Making sense of India's spatial plan-making practice: Enduring approach or emergent variations?

Abstract

India's Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) mandated “participation” while sponsoring the development plans for 63 select cities. Whom did the planners identify and engage as “stakeholders” in so many different places responding to the same national goals and requirements? We evaluate the reports and accounts of participation within the plan documents in order to compare variations in India's plan-making practice. We classify the plan-making efforts by interpreting the variation in relation to evidence about who the planners involved and using which methods, and to what extent. Grounding the investigation in the literature of post-independence spatial planning uncovers meaningful variations from the elite driven centralized planning model, including the emergent involvement of local actors. The paper concludes with an exploration of the future implications associated with this type of transformation for practice-oriented research in urban India and other developing contexts.

Keywords:

• spatial plan-making
• India's planning practice and literature
• plan evaluation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the journal's editors Heather Campbell and Aidan While and the three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions. None, of course, are responsible for such errors of commission or omission that remain. We would also like to thank the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago for assigning the following graduate students as research assistants: Elizabeth Felter, Haytham Abdul Rahman Abu Zayd and Irwing Gama. Without their enterprising help and enthusiasm for spatial plans, this research would not have been possible.

Notes

1. Several insightful and in-depth studies examining the meaning and purpose of “participation” in different domains of planning policy across India's varied geography are now available. See, for instance, Williams, Thampi, Narayana, Nandigama, & Bhattacharyya (2011) for a study of Kudumbashree, the participation-based poverty eradication mission in the southern state of Kerala, and Shepherd (2006) for a study of village-level environmental planning and collaborative management effort in the Himalayan foothills.

2. Here, it is important to point out that we do not agree with those positions and perspectives that conflate spatial plans with governance. We posit that plans offer advice and do not govern, although ruling elites in many parts of the world including India arguably try to use spatial plans as tools of governance often for parochial and self-serving purposes. We argue that spatial plans and the craft of plan-making provide the practical ground for conceiving purposeful change, but not for making that change happen. In this line of thinking, plans can help people conceive ways together to integrate differences and adapt to shifting concerns for different places and contexts (see Hoch, 2007).

3. The fact that several states such as Meghalaya, Mizoram and Uttaranchal are comparatively new, created by breaking up older states with large populations or due to the demands for autonomy of ethnic groups, also compounds the historically informed differences. In a similar vein, the ongoing insurgency of “Naxalite” guerrillas, or militant communist groups, affects many eastern and southern states such as Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh, exacerbating the existing regional disparities.

4. It is important to acknowledge that in mapping different plan-making approaches along the dimensions of “breadth” and “depth” across 63 CDPs, we are not in a position to look in depth at the particular political, economic and social circumstances of each case. Moreover, the lack of on-the-ground interviews and discussions with the local actors limits what can and cannot be said in confidence about the participatory styles of different CDPs. We, however, hope that this preliminary effort to sketch out a broad outline of India's plan-making practice would inspire further studies exploring the distinctiveness/complexity/plan-making culture of different cities.

5. K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who retired as Secretary, Urban Development to the Government of India, offers an insider view of the bureaucratic process involving the program conceptualization and the selection of 63 cities (later increased to 65 cities with the potential of further expansion in future). He also explains JNNURM's institutional framework and the “turf war” between the concerned central ministries over program administration and implementation (Sivaramakrishnan, 2011).