New Delhi: Earlier this month, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to the Himachal Pradesh government to implement its Shimla Development Plan, which was prepared after a gap of 44 years and finalised last June. In March last year, the Manipur government notified its own plan for its flood-prone capital city, Imphal — the first in three decades.
Shimla and Imphal are among the 200 Class-I cities (with over one lakh population) that have, for the first time, prepared Geographic Information System (GIS)-based master plans with each infrastructure and utility service mapped and verified.
This is part of the Centre’s Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) mission — first launched in 2015 for five years and then again relaunched as AMRUT 2.0 in 2021 for another five years. Under this, over 1,000 cities in the country are expected to prepare a GIS-based master plan.
A master plan or development plan is a vision document of a city’s development in the next two decades. It provides for planning regulations such as the type and extent of development in a city based on the available resources and projected demand.
Apart from regulations related to land use and building construction, it provides plans for transport, protecting green spaces, and economic development.
While a master plan is a critical document for the planned development of the city, urban development experts say that it has largely remained on paper in most cities. According to them, fast-paced urbanisation and poor implementation of master plans have led to unauthorised development in cities.
These issues are significant, especially in light of the flash floods and landslides that hill states like Himachal frequently face. Over 200 people were reported killed in flood and rain-related incidents during the monsoon last year.
The issue of unregulated development and the absence of master plans in cities was also highlighted by federal think tank NITI Aayog in its 2021 report ‘Reforms in Urban Planning Capacity in India’.
“(About) 65 percent of the 7,933 urban settlements do not have any master plan. This leads to piecemeal interventions, haphazard constructions, urban sprawl, and environmental pollution, which can further aggravate issues such as traffic congestion, flooding, etc,” the report said, adding that about “52 percent of statutory towns in India lack any kind of master plan”.
AMRUT’s sub-scheme is aimed at helping cities use technology to prepare master plans to address challenges due to fast-paced urbanisation and also mitigate the impact of climate change. A senior official from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) — the ministry that oversees the AMRUT scheme — told ThePrint that for preparing the baseline map, the states can either take satellite imagery from the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) or get the survey done using drones.
A baseline map is a layer that provides geographical context to the map and other dataset layers related to land use and services, such as water lines, sewer lines, transport facilities, healthcare etc., above it. The master plans prepared by some states have around 40-plus layers.
“This is a first and an important step towards ensuring planned development of urban areas. Baseline plans, which are prepared using GIS data, help identify any gaps. Any future plans, whether for transportation, economic activities, or social infrastructure, can be prepared based on it. But many cities don’t have a master plan,” this official said.
However, while cities are now focusing on preparing such plans for the next two decades, urban development experts ThePrint spoke to say that planning alone won’t solve the problem and that strict implementation is essential.
“The real challenge is in its implementation and enforceable legal framework, which is completely dependent on administration,” K. Rajeswara Rao, former special secretary at NITI Aayog who was instrumental in the preparation of the 2021 report, told ThePrint.
There are around 1500 class-I towns, of which hardly 10 percent have a valid master plan, he said, adding that the exercise hasn’t even begun in Class III (between 20,000 and 49,999 population) and Class IV (between 10,000 and 19,999) towns.
“But now with the central government providing an incentive for preparing master plans and focusing on recruitment of urban planners, there is some movement on the ground,” he said. The cities are getting funds as an incentive for preparing master plans.
ThePrint has reached officials at the MoHUA for comment via WhatsApp. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
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GIS master plans to help cities plan better
While AMRUT’s sub-scheme called ‘Formulation of GIS-based Master Plan for AMRUT Cities’ was aimed at pushing states to take up master planning for cities with over one lakh population, a similarly named sub-scheme under AMRUT 2.0 was aimed at doing the same for Class-II towns (those with populations of 50,000 to 99,999).
Under the first phase of AMRUT, 441 cities were to prepare the master plan, initially by 2023 but now extended till 2025-26. While 200 of these have been notified, 140 cities have prepared the draft master plans.
The remaining 102 cities have prepared the baseline maps.
Apart from Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Assam are among the 15 states and union territories to have notified GIS-based plans for their cities, a senior ministry official said.
