13 Industrial Company Towns and Planned State Capitals

Anu Sabhlok

Introduction

The history of planned settlements in the Indian subcontinent dates back to the Indus Valley civilisation. Historians and archaeologists have pointed out to aspects such as similar brick sizes in cities far apart from each other, well-planned drainage and sanitation system and a well laid out system of streets – characteristics that tell us about systems of planning thousands of years ago. In the more recent past, we see planning examples such as the temple town of Madurai, the imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri or the grid city of Jaipur. There are also several colonial cities such as New Delhi or Pondicherry. One can also add to this numerous planned settlements such as railway colonies, military cantonments and university towns. All of these were planned but they varied in scale from just a few neighbourhoods to elaborately planned townships. In this essay, we will look at two kinds of planned cities — those established as steel towns or the ones built as state capitals. However, as urban transformations take place, classifications are always evolving. Towns that were established as refugee settlements (such as Faridabad) are now major industrial centres, whereas the industrial towns themselves are seeing shifts in their occupational demographics.

What characterises planned cities? Scholars have pointed to several criteria that delineate a planned city as opposed to an organic settlement: a central authority, authorship and control; an ideology or vision; heterogeneity and diversity in the social and economic mix (Galantay1975; Gotsh 2009). The case studies we pick up in this paper, were all planned on greenfield sites, ie, were built as new towns, separated significantly from any previously existing town and were built from scratch. The planning ideas reflected the political-economic aspirations of a newly emerging nation. Each one of these cases that we will investigate was set up with high ideals, with the hope that they will usher in an era of modernity into India. It has also been pointed out that the principles behind planned towns in India (and perhaps everywhere) have “emerged through a halting pattern rather than a conscious evolutionary process” and are often not in tune with Indian conditions (Sivaramakrishna,1976:9). Moreover, these towns, although planned have emerged as urban areas with a planned core around which unplanned growth has accrued. This difference between the planned and organic parts of a town is particularly evident in the uneven distribution of basic amenities such as electricity, water supply and sewerage (Shaw 2003). Sivaramakrishnan (1976) further argues that the planned industrial towns are often seen as “employee towns” rather than “citizen towns,” especially as the confusion lies in the role of the centre as manager of the industrial plant versus government for the people. On the other hand, the new planned state capitals imagined and attempted the construction of certain kinds of citizens for the new nation state. In the following sections, we will attempt to see how all of these imaginations played out in the way these planned towns have evolved. We will delve into the history, planning principles and emerging sociological concerns in these cities. Let us start with the industrial towns, specifically steel towns in India.

Industrial Towns in India

It would be fair to say that industrialisation significantly changed the nature of urbanisation the world over. While on the one hand, industrial activity brings along with it issues of migration, pollution, working and living conditions, etc, on the other hand, these towns are often at the forefront of developments in urban infrastructure such as electricity and public transport. What can be a better reflection of these changes than to look at industrial towns themselves, especially those that have been planned as such. Apart from providing a historical perspective on each of three towns (Jamshedpur, Rourkela and Bhilai), we will address certain key themes. First, the role these towns played in the national imagination and then moving onto the conflicts and contradictions that emerge as a result of migration, labour issues, economic cycles and the diversity of communities that came to inhabit these towns.

Jamshedpur

Jamshedpur is situated in the state of Jharkhand, about 290 km west of Kolkata. Now more than a 100 years old, Jamshedpur was the first steel city of India built during British rule by the Indian pioneer Jamshetji Tata. It predates the other great planning experiments of the 20th century, namely, New Delhi, Chandigarh and Islamabad. As the legend goes, Jamshetji Tata travelled to Pittsburg in North America in his quest to find technical expertise to set up India’s first steel plant. There he requested a geologist, Charles Page Perin to help him identify a site in India. A long arduous search for a place rich in iron, coal, limestone and water began. It took three years to narrow down on a small tribal village called Sakchi on the Chota Nagpur Plateau. The site is surrounded by the Dalma hills and the rivers Subarnarekha and Kharkai formed the northern and western edges. A critical aspect was the Kalimati railway station, at that time a few miles away from the proposed steel plant.

