New Delhi: In the two decades when India urbanised at an unprecedented pace and cities came face to face with infrastructural collapse and governance deficit, an ambitious university conceived to find solutions stayed in suspended animation. Funds flowed in from some of India’s biggest industrialists—Nandan Nilekani, RK Damani, Hemendra Kothari, Jamshyd Godrej, Uday Kotak—who recognised the massive inaction on urban planning, but the Indian Institute for Human Settlements couldn’t set up its 21st-century urban transformation university, the first of its kind in Asia.
It had money, top-notch faculty, a curriculum, and a 54-acre residential campus, but it couldn’t award degrees or scale up teaching. Then last month, the skies finally opened and a rainbow appeared, literally
On the drizzly afternoon of 26 August, IIHS (Institution Deemed to be) University was inaugurated after getting recognition from the University Grants Commission earlier this year. With infectious glee, cries of “Congratulations!” and “Finally!” rang out in corridors and the canteen. “It’s happening at last!” one staffer cheered as she hugged her colleagues.
“Our 16-year-long vanvas is over. All our hard work has paid off,” vice chancellor Aromar Revi told the first cohort of 90 students of the IIHS (deemed-to-be) University, who came from all over the country. “While we were waiting for you,” he reminded them, IIHS was already a national institute that had worked with 1,500 towns and cities and left a footprint in every state. So far, it has been based out of a network of four buildings in Bengaluru’s upscale Sadashivanagar locality.
In the 2000s, the biggest struggle of building a curriculum on India’s rapid urbanisation was that there was no literature from India. It was all from outside. But over the last 15 years, we have built a wealth of research material from India
-Aromar Revi, founding director of IIHS
Now, the institute—with Padma Vibhushan awardee and former chairman of the XIII Finance Commission Vijay Kelkar as its chancellor—is starting with a doctoral programme and four interdisciplinary postgraduate courses to train the people who will run the cities of the future: transport planners, sanitation experts, climate-sensitive architects, urban designers, municipal officers.
Much before Ashoka University was even conceived, IIHS was the chosen university nurtured by India’s top business minds. It was meant to rewire how policymakers, academics, and students thought about cities and governance—and to cultivate a new crop of urban experts. It was a pivot from the Gandhi-inspired village-orientation in Indian politics, which left urban centres buckling under garbage mountains, waterlogging, traffic congestion, over-concretisation, and potholes.
Over the last few decades, rural India urbanised rapidly and cities burst at their seams, but politicians and policymakers, still wedded to the idea of rural “Maximum India”, were slow to catch up. The urban labour force spiked from 57 million to 93 million between 1983 and 2000. From 23 cities with over a million people in 1991, the number rose to 35 in 2001 and 53 as of 2011. It is now projected that by 2030, more than 40 per cent of India’s population will live in urban areas, up from 27.8 per cent in the 2001 Census. Through all this, there was no truly effective policy or framework to steward this growth.
It was in this vacuum that IIHS was born in 2008. Cities were promising to open a new chapter for India, yet were utterly clueless on how to prepare for the challenges of urbanisation. IIHS was envisioned as a beacon—it would fill a gaping hole in Indian education and bring the interdisciplinary imagination needed to build 21st-century Indian cities.
“Until JNNURM [Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission] 2006, there really was no urban-centric policy in the country. And that didn’t work too well. All our attention was on rural India. The urban story was being ignored. IIHS was born at a time when it badly needed attention and care,” a former founding member said on the condition of anonymity.
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A ‘contrarian’ approach
With several top industrialists on its board, money was never a problem. From the beginning, a motley crew of practitioners and academics was handpicked to build a one-of-a-kind interdisciplinary institute.
For the core team, Kavita Wankhade, an architect by training, was roped in from the London School of Economics and is now working as head of Practice (governance and Services). Amlanjyoti Goswami, with a BA in sociology and LLM from Harvard University, would go on to lead the legal and regulation team. Gautam Bhan, a sociologist and urbanist with a PhD from Berkeley, has been working as lead (Academics and Research) and is also the associate dean of the IIHS School of Human Development.
“Most of our faculty has a minimum of two interdisciplinary degrees. We took a contrarian approach while building our core team. While we could have hired many senior people, they had been trained in a disciplinary manner,” said Revi. “Most of IIHS’ core team members are now in their 40s and 50s, with interdisciplinary training and teaching methods. Because of this we’re able to build such an institute.”
For 16 years, Revi and his colleagues waited for deemed university status so they could have the autonomy to develop their own curricula. It was a strategic long game.
Deemed-to-be universities have far more flexibility over syllabus, admission criteria, and programme design than state universities, which must follow mandates set by state governments and the University Grants Commission (UGC). Any change in curriculum at a state university typically requires slow-moving approval from authorities.
