools, hospitals, houses etc. In a democratic State social investment cannot long be postponed. It is highly desirable that industrialisation should not be highly centralised in the existing big towns. We should aim at a balanced regional development. Of course, in determining the location of industries consideration will have to be paid to the availability of raw materials, labour and power, but unless some areas are to remain permanently depressed, centres of industrial production will have to be widely dispersed. The developing nations have one great advantage over the industrialised States. The latter did not plan their industrial growth, and urbanization took place in them haphazardly, creating innumerable social and economic problems for the Government, industry and labour. The former are in a position to plan the growth of industrial towns. The new towns situated in rural surroundings and providing all civic amenities can become ideal places, with plenty of fresh air, open spaces, hygienic conditions of work, adequate housing facilities, short distances, well-equipped schools and healthy entertainments.
The most noticeable evil associated with over-urbanization is market deterioration in the environment of the city and the appearance of slums. Cities in developing countries become overcrowded partly as a result of the natural increase in population over the decades and partly as a result of the migration of persons from the countryside and small towns where opportunities for gainful employment are wholly inadequate. Large-scale house construction to accommodate the poor worker or the petty tradesman is not possible because he cannot pay high rents which a housing entrepreneur expects. The poor are driven by necessity to living on footpaths or in slums under most intolerable conditions. They have to face the inclemencies of the weather like storms and monsoons or live amidst incredible squalor, dirt and disease. “Mobility from slum to non-slum housing”, as the editors of the book, “ Slums and Urbanization “ Point out in their general introduction, “becomes almost impossible because of the continuing gap between the rent they can afford and the rent that is determined by market conditions”. Had industrialisation been well-planned and had it been obligatory on the part of the employers to build houses for their employees or had the Government acquired land for house construction and set up housing co-operatives for the benefit of the poor, the present intolerable situation would not have arisen. In the new industrial towns which are springing up there is no problem of slum clearance which is so acute in our big cities like Bombay, Madras and Delhi. Slums are a disgrace to the community. They are unfit for human habitation.
Urbanization consequent upon industrialisation in developing nations has not only created slums but also denied to a large section of the people even elementary civic amenities-pure drinking water, underground drainage, hospitals and dispensaries, well-built and well-run schools and pucca roads. Our municipalities alone are not to blame for the present state of affairs. Where over-crowding is already a serious problem, any large addition to population is bound to complicate matters. The law cannot prevent migrations to already overpopulated cities. Article 19 of our Constitution gives every citizen the right to move freely throughout the entire territory and to reside and settle in any part of the country. But the municipal corporations and the Government cannot remain passive spectators of the scene and allow the creation or maintenance of slums and inadequate municipal services and civic amenities. When epidemics like cholera, typhus and malaria break out in a most vicious form, it is not only the slum-dweller but the entire community which suffers. These epidemics spring from slum squalor and over-crowding and poor municipal services. Rural people migrating to big cities find themselves in a wholly alien atmosphere. Before they migrated to large urban areas, they lived in fairly homogeneous groups, had their traditional codes of personal and social behaviour, participated in open-air entertainments, lived amidst their families and were bound by the constraints of convention. In big urban areas, living generally in slums and engaged in occupations of a tedious and dreary character and perpetually haunted by the spectre of unemployment and starvation, the migrants forget their moral or social code, throw away all the restraints which they had hitherto observed and take to crime, drink and prostitution. Not all the efforts to enforce prohibition and abolish prostitution have been able to make any significant impact because no other means of relieving boredom and giving some colour to a drab life exist.
Urbanization has created another vital problem, that of pollution of the environment. According to a biologist, the price of pollution could be the death of man. Pollution is the direct outcome of the application of science and technology to human problems. Man has learnt to turn deserts into fertile lands, harness the forces of Nature for his benefit, add immensely to production in all spheres so that the rapidly growing population may be well-fed, wellclothed, well-entertained and well-provided with all sorts of luxuries and comforts and overcome the gravitational pull of the earth and conquer space. But he has not yet learnt to live in peace with Nature and preserve the balance which has made life possible and given it such richness. We all know that a full-fledged thermo-nuclear war would destroy our civilisation and imperil the very existence of the human race. But we continue to add to the mounting stockpiles of these weapons of mass annihilation and stage atomic tests despite repeated warnings by scientists that these tests would contaminate the atmosphere and make this planet unfit for human habitation, especially most densely populated cities. The increasing use of science and technology in industry and agriculture is playing havoc with both urban and rural environments, but the urban environment is affected much more because most industries are located in the cities and more urban people use cars and other power-driven inventions. The former U. S. President, Nixon, had raised the question of pollution of the environment in a most pointed manner. “The great question of the 70s”, he had asked, “ is: Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water. “ The air is being polluted by all kinds of poisonous gases and fumes from industrial plants and automobile exhausts.
We are passing through a period of acute international anarchy when the great powers are vying with each other to build up huge stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons and other engines of mass annihilation. It may be that the instinct of self-preservation will prevail over suicidal tendencies and mankind will destroy these dangerous weapons ; but there is also the possibility of thermonuclear weapons being employed and the nations having to face catastrophic consequences of their folly.