# **VI. Census Towns and Access to Basic Services**

As mentioned above, one potential advantage of being an urban settlement concerns the funding available with urban local bodies for the development of urban services. The available literature is again limited on the level of urban services in Census Towns and on the capacity to design, operate and maintain networked services. There are a number of papers comparing variations in services from metro-cities to small towns that show a systematic decrease in the level of basic services as one moves down in the size of towns (Dubey and Gangopadhyay, 1999; Raghupathi, 2005) , with marked inequalities in some specific states, two of them (Bihar and Odisha) of interest to this research (Kundu et al., 1999). Small towns are therefore described as deprived of funds and as suffering from a weak governance capacity<sup>5</sup> . Nevertheless, these papers do not differentiate between CTs and STs. The only available paper that addresses the question that the administrative status plays in service provision in a comparative manner is Mukhopadhyay (2017). He uses a unique constructed data set of matched settlements from two census periods and defines indicators related to access to piped water supply, and improved sanitation and finds limited differences between STs and CTs both in the levels of service and in their growth over 2001-11 (Table 6). But, CTs close to larger towns have better improvements in levels of service.

**Table 6:  Comparison of Census Towns and Statutory Towns for Select Services**

||Level of|amenities i<br>In-|n 2001||Change|in Level of a|menities 200|1-11|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Amenity|Tap<br>Water|house<br>Tap<br>Water|In-house<br>Latrine|Water<br>Closet|Tap<br>Water|In-house<br>Tap Water|In-house<br>Latrine|Water<br>Closet|
|Mean value in<br>Statutory Towns|57.9%|35.9%|59.0%|28.2%|**_5.7%_**|**_5.4%_**|8.0%|28.4%|
|Mean value in|||||||||
|Proximate Census<br>Towns|47.87%|27.96%|66.34%|32.46%|8.15%|7.77%|11.96%|29.38%|
|Mean value in|||||||||
|Other Census<br>Towns|49.20%|32.64%|64.69%|37.72%|4.85%|4.34%|8.84%|23.18%|

Source: Mukhopadhyay (2017),. Proximate CTs refer to CTs that are close to larger towns.

There is an emerging, but still very limited, literature that focuses on some selected CTs, and it comes either from field research or from journalistic coverage.<sup>6</sup> These works provide insights into the low level of services, even in CTs located in the periphery of large metropolitan cities and into some of the governance issues that impact service delivery. The cases of Molachur (50 km from Chennai) and Chakan (30 km from Pune)<sup>7</sup> that benefit from the shift of manufacturing into rural areas highlight the problems raised in rapidly transforming places of the absence of physical and

> 5 See for instance the study of the financial capacities of 29 small towns in 8 states in Shastri (2011). Or of four small towns in Uttar Pradesh by de Bercegol (2012).

> 6 The Mint newspaper carried a series of articles on Census Towns (see below) and a few articles have appeared in other newspapers after the publication of the Census results that showed the large number of new CTs in 2011.

> 7 http://www.livemint.com/Politics/51FuOuvRXWXhxmwRTBMXbN/New-paths-to-urbanization-from-farms-to-factories.html

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