Our first level of impact has been on the global stage where some of the leading and most adhered to governance covenants have been shaped by us
-Manish Dubey, chief (Practice programme) at IIHS.
Under UGC guidelines, most applicants for deemed status must have an A grade from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) or rank in the top 100 of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). But IIHS applied under a special provision.
“An existing institution or an institution starting from the beginning with the focus on teaching and research in unique disciplines and/or addressing the strategic needs of the country… will be considered under ‘Distinct Institution’ category. Such Institutions will be exempted from eligibility criteria,” UGC guidelines say.
Over the last decade and a half, IIHS was just at the precipice of getting the university tag. But the dream was repeatedly stalled by eventualities—some political—that university officials didn’t wish to discuss on record.
Meanwhile, designing the academic programme—down to building the knowledge to do so—was a painstaking process, given the gaps in India’s urban planning frameworks. Revi refers to the 1990s and early 2000s as a “lost decade”.
“India has the Gandhian idea that growth won’t come from its cities, that they’re just where rich elites live. After liberalisation, there was a strong focus on the energy, road, and power sectors, but work on urban issues as a whole took a backseat. Resources for cities were discretionary,” he said, adding that the “shock” of liberalisation and a series of coalition governments didn’t help matters. “Revival came only after a whole set of reforms were introduced by the Manmohan Singh government.”
But whether it was the Manmohan or Modi years, IIHS wasn’t sitting idle. It was at the table during some of the most important global and Indian policy decisions. It helped shape Sustainable Development Goal 11 for making cities climate resilient, mapped post-pandemic recovery for Indian cities, and assisted during the division of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana by working on its integrated development, infrastructure, and financing plan. It has also been a key implementation partner for flagship central schemes like Har Ghar Nal se Jal and Swachh Bharat Mission.
Beyond policy contributions and fieldwork, IIHS has produced knowledge at scale. It has published over 1,500 research papers and publications—on subjects like nature-based urban water security, retrofitting buildings for heatwaves, and unequal risks of flooding to migrant populations in Bengaluru. These have been cited in more than 91,000 academic publications worldwide.
“In the 2000s, the biggest struggle of building a curriculum on India’s rapid urbanisation was that there was no literature from India. It was all from outside. But over the last 15 years, we have built a wealth of research material from India,” Revi said. “Most professors have worked on that research and they’ll be able to teach from experience.”
Hands-on urban planning
On a humid Tuesday afternoon, the new cohort sang the national anthem on the opening day of the university, surrounded by the sprawling campus’s urban forest.
The university’s infrastructure reflects the IIHS ethos. This isn’t a typical flashy private campus with tall glass buildings or food courts with burger joints. Instead, the buildings are inspired by traditional Karnataka architecture, interwoven and set within a landscape that includes a lake, urban wetlands, and dense greenery. There’s even an “experimental kitchen” for a “grow, eat, cook” foundational course.
At the inauguration, Revi didn’t unveil a model of the university campus. He unveiled a rare copy of the Constitution of India.
“Our campus will become one of the most remarkable places in the country,” Revi said. “The first thing we built for our students were ecosystem services. We don’t have to source water from the city. We have our own solar power grid. Buildings have been designed to reduce electricity use. The campus is a living lab—students will live in, test, and manage it.”
I wanted to do better work on the urban question. I needed to put theory to practice
-Kavita Wankhade, head of Practice (Governance & Services)
Claiming to be India’s first truly interdisciplinary university, IIHS has five schools: Systems and Infrastructure, Economic Development, Governance, Environment and Sustainability, and Human Development. Both Master’s students and PhD scholars work across all five. So far, the university offers four postgraduate degrees, all under the banner of “learn to lead urban transformation”: Sustainability Science and Practice, Climate Change Science and Practice, Urban Economic and Infrastructure Development, and Urban Studies and Practice.
The interdisciplinary approach, university officials say, is particularly well-suited for training practitioners and “system integrators” on solving the ‘wicked problems’ of 21st-century urban life— migration, overcrowding, climate change, and dwindling natural resources. Many students in the first cohort are working professionals from media, architecture, and policy spaces, with some pursuing a second master’s degree.
Revi said demand for seats is high—for 12 PhD seats they had 240 research proposals.
Several Indian institutes offer programmes in urban planning—such as the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and Bhopal, Ambedkar University in Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur. But here, it’s a lived, immersive experience.
Students are taught how to compress soil into bricks, mix concrete, and build a small structure from scratch. Then there’s a chemistry lab where they can check pollutants in water and soil. Real-time examples abound of sustainable living. A lake system within the campus will be used to train students on how to keep waterbodies in good health. To handle sewage, there’s a decentralised wastewater treatment system, adapted from their legacy sanitation project in Tamil Nadu.
