Why Indian cities are growing, but becoming unliveable

Shaping Urban India: By Design, Not By Default, by Janaagraha, a Bengaluru-based non-profit.India has urbanized at a fairly steady clip, broadly in line with its G20 peers. But fine feathers don’t always make fine birds.Estimates by the United Nations’ Degree of Urbanisation (DegUrba) show that about 84.1% of India’s population qualifies as urban.

Other estimates place India’s urbanization rate between 36% and 55%. However, India’s per capita income—even in PPP terms—remains far behind other G20 countries, limiting economic mobility.Janaagraha’s estimates show that even when an Indian city doubles its urbanization rate, its economic productivity increases by only 12% on average.

This compares with 17% in some African countries and 19% in China.India’s cities are expanding, but often in unplanned ways. Among the top 10 densely populated cities, the contiguous built-up area increased sharply between 2001 and 2020.

Pune and Bengaluru led this expansion, with built-up areas rising 109.5% and 85.2%, respectively.“Urban areas have added 2.5 million hectares between 2005-06 and 2022-23 — a 35% growth driven largely by unplanned sprawl, with 16 cities showing a periphery-to-core ratio greater than 1,” the report highlighted.This means the population is being pushed to the periphery, leading to longer commute times, rising congestion, noise, flooding, and lack of city services such as water supply and waste management. At its core, Indian cities are not growing by design, but by default.What explains this gap? A big part of the answer lies in how much investment is going into the development of Indian cities and how they are operated on the ground.Indian cities have no dearth of funding, but allocations are heavily skewed toward