UPD 2024
Discussions during the 10th edition of UPD will be centred on urban transformation strategies, governance reform, financing of growth-oriented,
resilient infrastructure, land information systems, high performance buildings, social protection, and leveraging sustainability reporting frameworks.
SESSION TITLE: FINANCING GROWTH-ORIENTED RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE
27 November 2024 | 12:15 pm–1:15 pm
Moderator: Manish Dubey, Chief- Practice, IIHS
Infrastructure investments have a powerful multiplier effect on growth and development. This realisation has driven sharp increases in India’s public spend on infrastructure development in recent years. Projections for 2030 suggest that the trend is expected to sustain. Notwithstanding the increased infrastructure investment, there remain areas of concern. One: Infrastructure investments, while sizeable and growing, may be just about half the requirements. Two: The Union and State governments, which have led the investment surge, could be constrained in sustaining their significant contribution in the coming years. Three: There’s a case for reflecting on whether India’s current infrastructure development trajectory has led to the quantum and quality of growth and jobs the country needs to realise. Four: Given India’s existing and emerging climate and disaster risk profile, resilience needs to be more strongly embedded in infrastructure development efforts; else, there’s the prospect of building the India story on a fragile edifice.
In this backdrop, the proposed session will reflect on the following questions:
- Why has private sector interest in infrastructure investment remained low, despite the appeal of infrastructure as an asset class? What lessons can we draw from the experiences in sectors such as roads and renewables, where private sector interest has been more evident and where both foreign direct investment (FDI) and InVITs have found favour? Or are there unique characteristics in the roads and renewables sectors that make their experience difficult to transfer to other sectors?
- What constrains institutional investors, domestic and foreign, and sovereign wealth funds from infrastructure investments in India? What specific enabling measures must we contemplate to unlock these constraints?
- How should resilience be hardwired into infrastructure development planning and execution? Will design and performance specifications, procurement practices, and financial incentives (including treatment of resilient infrastructure as a separate asset class) help?
- How can the infrastructure development agenda be better aligned to growth and job creation outcomes? Are there ways in which infrastructure development plans, configurations on ground, and investment outcomes can be better monitored for growth and job multipliers to be better realised? Is there a case for complementary capital investments and soft interventions to be woven into infrastructure development plans?
SESSION TITLE: REALISING HIGH PERFORMANCE BUILDINGS AT SCALE
27 November 2024 | 2:15 pm–3:15 pm
Moderator: Prasad Vaidya, Senior Advisor, IIHS
High performance buildings (HPBs) are a game-changing opportunity to transform India’s large, rapidly growing, and energy and carbon intensive real estate sector, particularly the commercial segment where energy intensity and carbon intensity is highest. Even if half of India’s projected 2030 commercial building were to be constructed/ retrofitted on high performance principles, the country will, over the 50 year life of these buildings, save businesses over USD 430 billion in energy costs, create 10 million permanent and skilled green jobs, avoid 600 million tCO2-eq of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and help reprioritise USD 1.1 billion of public sector energy investments. Encouragingly, the business and climate case for HPBs has already been demonstrated by Indian industry pioneers.
Yet, despite a range of efforts aimed at addressing regulatory, financing, and capacity gaps in the design, construction, and retrofit of HPBs, beginning with introduction of the Energy Conservation Building Code of India in 2007, HPBs are yet to be realised at the scale needed. This can lock-in massive energy and water inefficiency, high carbon emissions, and a poor living and work environment for millions of Indians in the years to come and calls for renewed effort to translate the opportunity HPBs present for powering India’s emerging green and circular economy.
In this backdrop, the proposed session will reflect on the following questions:
- What are the primary reasons that have held back the scale-up of HPDs, despite evidence that suggests they can be built at little or no additional costs and offer an attractive return on investments and present prospects for leveraging climate finance and ESG investments?
- Are there emerging policy, regulatory, and financing signals that can be leveraged for enabling a decisive market shift? What measures can be initiated to strengthen and complement these signals?
- What lessons do international experiences offer in terms of policy propositions and practices, and how can these be adapted to the Indian context for realising HPBs at scale?
SESSION: LEVERAGING SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING FOR BUSINESSES
28 November 2024 | 11.15 am– 12.15 pm
Moderator: Amir Bazaz, Head- Infrastructure and Climate
Sustainability reporting, where businesses periodically disclose their economic, environmental, social, and governance practices and performance, has gained high currency in business circles in recent years, both within and outside India. This is driven by: policy changes and regulatory requirements that are seized of business’ expanding influence on the environment and society; an improved appreciation among businesses themselves of sustainability as a strong driver of business choices and decisions; and, the potential that reporting on sustainability presents for signaling responsible corporate citizenship, to a range of stakeholder groups.
