Dr. Prasanth Vardhan

Urban Land Management; Municipal Finance; Urban Renewal and Redevelopment; Urban Open Spaces; Land Development Models

Multi-Criteria Decision Models; Spatial Statistics; Municipal Finance Assessment; Service Level Benchmarks; PIP and GIS

Public Land Optimisation and Land Value Capture Assessment for Urban Infrastructure Development

n many developing and developed counties, public land assets have become one of the legitimate local sources for municipalities to finance capital investments related to urban infrastructure. Often, the magnitude of revenues realised through public leasehold land have surpassed the tax revenues. Not only the physical land, but also the development rights and expected market value appreciation of public lands have directly or indirectly helped municipalities to raise significant capital from the market sources. It is estimated that 40 percent of the total population in India will reside in urban areas by 2031 and municipalities with less than one million population play a key role by accommodating the maximum population between 2001 and 2031. Ensuring the minimum standards in these Small and Medium municipalities with basic services become important planning mandates and require special attention on fiscal stability, and also to help in realization of economic potentials. Despite the reported poor condition of municipal finances, the current policy regime is seeking to improve the efficiency, i.e., increase the share of own revenues by exploring alternative sources with a higher emphasis on land monetization. However, a clear methodological framework for assessing the potentials of public land assets and the efficiency of municipalities with land monetization is a research gap in India. As compared to other financing options, monetization of public land is within the functional domain of local governments and allows opportunities to realize value capture for productive urban infrastructure investments. The experiences on monetization of public lands assets and its revenue generation capacity have drawn scholarly attention nationally and internationally in the recent past but limited to metropolitan cities, and no attempt is being made to assess the potential of public land assets in lower order municipalities. In this respect, my phd research has tried to assess the status of municipal finances and public land revenues of Small and Medium municipalities in Andhra Pradesh and based on the findings, a detailed investigation has been carried out for the study area, Guntur Municipal Corporation. Overall, this study aims to determine the status of public land ownership, identifies the control variables of public leasehold system, and the potentials of existing public lands through optimization method. This research study employed a linear programming model incorporating the constraints enforced by the state government to assess the potentials of public lands for urban infrastructure capital investments. Based on the historical trends, assumptions, and inferences, plausible scenarios on revenue optimization were formulated.

Urban Greens financing in Indian cities