India’s top metros—Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, home to 75 million people—rank among the world’s 10 most populous cities. However, “population scale has not translated proportionately into urban productivity, liveability or global economic influence,” the Union government’s Economic Survey 2025-26 admits.

While calling cities “engines of growth, magnets for talent, and crucibles of innovation”, the Survey also labels them “sites of daily strain: long commutes, uneven services and shared spaces that often fall short of collective expectations”.

Indian cities score low in their liveability quotient despite allocations to urban local bodies (ULBs) by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the XIV and XV Finance Commissions topping Rs 8.36 lakh crore in the last decade, according to a new report by Janaagraha and the Jana Urban Space Foundation, not-for-profits working to transform the quality of life in the country's towns and cities.

The key reason for this lapse, experts say, is the fragmentation of urban functions across ULBs, development authorities, state line departments and parastatal agencies. Essentially, local governments haven’t been empowered to do whatever is expected of them.

India’s urban population is expected to grow from 522 million today to 723 million by 2050.

If nothing is done to improve the way cities are managed, Akash Pharande, managing director of Pharande Spaces, a real estate developer in Pune, expects “escalating water wars, public-health emergencies and economic drag” to impede life in them.

Already, India’s affluent—desirous of bettering their lifestyle—are shifting to integrated townships and gated communities to make up for deficient urban public services. But their choosing to do so is worsening conditions for the less privileged.

“When the wealthy disengage, cities see deteriorating services and weakened political pressure for municipal reform,” said Amit Kapoor, chair, Institute for Competitiveness, the Indian knot in the global network of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.

Urban service delivery failures are a national challenge

Sonia Sarkar, 45, shifted from rental accommodation in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park to a gated complex in Noida in 2015, a move prompted by the need “to own a place because how long could I have kept living out of rented accommodation”, the Kolkata-native told IndiaSpend.

Sarkar opted for an apartment in a gated community consisting of 11 high-rise buildings in Noida because “high-rises started booming when I booked the apartment in 2010”. Safety, an important element when a single woman like Sarkar goes house-hunting, was much better in the complex than in a building opening onto the street in the same area, even if it meant contending with the residents’ welfare association’s rules that disallow a cab or three-wheeler into the premises.

The complex is clean “because maintenance employees are accountable to residents”, added Sarkar. The electricity back-up works, and the pavement stays intact unlike the road beyond, which “is dug up by civic authorities without any prior intimation of the utilitarian project they are undertaking”.

Unsafe, dark, potholed roads in cities across India are an outcome of governance vacuums. Speaking of Pune, Pharande points out that “three years without elected corporators had left the city’s residents chasing departmental signatures for streetlights and pothole repairs”.

With no general body, budget oversight has vanished, and project slippages have also multiplied, added Pharande, citing Pune’s Mahalunge-Maan town planning scheme, the region’s flagship hi-tech city launched in 2017 as an example. Nine years on, “flood-line errors, litigation and a lapsed contractor have left 250 hectares of half-built towers surrounded by dirt tracks, tanker water and construction debris”.

Essentially, “legal RERA-approved buildings now stand in an officially unapproved city”, he said.

Meanwhile, previously serene Pune suburbs such as Baner, Kalyani Nagar, and NIBM Road have seen bungalows flipped into restaurants, tuition centres and hostels without parking, fire access or waste systems, turning residential lanes into 24×7 traffic corridors.

Bureaucratic bottlenecks for routine civic issues as well as municipal urban planning failures are a national challenge, according to Pharande. “While 39 percent of state capitals lack an active........

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