GUWAHATI, Jan 28 — Assam has created a record of sorts by registering an unprecedented 258 per cent growth in the urban population in the period from 1941 to 1991 as against a national average of just 85 per cent. Interestingly enough, only about 11.10 per cent (24,87,795) of the total population actually live in urban centres as a whole, according to the State Action Plan for Children of 1999. Assam, a predominantly agrarian society with a low level of urbanisation has small towns with a total of 80 municipal bodies and 69 of them elected ones. As most of the towns are small the State can boast of only three class I and five class II towns.
This alarming level of growth of urbanisation has already created a lot of problems for the State. For example, the Action Plan informs that even way back in 1990 there was an estimated shortage of 3,00,000 units of houses which was expected to swell to a massive 7.5 lakh units by 2000. This in addition to the 1.96 lakh houses requiring urgent upgradation in the urban places. Consequently, the sanitation system in urban localities in the State is extremely in a bad shape with only a small percentage of population actually using septic tanks for houses. Except areas falling under armed forces’ cantonments, railways, oil and other townships no urban settlement has sewage disposal systems at all.
Significantly, not a single municipal body has adequate garbage disposal facilities and most of the towns do not have vehicles for dumping solid wastes or garbage disposal. Further, not a single waste processing unit exists as well as no facilities for segregating bio-degradable wastes from other wastes exist. In the field of water supply, the position is still more alarming as just about 20 per cent of urban households have access to piped water and the rest depend upon community taps, hand pumps, open ponds, wells or streams.
Though in the health care sector, curative facilities are available through a number of government and private hospitals the urban poor section still do not have access to them and have to depend upon costly health care institutions. The action plan envisages development and addressing of these problems by institutional strengthening of the urban local bodies and empowerment of the urban poor communities, in several of these fields in collaboration with the UNICEF through its intervention schemes.