IIHS is also waste-negative. As the campus processes more waste than it generates, it even imports waste from outside.
About two-thirds of the syllabus draws from the institute’s own research on transport, waste, energy, food systems, ecology, governance. It was nine years in the making and involved collaborations with international universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University College London, and University of Cape Town. Revi also visited foreign campuses to see how they functioned and consulted with around 200 deans, academicians, and practitioners.
“Internationally, we work with 11 of the top 20 institutions in the world,” said Revi proudly at the Sadashivanagar campus. “The basic question we asked while building our syllabi was: what do young people need to do to transform urban institutions in 2030? We wanted a mix of theory and practice. We have taught this framework for nine years in our Urban Fellows Programme.”
A campus for cities
Back in 2008, Kavita Wankhade, a bright young scholar of city design and social science from LSE, returned to India with a fire in her belly to tackle its urban challenges. But for months, she drew a blank while looking for interdisciplinary work.
“Most of the work I was being offered back then was designing malls,” Wankhade chuckled. “I wanted to do better work on the urban question. I needed to put theory to practice.”
Then came a call from Aromar Revi—he was setting up the very kind of institution she’d been hoping for.
“There needs to be some action and some ground work, and IIHS became that space,” Wankhade added. She would go on to become its first employee.
In the early 2000s, we had recognised that India had a huge opportunity for transformative urban change. But there were no institutions that were tasked with—or had the ability to steward—that change. So a group of eminent individuals came together, bringing in resources, talent and capacity to build a knowledge institution with that mission
-Aromar Revi
In the first year, she recalled, a lot of the work entailed simply unpacking a lot of boxes.
The monumental task of laying the academic and practical groundwork was next. City systems knowledge was mostly borrowed from the West. There was limited knowledge to address urbanisation at this scale and no strong pipeline of practitioners trained to work across disciplines. Their mandate was to change the status quo.
“In the early 2000s, we had recognised that India had a huge opportunity for transformative urban change,” said Revi, an IIT-educated civil engineer who had been doing rare foundational work in human settlements and sustainability since the mid-1980s, and is among the world’s most eminent scholars in climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and urban studies.
“But there were no institutions that were tasked with—or had the ability to steward—that change. So a group of eminent individuals came together, bringing in resources, talent and capacity to build a knowledge institution with that mission.”
The idea had first been floated by renowned engineer and urban thinker Shirish Patel, who suggested that Revi lead the creation of an institute to nurture homegrown urban practitioners. They were also joined by Chandrashekhar Bhave, former SEBI chief, who went on to chair the institute’s founding board.
From there, momentum grew fast. Calls went out to leading academics and philanthropists. Boardroom brainstorming in Bombay and Bengaluru turned into blueprints for a new kind of university that would take on issues left neglected by public sector institutions.
Just as Ashoka University was initiated by Delhi-based business leaders to create a top liberal arts institution, IIHS came from an entrepreneurial vision to address the question of cities in nation-building.
“Patient capital in India can make a transformational change for the common good, if it is are willing to build institutions like Vikram Sarabhai (IIM-A, ISRO), JRD & before that JN Tata (IISc & TIFR). That is a huge missed opportunity, that can be corrected as India becomes the third largest economy in the world,” Revi said in a written communication to ThePrint.
Among its early supporters were prominent Indian millionaires and billionaires such as Nandan Nilekani, who has donated Rs 300 crore to the institute. RK Damani, Cyrus Guzder, Deepak Parekh, and Nasser Munjee are also major contributors and board members.
In 2012, IIHS acquired 50 acres of land near Kengeri in Bengaluru for the campus but during its wait for deemed university status, it cemented a reputation as a leading contributor to urban policy interventions—and not just in India.
“Our first level of impact has been on the global stage where some of the leading and most adhered to governance covenants have been shaped by us,” said Manish Dubey, chief of the Practice programme at IIHS. “Whether it is UN SDG 11, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Habitat III (sustainable development of cities), United Nations Global Assessments of Risk, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have had a role to play in all of these. These set the tone for the world.”
At home too, IIHS contributed to major policy decisions over the years, backed by their research.
“An important thing we conveyed to the Finance Commission was to align rural and urban local body grants better with what’s happening on ground. They ran with the suggestion, and it’s great that they did because it creates space for bigger changes down the line,” Manish Dubey said, referring to IIHS’ work with the 15th Finance Commission.
Putting theory to work
What began as a municipal waste problem in Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur has turned into the sweet scent of flowers in villages.
The town’s municipality now sends its wet waste to farmers elsewhere in the district, who compost it and grow flowers such as marigolds, chrysanthemums, and jasmine, as well as crops like maize. It’s a case study in how urban transformation doesn’t end at the gates of cities.
