Indore's Metropolitan Region: What Three Years of Civic Campaigning Achieved

On 23 September 2024, Nai Dunia carried a report from Gurudwara Dashmesh Darshan in Bairathi Colony under the headline "नई पीढ़ी को मिले सुनियोजित इंदौर, इसलिए तीन वर्ष किया अथक प्रयास" — so that the coming generation inherits a well-planned Indore, three years of tireless effort.

The occasion was a felicitation of members of the Indore Utthan Abhiyan, held by Shri Guru Granth Sahib Vichar Manch and Gurudwara Dashmesh Darshan, marking the state government's approval of a metropolitan region for Indore.

Among those honoured were the campaign's president Ajit Singh Narang, its mentor, senior journalist Kirti Rana, convener S. S. Kutumbale, V. K. Gupta, A. S. Pal, study-group head V. K. Jain, Mahesh Rajvaidya — and, from our practice, Ar. Amit Sethi and, in the newspaper's own words, "अर्बन प्लानर प्रकृति सेठी".

We are writing about it here not to claim credit for a collective effort by many citizens over three years, but because the argument the campaign was making is one worth understanding if you care about how this city grows.

What the citation actually says

The सम्मान पत्र presented that day sets out the demand more precisely than any summary could:

That the new Indore development plan be based on a regional context and on the concept of a metropolitan vision, so that a new, attractive and modern Indore may be handed to the coming generation. For the years of struggle and tireless effort undertaken by you towards this, and for the success achieved, we offer our heartfelt honour.

Note the wording: regional context, metropolitan vision. The campaign was not asking for a project. It was asking for a change in the unit of planning.

What was being asked for

The central demand was that Indore, Ujjain, Dhar and Dewas be planned together as a single metropolitan region, rather than as four separately administered urban areas that happen to be growing towards each other.

Speaking at the event, Dr. Gurmeet Singh Narang noted that members had gone repeatedly to Bhopal to place their study, with supporting facts, before the Chief Minister and senior officials — and that Nai Dunia had published articles by technical experts on the subject for forty-eight consecutive days.

That is an unusual amount of sustained public argument for a subject as unglamorous as regional planning. It is worth asking why it mattered enough to justify it.

Why a region, and not four cities

A city does not stop at its municipal boundary. Its labour market, its freight movement, its water catchment and its housing pressure all spill across administrative lines long before anybody redraws them.

When adjoining urban areas are planned separately, four predictable things go wrong:

• Infrastructure stops at the boundary. A road that is a six-lane arterial on one side of a line becomes a village road on the other, and the whole corridor performs at the weaker standard.
• Land use contradicts itself across the line. Industry is zoned on one side facing housing on the other, and neither authority is obliged to care.
• Investment is duplicated or missed entirely. Two authorities build two undersized facilities where one properly sized one was needed.
• Growth leaks to wherever regulation is weakest, which is rarely where the infrastructure is.

Planning the four together does not merge their governments. It means the land use, the transport network and the trunk infrastructure are drawn on one sheet, at the scale the problem actually occupies.

The most consequential decisions in a city's life are made at a scale most citizens never see — not in what a building looks like, but in where the road goes and what the land beside it is permitted to become.

The harder argument came after the approval

Approval of the region was the beginning of the real work, not the end of it. The next question was who would prepare the plan.

Patrika subsequently reported that members of the Indore Utthan Abhiyan — Ajit Singh Narang, Srinivas Kutumbale, Vishnu Gupta, Mahesh Rajvaidya, V. K. Jain, Gautam Kothari and Amit Sethi — met Divisional Commissioner Deepak Singh with a memorandum objecting to the terms of the tender issued by the Indore Development Authority for appointing a planning agency.

Their objection was specific. The tender invited agencies that had planned cities of around ten lakh population. A metropolitan region formed of Indore, Ujjain, Dhar and Dewas is a substantially larger and structurally different problem. The campaign argued that the eligibility criteria should give weight to agencies with genuine mega-city planning experience, and submitted the names of agencies that had planned major urban development in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

This is the sort of argument that never makes a front page and determines everything. Tender eligibility criteria are where the quality of a plan is really decided — years before anyone sees a drawing. An agency that has only ever planned a city of ten lakh will produce a competent plan for a city of ten lakh, which is not what is being planned.

What we would watch for now

Speaking as planners rather than as campaigners, these are the things that will tell you whether a metropolitan plan is a real instrument or a document:

Does it have a transport spine that is funded? A regional plan whose connectivity depends on projects with no allocation is a wish list. Road and rail capacity between the four centres is the thing that makes a region function as one economy.

Does it protect the land it needs before that land becomes expensive? Rights of way, water bodies, catchment and green wedges have to be reserved early. Once a corridor is built up, no plan can recover it at any price.

Is there a governance mechanism with authority? A plan across four jurisdictions needs a body that can actually decide. Without it, the plan becomes advisory and each authority quietly reverts to its own priorities.

Is it phased against realistic money? Ambition is easy to draw. A plan that is honest about sequence — what happens in the first five years, and with whose budget — is worth more than one that shows everything at once.

Why this belongs on an architecture firm's website

Most of our work is buildings — homes, townships, interiors. But the quality of a building is bounded by the quality of the place around it. You cannot design your way out of a road that was never built, a drain that was never sized, or a plot that was zoned without a thought for what would sit beside it.

That is why one of us is a registered town planner with the Institute of Town Planners India, and why we spend some of our time on questions that will never appear in a portfolio.

Three years of argument by a group of Indore citizens moved a genuinely important decision. That deserves recording, and it deserves following up on — because the plan itself has not been made yet.