Blog Posts: Urban Development

Intersections are locations where roads merge or cross each other, thus putting multiple modes of traffic from different directions into potential conflict. Although they cover only a fraction of the 2000 kilometre long road network in Mumbai, they account for nearly 40 percent of all high risk zones, or blackspots, in the city. They are also where almost a third of all road traffic fatalities occur. What is even more alarming is that more than half of these fatalities are pedestrians.

Earlier this year, the Mumbai Traffic Police and Vital Strategies, under the Bloomberg...

This blog post originally appeared in TheCityFix.

Provision of affordable, adequate and accessible housing is one of the major challenges facing India today, as it surges forward economically and demographically. Current government statistics put the housing shortfall at...

This blog post originally appeared in TheCityFix.

Photo Credit: Lubaina Rangwala/WRI India

One of the biggest challenges to climate action is not only understanding the risks of flooding, extreme heat and other challenges, but how your community might respond to these risks. What are its strengths? How might policymakers augment...

For some time now, there has been an ongoing tussle between the Government of Delhi and the National Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs about increasing fares for the Delhi metro. Under the existing law, a fare fixation committee reviews the fares for the Delhi metro and periodically suggest revisions. This committee is an apolitical body, includes representatives from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the Delhi government and is, typically, chaired by a retired judge. It considers the operating costs, possible revenues at different fare levels, and then makes...

From Bangalore to Bengaluru

In 1970, Bangalore had 1.6m people. Within the decade, the emergence and expansion of public sector institutions such as the Indian Space Research Organisation, Bharat Electrical Limited, and Hindustan Machine Tools caused a sudden growth spurt, followed quickly by more growth owing to the textile and information technology industries gaining a foothold in the city. By the 1980s, the population was growing at the rate of 45...

This blog post originally appeared on Insights.

As India’s summer intensifies, many states are already in the midst of a drought—and the hottest days have yet to arrive. At the same time, water-intensive agriculture, rapid urban expansion, increases in industrial activity and growing energy production are driving the country’s water demand...

This blog post originally appeared on Insights.

One city in India is swapping its cars for bikes.

WRI India and Nagarro Software, in partnership with Udaan NGO and NASSCOM Foundation, recently launched the Seeds for Change project in Gurugram, India, reclaiming four car parking spots to make space for 40 bicycles. The...

India's urban population is expected to reach 600 million by 2031. Providing infrastructure to accommodate this growth will be a huge task. The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) is encouraging Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) as one of its strategies for sustainable urban growth. There has been increased interest in India for scaling-up TOD projects in order to...

City buses, plying on both long and short distance routes, are the primary mode of transport for majority Indians, with over 25 billion trips recorded in 2014-15. The most vulnerable sections of society depend on buses as one of the cheapest and the most convenient means of commute, in small, medium and metro cities alike. Unfortunately, despite being the backbone of urban mobility, bus penetration in India is dismal. There are 1.29 buses per 1000 people in India, compared to China’s 1.89 and UK’s 2.77, and less than a fifth of Brazil’s 10.3, as of 2009 (Bus Karo 2.0 – Case Studies from...

Over the last decade, Bengaluru has seen tremendous growth. This unprecedented expansion has resulted in urban sprawl, with the peripheral areas of the city experiencing growth rates of over 100 percent. In turn, this has caused inefficiencies in infrastructure and service delivery, lowering people’s quality of life.

WRI India, through its Sustainable Cities programme, assists urban centres like Bengaluru to make informed decisions on land-use and infrastructure that typically have 40-100 year lock-in...