Population and provisioning of civic amenities in urban local bodies of West Bengal, India

Abstract

In the face of increasing urban population ULBs are facing the challenge to provide necessary civic amenities to them. In this paper our objective is to examine the relationship between municipal population and municipal facilities. The work is empirical in nature. Secondary sources of data were used. To identify the presence of a latent structure within the facilities. Taking some selected municipal facilities into consideration wide variations are identified in West Bengal. It appears that the variation is not due to differences in size and population of ULBs but also due to various levels of provisioning of municipal facilities. The relation between municipal facilities and municipal population is high in large ULBs i.e. Kolkata and Haora. The relation was poor for other ULBs excluding Kolkata and Haora. It implies that the desired provisioning of municipal facilities is restricted only in large ULBs in West Bengal. We may also argue that provisioning of municipal facilities is not satisfactory in response to population growth in West Bengal.A group-wise analysis of municipal population and municipal facilities also highlights an unsatisfactory performance of ULBs in most of the cases. The facilities are found to increase with population in absolute terms but the performance of ULBs is very poor when considered in terms of population coverage of each facility. The only exception is found in the case of solid waste management. We get a different result when population is compared with overall provisioning of municipal facilities. In this case populations of ULBs are found to be highly correlated with overall provisioning of municipal facilities. However ULBs are not being able to expand infrastructural facilities at the individual level in the face of increasing municipal population.