When the Indian Institute for Science was established in 1909, its founders understood that India’s progress required a locally led scientific research institute, built for the long term. Decades later, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was set up, and today both are world-class institutions, leading India’s scientific and technological capacity. The same institutional ambition is now needed to support our urban development aspirations.

Metropolitan area planning in India needs independent, locally anchored, data-driven institutions – seeded by philanthropy, supported by private enterprise and research partners, and embedded with local governments. These institutions should not function only as government agencies or pure academic bodies. Instead, they should be designed to survive electoral cycles, serving as permanent custodians of local data, institutional memory and implementation-ready knowledge. Their mandate should be to build credible regional evidence, translate it into investable projects, and help governments, philanthropy, and the private sector align with long-term urban development plans.

The Challenge and the Opportunity

Projections indicate that 70% of India’s economic growth will occur in just 49 clusters or metropolitan regions. This includes the growth happening in the National Capital Region (NCR), which comprises ten cities, spread across three state borders, and in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), which covers over 6328 sq. km and includes nine municipalities.

Additionally, our cities need to create job opportunities for its rising working-age population – increasing by at least 12 million annually until 2030. As the world begins to experience a degree of deglobalisation, India needs to harness the capabilities of its growing workforce and capture manufacturing reshoring. Parallelly, the global digital economy is expanding with a focus on finance, technology and AI innovation. India is well-placed to establish itself as a leader in both physical production as well as digital transformation. 

NITI Aayog’s Growth Hub (G-Hub) initiative, which is piloting dynamic economic masterplans for the economic regions of Surat, MMR and Visakhapatnam, is a good example. The initiative establishes the need to build collaborative institutions – consisting of academia, government and industry associations – that work together to operationalise development plans and serve as the custodians of data that forms the bedrock of future progress.

To sustain the rapid rate of urbanisation, our cities require capital infrastructure investments of over $840 billion, over the next decade. While states are making investments to improve delivery of basic services like water, sewerage and transport, the decisions being made today must also consider future impacts on biodiversity, air and water quality. Such investments will not only help create new jobs but will also meet the vision of liveable cities, aligned with India’s development aspirations.

Harnessing Expertise for Better Cities

The large-scale investments Indian cities are anticipating, over the next 15-20 years, could contribute immense economic value, but getting them wrong will have irreversible environmental implications. 

Mumbai’s air quality challenge exemplifies the analytical complexity of urban challenges and shows why an institutional model is imperative. Air pollution is greatly influenced by meteorological factors like wind conditions, air pressure, etc. A lot of the pollutants are secondary — formed through chemical reactions between in-transport pollutants and locally emitted volatile organic compounds that are small in volume but highly reactive. There is a need for trained experts who can study all causal variables, archive data systematically to understand trends, and use that data to model future scenarios.

Currently, there are a handful of experts working on Mumbai’s air pollution challenges, aside from those in the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB). Installing, calibrating and maintaining monitors, developing roadmaps to mitigate air pollution from different sectors – such as construction, road dust and solid waste burning – will require trained experts and consistent monitoring of progress. This requires a supportive institutional structure that is not only able to attract, mentor and retain these experts but also drive coordinated air quality management across MMR.

This same depth must be applied to study our water systems, land ownership patterns that decide the success of town-planning schemes, and mobility infrastructure that shapes how people live and work. Cities need a single anchored capability, for each sector, that can archive evidence, detect patterns, learn from failures, test future scenarios and convert insight into decisions. Without such institutions, data will remain fragmented, expertise will remain thin, and each new administration will be forced to reinvent the wheel.

Making the Case for Locally Anchored Institutions

Municipal commissioners and district collectors typically have a 3-to-5-year tenure. Often, city commissioners end up identifying a handful of projects within the first six months, which get gradually implemented during the rest of their time in office.

Indian urban governments largely grapple with the day-to-day challenges of running over 15 services such as roads, healthcare, education, waste management, water distribution, etc. With limited data in the system, cities make decisions and install mechanisms based on current priorities layered with empirical information from field officers.

Implementing long-term, large-scale projects is complex and requires buy-in from a wide variety of actors, including state governments, local politicians, end beneficiaries and civil society members. Additionally, data, capital and operational financing need to come together, anchored to new institutional structures.

While the metropolitan development authority leads planning, the authority is occupied with the implementation of high-value, multi-municipality infrastructure projects like rail metro, expressways and airports. Regional developmental initiatives, such as building institutional capacity, fostering collaboration between industry and academia, and skill development, need external support and leadership. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for India. Non-state actors can play a significant role in driving action and helping establish forward-looking institutions.

Looking at Global Best Practices in the Indian Context

Globally, there are several interesting models of regional organisations, led and set up by non-state actors, that play a key role in development. For example, the Regional Planning Association (RPA) of New York is a 90-year-old urban research and advocacy organisation, which works to improve the prosperity, infrastructure, sustainability and quality of life across the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region. 

On the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), set up after the 1906 earthquake, brings together stakeholders from across the political spectrum to develop civic solutions and promote good planning and governance.

In Recife, Brazil, the Recife Agency for Innovation and Strategy (ARIES), a multi-disciplinary organisation of academics, has developed its 500-year-strategic-plan for the city. In Greater Mexico City, the Environmental Commission of the Megalopolis (CAMe) addresses air quality and environmental resource management issues across seven cities.

Global insights can help in setting up independent monitoring and planning organisations in India. Now is the time for philanthropic capital to step up and seed and endow science- and data-backed local institutions for a fast-urbanising India. Private enterprises, who understand what this means for the talent economy, have every reason to invest, as does the government, as we work towards the vision of a Viksit Bharat by 2047. 

If done right, these institutions will improve our quality of life while also strengthening our crisis response to natural disasters and climate and public health emergencies. Strong institutional memory, sustained investment, and a clear mandate will help us both predict and prepare for our immediate and long-term future.