India Is Urbanising Faster Than It Is Planning, and the Bill Is Coming Due

Every year, without fail, some part of Bengaluru's technology corridor floods after a few hours of heavy rain, stranding commuters in waist-deep water outside campuses that host some of the country's most valuable companies. Commentary after each such event tends to focus on immediate causes, encroached stormwater drains, or a particularly intense rainfall event attributed to climate variability. These explanations are not wrong, but they understate a more basic truth: Bengaluru's flooding, like similar recurring crises in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, is substantially a planning failure decades in the making, in a country whose cities are growing far faster than the institutions meant to plan them are able to keep pace.

India's urban population has grown from roughly 290 million at the 2001 census to well over 400 million today by most demographic estimates, with urban residents projected to constitute closer to forty percent of the population within the coming decade. A meaningful share of this growth, however, has not occurred through the extension of planned, serviced urban areas but through the organic sprawl of what planners call peri-urban development, villages and semi-rural settlements on a city's fringe that gradually densify into de facto urban areas without ever being formally incorporated into a master plan, brought under municipal governance, or connected to planned water, sewerage and drainage infrastructure.

The lakes Bengaluru built over

Bengaluru's flooding problem is a particularly well-documented instance of this pattern. The city historically relied on an interconnected network of several hundred lakes and tanks, originally built to manage the region's seasonal rainfall and support agriculture, that also served the incidental function of natural stormwater storage. As the city expanded rapidly from the 1990s onward, driven by the growth of its technology sector, a substantial number of these lakes were encroached upon, built over or converted into layouts, often with the tacit or explicit approval of local authorities eager to accommodate demand for real estate, before formal environmental and planning safeguards caught up with the pace of construction. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have documented, using satellite imagery over multiple decades, the steady shrinkage of Bengaluru's wetland and lake area even as built-up area expanded, a direct and measurable link between planning failure and the flooding the city now experiences with each monsoon.

This is not unique to Bengaluru. Chennai's 2015 floods were linked by several independent studies to encroachment on the Pallikaranai marshland and the Adyar and Cooum river floodplains, areas that had historically absorbed excess monsoon water. In each case, the pattern is similar: natural drainage capacity is degraded by unplanned or under-regulated construction, often over a period of two or three decades, and the consequences surface abruptly during an unusually heavy rainfall event that a well-preserved natural drainage system would likely have absorbed without incident.

The 74th Amendment's incomplete promise

The constitutional framework for addressing this exists and has existed for three decades. The 74th Constitutional Amendment, passed in 1992, was intended to devolve real planning, financial and administrative authority to urban local bodies, municipal corporations and municipalities, giving cities the institutional capacity to manage their own growth, including subjects such as urban planning, land use regulation, water supply and slum improvement that the amendment's Twelfth Schedule explicitly assigned to them. In practice, most state governments have devolved these functions only partially, retaining control over urban planning and land use through state-level development authorities, such as the Bangalore Development Authority or the Delhi Development Authority, that operate with limited accountability to elected municipal councils and often with planning horizons and priorities shaped by state political considerations rather than a city's own governance needs.

This has produced a peculiar governance vacuum in many Indian cities, where the elected municipal corporation, nominally the primary urban government, lacks meaningful authority over land use and planning decisions, while the state-appointed development authority that does hold that authority is not directly accountable to city residents through local elections. Fragmented authority of this kind, split across multiple parastatal bodies for water supply, planning, transport and pollution control, each reporting through different state government departments, makes coordinated urban planning extremely difficult even when individual agencies are competent and well-intentioned.

Unauthorised colonies and the informal city

A second, related dimension of the same problem is visible in the scale of unauthorised or unplanned settlement across Indian cities. Delhi alone has, by various government estimates over the years, well over a thousand unauthorised colonies housing a substantial share of the city's population, settlements that grew without formal planning approval and have since been retrospectively regularised, often for electoral reasons, without ever being brought up to the infrastructure standard a planned colony would have had from the outset. Regularisation in these cases functions as an acknowledgment of a governance failure rather than its correction, granting legal status to a colony's residents without necessarily providing the underlying drainage, sewerage or water infrastructure a planned settlement would have included from the start.

What the strongest defence of the status quo gets right

It is worth acknowledging the strongest counter-argument to this critique, which is that Indian cities have absorbed genuinely enormous population growth, driven substantially by rural distress and the search for economic opportunity, under severe fiscal and administrative constraints, and that some degree of informal, unplanned growth is arguably preferable to the alternative of excluding migrants from urban opportunity altogether through overly rigid planning regimes, as some East Asian cities have historically done. Indian cities have, in this reading, prioritised inclusion over order, a defensible choice given the scale of rural-to-urban migration the country has experienced. There is real force to this argument, and rigid planning regimes elsewhere have often produced their own injustices, excluding the poor from cities through zoning and permit systems designed to keep land values high for existing residents.

But inclusion and planning are not inherently in tension; the choice India has actually made has too often been inclusion without the infrastructure investment that would have made that inclusion sustainable, leaving both new and long-standing urban residents to share the consequences of drainage systems, water networks and public transport that were never sized for the population now depending on them. Fixing this will require the harder, slower work the 74th Amendment envisioned but state governments have resisted: empowered, adequately financed municipal governments with genuine authority over planning and land use, coordinated with rather than subordinated to state development authorities, and a willingness to treat urban infrastructure investment as being as urgent as the visible crises, a flooded IT corridor, a dry municipal tap, that periodically remind Indians their cities were never quite planned for the size they have become.