Fixing India’s cities needs cutting the Gordian Knot: Failure, inaction are roadblocks to leveraging urbanisation for good

The Government of India needs to build whole-of-system capacity for urban transformation, ensuring that all urban actors learn about complexity and understand the city as a ‘system of systems’. While all Five-Year Plans tinkered with the urban sector, a radical shift had been made in 1948, when the new Ministry of Health, acting on the recommendations of the ‘Health Survey & Development Committee’ of 1943 chaired by Sir Joseph Bhore, promoted the preparation of ‘master plans’ as a means to improve public health in India’s cities. While most cities already had municipal administrations and improvement trusts, new ‘development authorities’ were established for the purpose of acquiring ‘land banks’, planning them and disposing them through allotment. Despite the existence of development authorities created in the public interest, the actual supply of urban land seldom kept pace with demand, allowing unscrupulous officials and politicians to extract rents from patronage and discretionary access while simultaneously influencing and pre-empting future development through acquisition of cheap farmlands in the unregulated ‘peri-urban’ areas.