Evolution of Urban Development Policies in India

India’s cities today are a world away from what they looked like in 1947. From a largely rural nation with only about 17% urban population at independence, the country now finds itself preparing for a future where more than half its people could live in cities. How did policy thinking evolve to meet this transformation? The story of urban development in India unfolds across three broad phases, each shaped by the political priorities, economic realities, and governance philosophies of its time.

Why understanding the phases matters 🔗

Urban policy in India has never been static. It has shifted in response to population pressures, economic reforms, and the changing role of cities in the national economy. Looking at these shifts in phases helps us see a pattern: the state has moved from neglecting cities, to recognising them as problems needing management, to finally treating them as engines of growth. Scholars broadly divide the post-independence urban trajectory into three stages, loosely aligned with policy emphasis rather than strict calendar years.

This classification is useful for students of public administration because it shows how institutions, laws, and missions were layered over time. Each phase left behind frameworks that the next phase had to either build on or correct.

Phase I: Independence to mid-1980s – the rural-first years 🔗

When India became independent, the urgent questions of the day were food security, poverty, and the rehabilitation of refugees. Policymakers believed that solving rural distress would automatically take pressure off cities. Urban areas, though growing, were not seen as a priority sector. Planning energy went into agriculture, heavy industry, and village-level development.

The fragmented early approach 🔗

Urban interventions in this period were scattered and issue-specific rather than part of a coherent national vision. The first three Five Year Plans focused largely on housing provision, slum clearance, and rehabilitation, driven by the need to settle partition refugees in cities like Delhi, Kolkata, and Chandigarh. The Second Five Year Plan introduced town and country planning laws and set up planning institutions, which eventually led to rigid Master Plans for several cities.

Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier in 1953, became the country’s first planned post-independence city. Industrial townships such as Bhilai, Bokaro, Jamshedpur, and Rourkela came up as part of the public sector industrialisation push. These were planned administrative and industrial centres built almost from scratch, but they were exceptions rather than the rule.

Why urban issues stayed in the background 🔗

Poverty in this period was overwhelmingly rural. Planners assumed that improving agricultural productivity and setting up large industries would create balanced regional growth. The constitutional distribution of powers also mattered – land, housing, and urban development were placed in the State List, meaning the central government had only an advisory and financial assistance role. The first Urban Development Plan Formulation and Implementation guidelines were circulated to states and union territories in 1966, but there was no dedicated national ministry, no flagship urban mission, and no mechanism to finance large-scale city infrastructure.

By the end of this phase, cities were expanding fast. Slums were mushrooming, municipal bodies were financially weak, and urban services were breaking down – but the policy vocabulary had not yet caught up.

Phase II: Mid-1980s to mid-2000s – recognising the urban challenge 🔗

The second phase marked a clear shift in how the central government viewed cities. Rapid urban population growth, the rise of million-plus cities, and the visible collapse of services in metropolises pushed urban issues onto the policy agenda.

Institutional recognition: a dedicated ministry 🔗

The clearest signal of this shift was the creation of a separate Ministry of Urban Development in 1985. For the first time, there was an exclusive institutional home at the centre for thinking about cities. This marked a departure from treating urban issues as a side-effect of industrial or housing policy.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 🔗

The most transformative reform of this phase was the 74th Constitutional Amendment. It gave constitutional status to urban local bodies and added a third tier to India’s federal structure. The amendment established urban local bodies as the third layer of government, with responsibility for preparing and implementing plans for the development of urban areas. The Twelfth Schedule listed 18 functions that could be devolved to municipalities, from urban planning and water supply to poverty alleviation.

Reserved seats for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and women, along with mandatory elections every five years, were meant to make urban governance more democratic and representative. District Planning Committees and Metropolitan Planning Committees were introduced to coordinate planning across local bodies.

New programmes and new thinking 🔗

During this phase, several programmes targeted specific urban problems – the Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns, the Urban Basic Services for the Poor programme, and the Mega City Scheme for large metros. However, implementation was uneven. Municipal finances remained weak, devolution of functions lagged, and capacity at the local level was limited. Cities were now on the policy radar, but the tools to transform them were not yet fully in place.

Phase III: Mid-2000s onwards – cities as engines of growth 🔗

The third phase was shaped by liberalisation, globalisation, and the growing realisation that cities would drive India’s economic future. The economic reforms of 1991 had unleashed private investment, international capital, and a services-led growth model that depended heavily on urban infrastructure. By the early 2000s, it was clear that Indian cities could not support this growth with their existing roads, water supply, sanitation, and transport systems.

