Opinion | Urban Quest I: The Pathway For Chennai To Become A Developed City By 2047

For Chennai to sustain 10 per cent GDP growth over the next 22 years and become a $1 trillion economy, the city needs to increase its annual capex-to-GDP ratio to 12-15 per cent

India stands at a pivotal moment in its urbanisation journey. The evidence shows that the country is far more urban in economic, functional, and spatial terms than the conventional definitions and boundaries of urbanisation suggest.

Moreover, urbanisation has concentrated productivity, innovation, and labour markets in our cities. Nonetheless, as the Economic Survey 2025-26 suggests, “our cities have not been equipped with the institutional, fiscal, and planning foundations commensurate with their role in national prosperity."

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This, along with the myriad problems facing cities, prevents them from fulfilling their defined role in making Bharat Viksit by 2047.

Crux of Urban Quest Series

In the context of the Urban Quest series, I examine one city at a time, assess its readiness to support the country’s growth towards Viksit Bharat by 2047, analyse the challenges facing it, and outline the path for it to fulfil its mandated role.

In the first two editions of the ‘Urban Quest’ series, I delved deeper into Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. In the current third edition, I do a two-part deep dive in Chennai, colloquially known as the “Detroit of India." The analysis focuses on as-is, where-is analyses and the opportunities before the city, and discusses the challenges Chennai faces in actualising its potential and possible solutions.

I begin where it began.

Chennai (formerly Madras) has evolved from an ancient settlement to a major modern metropolis. Its history includes prehistoric origins, medieval kingdoms, colonial expansion, and post-independence growth as “Gateway to the South."

But the journey of modern Madras commenced in 1639 when Francis Day, an agent of the British East India Company, secured land from the Nayaks (of the Vijayanagar empire) and established the St. George Fort in 1644.

Madraspatnam became the capital of the Madras Presidency by 1652, with the city divided into two parts-

“White Town" (the European fort area) and “Black Town" (the Indian quarters).

The 19th-century Madras was characterised by:

The arrival of railways (1856),

The establishment of Madras University (1857), and

The creation of the Madras High Court (1862).

These solidified Madras’s role as the administrative centre of South India under British rule. The name Madras was changed to Chennai on July 17, 1996, by the Tamil Nadu state government as part of a broader effort to replace colonial-era names with their native, indigenous counterparts.

Since the first official census of the country in 1871, the population of Madras (now Chennai) has grown as follows:

At the time of the first post-independence census in 1951, Madras became a million-plus city. And by the 2011 census of India, the Chennai core city population (within the then-municipal corporation limits) was 4.65 million.

However, Chennai grew rapidly beyond its core city area and, according to the 2011 census, the population of the Chennai Metropolitan Area (CMA) was 8.65 million, up from 6.56 million in 2001. In 2026, according to UN........

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