Over 250 farmers are benefiting from the City-Farmer Partnership for Solid Waste Management, run jointly by the municipal authorities and IIHS, with support from Godrej Industries. Floriculturist Mahesh says the initiative saves him Rs 25,000 every quarter.
The premise seems simple but it involves numerous challenges, from incentivising residents to segregate dry and wet waste to getting usable compost to farmers.
The IIHS team, in conjunction with the municipality, went door to door and appealed to families to segregate waste for the sake of the farmers.
“That was our emotional pitch,” said Pushkara SV, the project manager of the urban waste programme.
The municipality transports the organic wet waste to farmers directly, while IIHS trains them in composting techniques. This, Pushkara says, reduces costs for both the city and farmers. It’s a rural-urban win-win.
IIHS is both process-driven and tech-driven. There are very few organisations to fall back on for urban sector training, and IIHS is one that helps senior officers, especially those working in municipalities or handling city finances, understand systems better
-Sanjeev Chopra, former director of LBSNAA
“Urban local bodies are unable to process their waste because of lack of financial viability, and farmers find organic compost more expensive because of higher transportation cost,” Pushkara added. “Although this model is not replicable in big cities, this management programme can help cities process waste and reduce the need for fertiliser for farmers.”
IIHS has painted murals across the city to encourage people to segregate waste, and worked with ward councillors to drive behaviour change. The city claims that 55 per cent of its waste is now segregated. From 4,000 tonnes of wet waste, farmers have extracted 1,500 tonnes of organic compost so far.
This city-farmer partnership is one of IIHS’s pet projects and is in line with its core objective of turning research into real-life interventions.
Another flagship programme that has reached “saturation coverage” is the long-running Tamil Nadu State Urban Sanitation Support Programme. Tamil Nadu is now a leading state on this front, with faecal sludge treatment plants built across its urban centres.
Making people’s lived realities better is a driving principle as well. The institute has worked with the Rajasthan government to design the policy framework for the state’s Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme, which provides social protection to informal workers. At its Urban Informatics Lab, IIHS uses statistical and spatial analysis to map the socio-economic geography of Indian cities for data-backed research on access and service delivery.
The institute is also training civil servants who run the municipalities and other urban bodies of the country. Since 2015, it has been carrying out a capacity-building programme for IAS officers at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie. The diverse topics include disaster risk mitigation, water supply, and environmental sustainability. Similarly, its nine-month Urban Fellows Programme, now superseded by the postgraduate and doctoral programmes, trained working professionals from across India to take on real-world urban challenges.
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‘Long way to go’
Vanitha, an executive engineer with the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply Department, keeps a small notebook in her pocket at all times—filled with learnings from a workshop on Sustainable Development Goals and water treatment at IIHS.
“As a department we learnt new things that were unexpected, things we don’t even think of which will help us interact with our city residents better and achieve our goals,” Vanitha told ThePrint over the phone, adding that she ensured her entire staff attended the same training.
Vanitha is one of thousands of government workers across India who have taken part in IIHS’s capacity building programmes—ranging from municipal staff and urban local bodies to IAS officers.
The institute has trained around 17,500 government officials on diverse topics such as disaster risk mitigation, water supply, and environmental sustainability.
Retired IAS officer Sanjeev Chopra, who was joint director at LBSNAA, said IIHS plays a key role in training officials on urban governance.
“IIHS is both process-driven and tech-driven. There are very few organisations to fall back on for urban sector training, and IIHS is one that helps senior officers, especially those working in municipalities or handling city finances, understand systems better,” he added.
Serving IAS officers are not mere audience members in these sessions but also share their own knowledge, experiences, and best practices with peers from various parts of the country.
But as IIHS ends its 16-year-old “vanvas”, Revi is still reluctant to take a victory lap. The work, he says, is far from done. The institute’s initiatives have impacted nearly 5 per cent of urban India, according to him, but meaningful transformation will only begin once that reach grows to 12 per cent.
“We are not going to rest until we touch the lives of at least 12 per cent of this country,” he said. They plan to introduce a master’s degree in Human Development next year, followed by a four-year undergraduate programme to hone future urban practitioners in 2027. “It will be truly revolutionary in its syllabus. IIHS still has a long way to go.”
This article is part of Urban Pressure, a series on how bad planning is choking Indian cities.
Disclosure: Nandan Nilekani and Uday Kotak are among the investors in ThePrint. You can read our full list of investors here.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
India will become a developed country if it follows the opposite of the teachings of M K Gandhi and J Nehru, the two socialist killers of Capitalist Republic of India. They wanted India to remain as an undeveloped country of villages. Time to build world-class cities at least now.