JNNURM: the first big flagship mission 🔗

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission was launched on 3 December 2005 and became the country’s first large-scale national urban initiative. It was introduced with two primary objectives: accelerating planned development and encouraging reform implementation in selected cities. The mission had an initial allocation of around ₹50,000 crore and a duration of seven years, later extended to 2014.

JNNURM had two main sub-missions – Urban Infrastructure and Governance, and Basic Services to the Urban Poor – along with programmes for smaller towns. The Urban Infrastructure and Governance sub-mission focused on water supply and sanitation, solid waste management, road network, urban transport, and redevelopment of old city areas, while the Basic Services component targeted housing and services for the urban poor.

Reform-linked funding – a new approach 🔗

What made JNNURM a turning point was not just the money but the conditionalities attached to it. Cities had to prepare City Development Plans, Detailed Project Reports, and commit to a set of mandatory and optional governance reforms to access funds. The mission introduced 23 required reforms for state and urban local bodies to address structural governance problems, including property tax reforms, double-entry accounting, e-governance, and public disclosure laws.

This was the first serious attempt to use central funding as a lever to modernise municipal governance. Many states enacted community participation and public disclosure laws as part of this push.

The 2014-15 wave: new missions for a new India 🔗

After JNNURM ended, a second wave of urban missions was launched in quick succession, each with a more focused mandate.

The Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) was launched on 2 October 2014. Its three major objectives were achieving 100% Open Defecation Free status, ensuring 100% scientific Solid Waste Management, and driving behaviour change through a ‘Jan Andolan’ by 2 October 2019 in all statutory towns. The mission turned sanitation from a quiet municipal function into a mass movement.

The Smart Cities Mission and the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) were launched in June 2015. AMRUT took a project-based approach. It was launched on 25 June 2015 in 500 selected cities across the country, covering around 60% of the urban population, and focused on enhancing basic infrastructure through water supply, sewerage, drainage, green spaces, non-motorised transport, and capacity building.

The Smart Cities Mission, in contrast, took an area-based approach. Unlike other project-specific missions, the Smart Cities Mission is an area-specific mission that recommends convergence with AMRUT, Swachh Bharat Mission, HRIDAY, Digital India, Skill Development, and Housing for All in its planning. Cities competed for selection through a City Challenge, and successful proposals focused on retrofitting, redevelopment, or greenfield projects combined with a pan-city technological intervention.

Alongside these, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) aimed at Housing for All, the Deendayal Antyodaya National Urban Livelihoods Mission targeted urban poverty, and HRIDAY focused on heritage cities.

The 2.0 generation of missions 🔗

In October 2021, the government launched SBM-U 2.0 and AMRUT 2.0 to consolidate and extend the gains of the first round. These missions were designed to make cities ‘Garbage Free’ and ‘Water Secure’, and to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals 2030. AMRUT 2.0 expanded water supply coverage from 500 cities to all statutory towns and introduced a circular economy approach to water, including recycling of treated sewage and rejuvenation of water bodies.

Connecting the phases: what the story tells us 🔗

Each phase corrects the gaps of the previous one. Phase I set up basic planning frameworks but left cities under-resourced. Phase II gave cities constitutional recognition and a dedicated ministry but lacked the investment and reform push needed to transform them. Phase III brought large-scale funding, measurable targets, and reform-linked conditionalities – but its effectiveness still depends on municipal capacity, fiscal autonomy, and political will at the local level.

A few threads run across all three phases. One is the tension between centralised funding and local autonomy – missions are designed in New Delhi but implemented by municipalities that often lack trained staff and finances. Another is the persistent gap between planned cities and the reality of unplanned urban sprawl. A third is the evolving relationship between the state and the private sector, with public-private partnerships becoming a standard feature in the third phase.

Understanding these phases is less about memorising dates and more about recognising how policy frameworks adapt – or fail to adapt – to the forces reshaping cities.

What do you think? Are India’s current urban missions addressing the structural weaknesses of municipal governance, or are they simply delivering infrastructure without building local capacity? And if you had to design a fourth phase of urban policy, what problem would you put at the centre of it?

References

1. https://blog.mygov.in/editorial/trajectory-of-indias-urban-development/
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/geop09/chapter/process-of-urbanization-in-india-a-colonial-legacy-and-the-post-independence-characteristics/
3. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/urban-planning-its-evolution-india-diptesh-utekar
4. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/jawaharlal-nehru-national-urban-missio/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_National_Urban_Renewal_Mission
6. https://udpa.mizoram.gov.in/page/swachh-bharat-missionurban-20
7. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/amrut-atal-mission-for-rejuvenation-and-urban-transformation-scheme
8. https://indiaai.gov.in/missions/smart-cities-mission
9. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1759593