Under AMRUT 2.0, which was launched in 2021, 675 cities (with populations between 50,000 and one lakh) will be preparing the GIS-based master plan, the official added.
From approving building plans to planning road networks and preparing developing plans for new areas, government agencies in states have gradually started using GIS-based master plans for infrastructure projects.
“We now have data of all services, including road infrastructure, water and sewer lines, available online,” Nongthombam Benju Singh, the chief town planner at Manipur government’s town planning department, told ThePrint. “It can be accessed by all government departments and citizens. It is now a lot easier to plan new infrastructure projects as all the baseline information needed is available online. We are now preparing a risk-based plan for Imphal.”
According to Srikanth Banoth, commissioner-cum-director of the town and country planning department in the Madhya Pradesh government, master plans are being used for various purposes in the state, from civic body approvals to new development projects to sanctioning building plans.
“With this, we have a clear idea about the existing infrastructure, which was missing earlier as satellite data is verified on the ground while preparing base maps,” he said.
The Madhya Pradesh government notified master plans of nearly 32 cities, including Ujjain, Neemuch, Ratlam, and Rewa in the last three years, the official said, adding that out of the 38 cities selected AMRUT 2.0, master plans for 10 — such as Nowgong, Porsa, and Ambah — will be prepared for the first time.
On 11 January, the Supreme Court greenlit Shimla’s development plan, which had been stayed twice by the National Green Tribunal (NGT). The plan — the Shimla Development Plan-2041 (SDP-2041) — is aimed at regulating construction activity in Himachal Pradesh’s capital, which had, until this point, seen all development projects designed according to the Interim Development Plan (IDP), drawn up in 1979 and modified more than 30 times.
According to Karam Chand Nanta, state town planner at Himachal’s Town and Country Planning Department, this is the first time that a development plan for Shimla, popularly known as Queen of the Hills, accurately maps basic services, such as sewerage, water lines, roads, transportation and land use, etc, have been accurately mapped.
“In the previous plan (IDP), which is still in use, land uses of the entire Shimla area were not prescribed; it was done mostly for the core area,” he said.
Under the GIS-based master plan, authorities have prescribed the land use of the entire 240 sq km of the Shimla Planning Area, not just the core area, with data under 50-plus categories or layers, such as eco-sensitive areas, wasteland, transportation, heritage, etc., has been captured and uploaded on the government portal.
In Uttar Pradesh, the state government has taken up 59 cities to prepare the master plans under AMRUT, of which, plans of 17 cities, including Varanasi, Ayodhya, Gorakhpur etc, have been notified, according to state government officials.
“The master plans were there for these cities but it is for the first time GIS-based master plans have been prepared. It took some time to notify the plans as it is the first time such plans have been prepared where every facility etc has been mapped using GIS,” said a senior UP government official.
Implementation and enforcement of major changes
Although urban planners see master plans as a step in the right direction, the biggest challenge is still implementation. To ensure it’s enforced, accountability has to be fixed, urban planners ThePrint spoke to said.
“To ensure there is enforcement of the master plan, it should be made a key performance indicator of officials involved in its implementation at the grassroots level,” Keshav Varma, chairman of the Centre’s high-level committee on urban development, told ThePrint. The committee was constituted in 2022 to recommend urban planning reforms proposed in that year’s Union budget.
He further said: “Municipal agencies and development authorities have to ensure that development happens according to plan. We often see that the master plan is reduced to just a land-use document. Senior officials have to be involved in its implementation.”
Former NITI Aayog special secretary K. Rajeswara Rao, quoted earlier, told ThePrint that the think tank realised during consultations for the 2021 report that “master plans are not a priority for city administration”.
“Linking grants and incentives given by the states to municipalities to implementation of the master plan is an effective way of ensuring that urban local bodies, which are the main implementation agencies, prepare and implement the plan. Now, we see this happening with the central government linking incentives under its schemes to the preparation and implementation of the master plan,” he said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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Stop writing to please your political masters as election is aroundthecorner. Since 2015 Nothing has changed imphal except 4 footbridge.