India’s urban agglomerations are no longer held back by state boundaries
Sarjapura is a small town lying at the very edge of the expanding Bengaluru metropolitan sprawl. It is geographically closer to the town of Hosur than to the centre of Bengaluru. Reaching it by car from Bengaluru airport can sometimes take close to three agonizing hours.
The drive from the proposed airport in Hosur is expected to be far more convenient. Many of these facts will be known to readers. The reason they are being mentioned here is that Sarjapura is in Karnataka while Hosur is in Tamil Nadu, an example of how economic agglomerations are increasingly spilling across the administrative boundaries of states, creating a new challenge not just for city planners but also for Indian federalism.
Another example is the growth of the privately-developed Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, which is also very close to the border with Tamil Nadu, and just 75km away from Chennai. A milder version of this challenge has been the growth of our cities outside their administrative boundaries. My colleagues at Artha Global had nearly a decade ago used satellite data to show how many cities, big and small, have spilled outside their formal limits, engulfing not just suburbs, but also smaller settlements that continue to be mistakenly identified as villages in our official statistics.
Much of this spatial growth—in Mumbai, for example—was still within the confines of a state. That is no longer a given. Flashback to 1955.
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