Why Urban Planning Belongs at the Top of a City Budget, Not the Bottom

In February 2025, Nai Dunia ran a campaign called "बजट से उम्मीदें" — expectations from the budget — asking what Indore most needs funded. The report by Prem Jat carried the headline "मास्टर प्लान की सड़कें अधूरीं, देरी से प्रभावित हो रहा नगर नियोजन": master plan roads incomplete, town planning affected by the delay.

I was asked to comment, and what I said then is worth setting out at greater length, because the argument is easy to state and easy to lose.

If metropolitan cities are built on the basis of a complete urban planning equation, they can become the GDP growth engines of the future. In the budget, connectivity — road and transportation infrastructure — must be resolved first, on a priority basis. Only then can we open a path to raising the incomes of city residents. Urban planning is a critical factor among a city's primary needs, and ignoring it in the budget causes the city long-term damage. Government should give first priority to spending on the planned development of the city. We will see the result in the form of a rising happiness index. — as quoted in Nai Dunia, 23 February 2025

What the report was describing

Indore is the most developed city in Madhya Pradesh and is known nationally for its sanitation record and its smart city work. The report's point was that in recent years the pace of town planning and development work has slowed for budgetary reasons, and that the gap shows in specific, locatable places:

• The master plan's principal roads have not been built. With MR-11 and MR-12 incomplete, the maximum vehicle load falls on MR-10. MR-3 and MR-4 also remain unfinished for want of budget.
• Super Corridor development work is incomplete, with further spending announced to finish it.
• The twenty-nine villages brought inside the urban limit still lack basic services, even as new colonies have developed around them.
• Railway overbridges, and water and sewerage lines in outer areas, remain partially done.
• Bridges, flyovers and underpasses under the smart city project await completion, and the metro has slipped.

Read that list again and notice what it has in common. None of these are exotic projects. They are the ordinary skeleton of a city — and each unbuilt piece transfers its load onto a piece that was built.

The compounding cost of a road not built

MR-10 carrying the traffic intended for MR-11 and MR-12 is not simply an inconvenience. It is a cost, paid daily, by everybody:

It is paid in time. Every hour spent in avoidable congestion is an hour not worked, not spent with family, not spent anywhere productive. Multiply by a city.

It is paid in fuel and in air. Congested movement burns more per kilometre and deposits the difference in the lungs of the people living along the corridor.

It is paid in land value that never materialises. A planned road raises the value and the productive use of everything along it. Until it is built, that value simply does not exist — and the public investment that would have captured part of it is never recovered.

And it is paid in the cost of building it later. A right of way that is protected but empty is cheap to build on. The same alignment, after a decade of construction pressing against it, costs multiples more in acquisition, in compensation and in political difficulty. Sometimes it becomes impossible, and the city loses that connection permanently.

That last point is the one that makes planning genuinely urgent rather than merely desirable. Most infrastructure decisions get more expensive the longer they are deferred, and some expire.

A second view, worth taking seriously

The same report carried Jagdish Mahadev Dagaonkar, former City Engineer of the Municipal Corporation, making a different and complementary argument.

His point was that development plans have consistently been drawn without the money to deliver them, so the master plan never fully reaches the ground — and traffic and environmental problems follow. A plan should be accompanied by its funding arrangement in the budget, and public–private participation can close part of the gap. He cited precedent: between 2000 and 2005, roads worth some ₹80 crore were built in the city through public participation, with residents contributing cement, steel and other material where roads were being laid. He also noted that the sewerage and drainage system was never upgraded, which is why roads are dug up repeatedly and why waterlogging turns severe every monsoon.

I would add one caution to it, from a planner's side. Public participation works well for the last hundred metres — a street, a drain, a park. It works poorly for a trunk arterial or a regional corridor, because those need land assembled across many owners and a decision taken at a scale no neighbourhood can convene. Both instruments are needed, and it matters that each is used where it fits.

Why "growth engine" is not rhetoric

The claim that a well-planned metropolitan region becomes a GDP growth engine has a mechanism behind it, and it is worth being precise about it.

Cities are productive because they put large numbers of people, skills, suppliers and customers within reach of each other. Economists call this agglomeration. Its benefits are real and measurable — but they are entirely dependent on reach, and reach is a function of the transport network.

A city where a worker can access a large share of the region's jobs within a reasonable commute has a deep, liquid labour market. A city of the same population where congestion cuts that reach in half behaves, economically, like a much smaller city. Same people, same land, far less output.

This is why connectivity comes first in any honest ordering of priorities. It is not that roads matter more than schools or water. It is that the transport network determines how much of the city every other investment can actually serve.

The happiness index point

I ended that quote with the happiness index deliberately, because it is the part that usually gets treated as decoration.

The daily experience of a city — how long you sit in traffic, whether your street floods in the monsoon, whether there is a park within walking distance, whether the air is breathable — is not a soft outcome. It is the outcome. GDP is a means. Nobody has ever wanted a higher regional product for its own sake.

And nearly all of those daily experiences are determined by planning decisions taken years earlier, by people the resident will never meet, in documents they will never read.

What a good planning budget looks like

If I were arguing for a specific ordering, it would be this:

1. Complete what is half-built. A partly built network delivers a fraction of its benefit. Finishing MR-11 and MR-12 unlocks value that has already been paid for.
2. Protect the rights of way you will need in twenty years, before they are built over. This is the cheapest money a city can spend and the easiest to postpone.
3. Service the areas already brought inside the limit. Twenty-nine villages inside the urban boundary without basic services is a commitment the city has made and not honoured.
4. Then build the new.

The temptation in every budget cycle is to fund what is visible and announceable. Reserving a corridor that will not carry traffic for fifteen years does not open with a ribbon.

But cities are built by people who accept that the most valuable thing they can do will be credited to somebody else, much later. That is the job. A budget that understands it is what separates a city that grows well from one that merely grows.