India is building cities at speed—but planning them in isolation. That mismatch is quietly becoming one of the biggest constraints on the country’s growth story. For decades, urban policy has treated cities as standalone units—each with its own master plan, infrastructure pipeline, and governance structure. But the economy has moved on, unmindful of city boundaries, and markets have little regard for administrative boundaries.
Urban growth is no longer city-centric; it is now regional. Due to land pressure and congestion, economic activities and housing are increasingly shifting outward towards peripheries, causing urban expansion beyond the recognized administrative boundaries. The land-use plans and infrastructure provisions remain deficient or absent in these areas.
This phenomenon can be observed at two scales:
- One that is restricted to larger city regions or metropolitan regions, serving as an economically viable network linking the core city and a few relatively smaller peripheral urban centres experiencing high growth.
- The other one happens on a larger scale in city pairs, in both spatial and economic terms, sometimes across states.
From Mumbai–Pune to Ahmedabad–Vadodara, and from Delhi–NCR to Chennai–Bengaluru, India’s most dynamic economic zones are no longer individual cities—they are networks of cities. They share manufacturing hubs, labour markets, logistics systems, supply chains, and investment flows. In effect, when woven together, they already function as a single economic region.
Cities today generate a disproportionate share of GDP and jobs and drive innovation, knowledge spillovers, product diversity, and economies of scale due to agglomeration economies—the productivity gains that arise when firms and workers cluster together. However, growth is increasingly regional, spanning multiple cities or growth centres across the region and their hinterlands.
However, planning in India remains fragmented, sectoral, and short-term, mostly confined within administrative boundaries. The result is inefficient urbanisation, congestion in core cities, and underutilised potential in secondary cities. Regional planning enables agglomeration at scale, efficient infrastructure investment, balanced spatial development, and global competitiveness, thereby making urbanisation more productive.
Global examples highlight the importance of regional planning; well-known examples are from Germany, where the framework for regional cooperation helped position the city’s economic regions, such as Hannover, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, on the global economic network. The regional cooperation framework also helped these regions balance their economies with quality of life and ecology.
India’s past attempts at regional planning have struggled due to several structural issues, such as the lack of a regional planning framework and standards, enabling town-planning legislation, and institutional capacity for coordination.
Typically, these plans are initiated by the state housing and urban development departments, with little input or coordination from other important state and para-statal departments.
States like Maharashtra have shown partial success due to stronger regulatory frameworks and regional authorities, but challenges in achieving balanced economic growth and ecological sustainability remain.
In another case, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) expanded its boundaries fivefold, covering almost the entire economic region around Chennai, and undertook the task of preparing master plans for growth centres on the periphery of the metropolitan area.
In 2023, a High-Level Committee on Urban Planning, set up by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MOHUA), also highlighted the need to leverage the economic potential of cities and regions and to adopt regional/economic approaches in urban planning.
In 2024, NITI Aayog identified four economic geographies:
- Surat Economic Region
- Mumbai Metropolitan Economic Region
- Visakhapatnam
- Varanasi
However, in the absence of state-specific regional spatial planning frameworks, it remains unanswered how these plans would be grounded locally.
Within the framework, large-scale projects spanning across the Economic Regions can be prepared and funded under this program. These projects can also be conceptualised and suitably structured as Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to become eligible for the Urban Challenge Fund (UCF).
For the first time, there is a national-level financial instrument that can incentivise states to rethink how cities and regions are planned and governed. Unlike past schemes that focused primarily on project financing, this fund has the potential to reward systemic reform.
This is indeed a step in the right direction.
Global experiences of similar economic geographies clearly suggest that effective regional planning can transform fragmented urban growth into integrated, competitive, inclusive, and productive economic systems.
Thus, to leverage the benefits of the economic geographies, respective state governments must create enabling legislative and institutional frameworks.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
