India aims to become a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its independence. Urban development is one significant pillar of this push. I jot down some links and notes from a short engagement with the subject.
There does not appear to be a central document outlining the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, but the Indian government’s main think tank NITI Aayog has taken an outsize role in the intellectual work around the topic. A representative example is this paper by Arvind Virmani.
I am interested in the urban aspects of this plan. I recall India’s Smart Cities Mission, which ran from 2015-2025 and focused on 100 cities and select projects. Viksit Bharat 2047, meanwhile, is nationwide and holistic. Urban development is seen as part of a broader national agenda. This will necessitate changes in the way long-term urban planning is carried out in India. Mumbai is, as usual in these matters, a trailblazer.
Although the city and city region are not short on master plans, the September 2024 G-Hub report is a step up from prior initiatives due to its sheer scale and concrete governance initiatives, particularly the creation of several new governance bodies (possibly adding to the city’s complex urban governance regime). It really represents a synthesis of economic and urban planning, something that the ADB has found is missing from most urban planning documents in other, smaller Indian cities.
It is now likely that this type of integrated urban planning will increasingly be carried out here, in second and third tier cities, which are already the main locus of India’s urban transition. What then are the features of this new approach to urban planning?
This ADB has distilled five main areas that must be addressed in this report. They can all be identified throughout the Mumbai report. (I note that there is a newer, more complete report available here, with several city profiles.)
Integrated economic vision and planning: 10-15-year horizon; identifying thematic priorities; infrastructure requirements; action plan
Policies, regulation and promotion of investments: Promotion and marketing board for cities; city promotion councils; automated approval mechanisms
Integrated master planning regarding land use and infrastructure planning: Demarcating the larger urban region; inter-agency coordination; short-term milestones; cluster-based planning mechanism
Land supply and development regulations: Digitize land records systems; invite PPP or private investors for landbank developments; alternative land acquisition; relaxation of building bylaws
Affordable and organized housing for workers: Incremental in-situ upgrading of low-income housing stock; alternative models for rental housing (build to rent), rental housing vouchers
Formulating an economic vision for second and third tier cities is important. Their role in India’s urban future cannot be overestimated. It is expected that they will account for about two thirds of all incremental urban growth from now. Housing has to be provided, jobs created, all the while social and physical infrastructure needs to keep up with this growth.
Viksit Bharat 2047 will have to succeed in tier 2 and 3 cities.
However, smaller cities will struggle with coming up and implementing these long term plans for various reasons: They have limited institutional capacity and often even more fragmented institutional frameworks than tier 1 cities.
They are poorer, and hence lack the revenue capacity required to enact large-scale infrastructure projects. Infrastructure is often already in even worse shape than in the bigger cities, making smaller cities even more ill-equipped to absorb migrant labor.
Given the size of this field, there are plenty of issues to pick and dissect for a critical review.
Most basically, top down planning comes with its own pitfalls. Seldom are plans dynamic enough to account for various future pathways, with new emerging technologies or other external shocks shifting the model parameters significantly.
Private sector capital deployment does not per se increase the efficiency of urban development but can instead lead to rent seeking and oligopolistic market structures, particularly in housing and infrastructure.
Small and medium size enterprises are often an external variable in these plans, when in fact they represent the lion share of local employment and are crucial for equitable growth.
More importantly, there appears to be no inbuilt public consultation process in these new planning frameworks, which raises the issue of “post political planning” (also something I wrote on here). Long-term planning decisions are delegated to expert fora, avoiding the messy politics of competing and overlapping jurisdictions.
These plans are too big to voice any meaningful dissent, but if one does oppose them one is easily singled out as being anti-development. While post-politics is quintessentially technocratic in form, its branding is often exploited and branded politically, at the local and national level.
Stakeholders are mainly from the public and private sector, with little representation of civil society in these deliberations. As for the Mumbai report, there is no mention of formal public participation, and there is no explicit procedure for making the plans and underlying data available.
The new and complex governance arrangements, often cutting across administrative boundaries, can disenfranchise population groups in areas affected by the plan. Many of these issues are already prevalent in India and elsewhere of course, but master plans can exacerbate these conflicts.
This is an exciting field, and hopefully it will have more people engage with urban futures in India. I’m sure that if I dive more deeply into this, a much richer picture will emerge.
