ROLE OF PUBLIC FINANCE IN INDIA

ABSTRACT

While the thrust of urban policy in India has been on the metropolitan centres, the current state of public infrastructure and service delivery in India’s small and medium cities is, if anything, even more alarming than that in the larger ones. The central question that therefore confronts us, in the context of cities both big and small, is this: How can cities sustainably finance the development of public infrastructure to ensure service delivery that conforms to the laid-out benchmarks for all citizens in the next fifteen years? This article argues that in order to meet this challenge, Indian cities will need to increasingly generate higher levels of own source revenue and efficiently use market based financing mechanisms to ensure minimum levels of service delivery.

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