Introduction to Planning in India

At the end of the final meeting of the group before the tour starts, we were graced with a presentation by Jignesh Mehta on the highlights of planning in India. Jignesh has been helping the group all along with advice on where to go and what to see, and he also helped us arrange several of the meetings we will hold with professionals in India.

The parts of the presentation that interested me most were the philosophy of Indian city patterns, the hierarchy of Indian cities, and the new transportation system. The philosophy of an Indian city shows up in the birds-eye city layout. A traditional Hindu city would be divided up into grids, with different sections for different trades or classes. An example of this type of city is Jaipur, which we will visit. It is the shape of a nine square grid, with geography forcing one of the squares to be shifted from the upper left corner to the lower right side of the city. Other cities are in the form of concentric rectangles, with the outer rings reserved for the progressively more numerous and less prestigious classes. Muslim cities have very dense and winding paths with lots of dead ends. The British build New Delhi in a pattern that looks a lot like Washington DC.

The hierarchy concept was presented through the use of the word 'tier'. The first-tier cities are the biggest metropoli, including Dehli, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. There are only a handful of them. Second tier cities have at least 1,000,000 in population. There are perhaps 35 or so second tier cities. Third tier cities have between 100,000 and 1,000,000 in population. The placing of a city into a tier is flexible, depending on the person making the judgement or the statistic (population, wealth, business) being highlighted through the tiering.

The four biggest cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata are also the ones linked through a new superhighway system called the Golden Quadrilateral. Each leg of the Golden Quadrilateral connects a number of the second and third tier cities along the way, including ones on the Delhi-Mumbai leg like Jaipur and Amehdabad (which is also a candidate for first-tier status), which we will visit on our trip. There is a second phase of highway development underway right now, which will make a north-south and east-west routes