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New Delhi: India may have become the world’s fourth-largest economy by GDP, but its continuing economic growth has not translated into a better quality of life for its urban residents, a new report by non-profits Janaagraha and Jana Urban Space Foundation has found. 

The report, titled ‘Shaping Urban India: By Design, Not by Default’, said that India’s metropolitan cities fare poorly compared to their global peers and have consistently ranked in the lower tier of the Global Liveability Index between 2020 and 2024.

“Housing is increasingly unaffordable. Daily commutes are longer and more stressful, on roads that are congested, poorly maintained, and often unsafe. Green spaces are disappearing, flooding is more frequent and severe, and air quality is declining. These are not minor inconveniences – they result in poor health and well-being, rising healthcare costs, lost productivity, and climate vulnerability,” the report noted, adding that these factors undermine a city’s appeal as a place to live and work.

Approximately Rs 8.36 lakh crore has been invested in cities since 2015, the report said, based on data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), and the 14th and 15th Finance Commission (FC) grants.

Yet, poor quality of life persists due to “fragmented governance, uniform models of planning applied across different typologies of cities, limited availability and quality of city-level data, and unempowered local governments”.

India today has anywhere between 522 million and 1.23 billion people living in cities and towns, the report stated, citing UN projections and World Bank estimates for urban population. By 2050, at least 723 million Indians are estimated to be living in cities.

Even as the country is urbanising at an unprecedented speed and scale, liveability in cities is deteriorating because they are evolving “by default” rather than “by design”. 

Unplanned urban sprawl

Unplanned sprawl has expanded the country’s urban footprint by 2.5 million hectares between 2005-06 and 2022-23, the equivalent of adding “a 100 Hyderabads”, as per the report. In the next 25 years, India’s cities are projected to house approximately the population of all ASEAN countries, combined.

The report says that urbanisation is no longer limited to a few metropolises but also visible “in urbanised settlements that are still classified as rural, with new growth increasingly seen beyond existing urban boundaries”. 

What this means is that an unplanned........

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