Sustainability reporting has variedly been guided by initiatives such as Science-based targets, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and most recently within the Indian context, the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework.
Sustainability reporting is known to have offered opportunities for businesses to systematically reflect and strategise better on reporting and disclosure, promising, an improved alignment of business, environmental, and social goals. Yet, there remain concerns around the appropriateness of these reporting frameworks to trigger business decisions. Further, while their quality of reporting has improved, its completeness in terms of coverage, essence, and intent remains an open question.
Unless addressed, these, cumulatively, could undo the promise of sustainability reporting, hurting business performance and worsening the environmental and social circumstances they thrive on in the long run.
In this backdrop, the proposed session will reflect on the following questions:
- How has sustainability reporting evolved in India? How are businesses leveraging it? What has been the experience of operationalising multiple sustainability reporting frameworks?
- To what extent has sustainability reporting in India supported the embedment of sustainability principles in business operations and practices?
- What challenges exist in mainstreaming sustainability as a key business criterion, including challenges arising from gaps in reporting frameworks themselves and capacity gaps both on dimensions of sustainability reporting and leveraging sustainability as a strategic pivot?
- How can sustainability reporting be better leveraged to drive deeper and wider environmental, social and governance impact?
SESSION TITLE: CRAFTING URBAN SOCIAL PROTECTION
28 November 2024 | 12.15 pm– 1.15 pm
Moderator: Gautam Bhan, Head- Human Development, IIHS, Associate Dean- IIHS School of Human Development
India has been building integrated social protection systems across food, pensions, work guarantees, maternity benefits and health. Many of these systems have longer histories and stronger contemporary impacts in rural areas. Delivery of urban social protection has lagged and has been often defined by a ‘rural imagination’. As the COVID-19 experience showed, our cities offer significant challenges of universal access to meaningful social protection and safety nets that than address poverty and vulnerability, and also enable mobility and flourishing.
Designing and implementing urban social protection regimes requires at least two considerations. The first is to examine what social protection entitlements urban residents should have – what is the right social protection package for a transitioning economy? The second is engage with questions of governance, financing, and institutional design and delivery in the context of India’s multi-level governance and fiscal federalism.
The delivery of effective, equitable and sustainable urban social protection entitlements (including to mobile and migrant workers) by ULBs with constrained mandates, inadequate staffing, weak and data systems is a serious challenge to be overcome. The country’s experience of urban social protection varies across State and regional contexts, offering considerable potential for cross-learning from domestic experiences.
In this backdrop, the proposed session will reflect on the following questions:
- What should be the components of an integrated and effective social protection system for urban residents?
- How should this system tackle mobility that is inextricably linked with urban areas as workers and residents move in and out of cities?
- Can urban employment guarantee programmes create effective safety nets for urban workers?
- How can social protection be expanded to create care infrastructure?
- What kind of delivery mechanisms can not only enable rights but reliable and sustainable services?
SESSION TITLE: REALISING URBAN TRANSFORMATION AT SCALE – THE STORY OF TAMIL NADU’S SANITATION
28 November 2024 | 2.15 pm– 3.30 pm
Moderator: Manish Dubey, Chief- Practice, IIHS
The Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Programme (TNUSSP) is among the largest local clean water and sanitation (SDG6) implementation programmes in the world. With the ambition of scaling urban sanitation through decentralised sanitation systems across 650 towns and cities in Tamil Nadu, it has already reached a population of 18 million, making it a rare global example of a decentralised service delivery system that has been scaled across the rural-urban continuum for an entire State/ region.
Implemented over eight years, starting 2016, the TNUSSP’s transformative effect has been enabled through empowered multi-level governance, institutional strengthening and regulation, enterprise development, technological innovation, digital support and extensive behaviour change and communication. Its multi-dimensional approach has been successfully institutionalised in Tamil Nadu’s public agencies and programmes, from the State government to urban and rural local bodies.
With the TNUSSP reaching its scheduled phase-out in 2025, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on its journey. The panel will bring together a diverse set of stakeholders for the panel across government, donor, community members, and implementors to understand the lessons that the TNUSSP experience holds for those contemplating scalar transformations, in other urban domains and contexts.