Unlike New Delhi or Chandigarh that were designed in one grand gesture by well-known architects, Jamshedpur was incrementally planned by several engineers and architects over a period of 34 years. In the 1800s, industrial towns in England and elsewhere were encountering a range of problems. A large influx of labouring populations needed to be housed and the infrastructure for their settlements was far from adequate. Numerous sociological and literary accounts have described life in these industrial towns. Having observed the squalor and the inequalities inherent in industrial capitalism, Jamshetji Tata wrote to his son Dorabji in 1902 a legendary letter : “Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of place for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areas for football, hockey and parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and Christian churches” (quoted in Sinha and Singh 2011:3). The note reflects a modern and secular sensibility which also extended to industrial policies for worker welfare. The understanding at the time that physical environments play a role in boosting productivity also played a role as did Tata’s efforts to minimise worker discontent.

Julian Kennedy and Axel Sahlin from a Pittsburg firm were hired to build a colony for workers. This initial colony was for only for managers and skilled workers. The typical American grid iron layout was adopted for this settlement that was set atop a ridge. The orientation ensured that the factory dust did not bother the residents. However, the need for housing for the labourers was ignored and very soon clusters of temporary housing came up around the factory gates. Alongside, World War I increased the need for steel production and Tata Steel built more blast furnaces, machine shops and foundries (Sinha and Singh 2011).

In this second round of expansion, Frederick Charles Temple, a sanitary engineer was hired to plan the growth in the township. Given his expertise as a sanitary engineer and his familiarity with tribal populations, Temple sought to design with ecological and social sensitivity. The Temple plan utilised already existing paths that followed the natural contours to build an inner circle which he then connected to the already existing settlement. His greatest contribution to the town lies perhaps in his design of the water-borne sewerage system that instead of dumping the sewage into sewers empties it into a underground system and then pumps it up into a purification plant. The purified sewage then is used as manure. Temple also planned the housing as clusters around a central open space and his designs are regarded as sensitive to the tribal way of life.

By the 1930s, Tata Steel was the largest producer of steel in the British empire (Singh and Sinha 2011). The population of Jamshedpur in this period had increased from a mere 10,000 in 1910 to upwards of 80,000 in 1930. This time a military engineer, Major P G W Stokes was entrusted with the task of building housing for the ever expanding population of workers. Stokes’ plan was to house the labourers as close to the factory as possible as they could not afford the cost of transportation. This was, however, not possible and so he followed a wedge shaped model that placed housing along transportation arteries. The housing was also segregated on the basis of class and populations of workers with similar incomes were placed next to each other.

The fourth wave of expansion in Jamshedpur came with the increased need for steel during the World War II leading to a tremendous surge in population. Otto Königsberger, the chief architect of the princely state of Mysore was asked to come up with a developmental plan for a city of 150,000 people. J R D Tata, the then Chairman of Tata Company described Königsberger’s plan in the following words: “it will ensure the harmonious development of Jamshedpur in a manner which will satisfy the manifold needs, functional and aesthetic of this beautiful garden city” (Sinha and Singh 2011: 271) .Although influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement, Königsberger was limited in his ability to implement it in the Jamshedpur plan owing to the already existing industry and housing. He did, however, bring in the ideals of neighbourhoods with access to greenbelts within walking range. Königsberger, like his predecessor planners, also considered the temporary housing (or bustees) that had sprung up all around to be unsustainable and a “blight” on the urbanscape (Sinha and Singh 2011: 273). His recommendation was to build 12,000 units of prefabricated housing every year using Tata Steel and pre-cast blocks. This too, however, did not solve the problem of exponential growth and influx of labourers.

The working populations in Jamshedpur came from all parts of India and the world. Jamshedpur was known for its progressive and cosmopolitan environment. The workers’ needs of housing, children’s education, recreation and sports, etc, were taken care of by the company. Studies conducted in the 1960s observed the contradictions between modernity and tradition that characterised the life of Jamshedpur residents. The housing arrangements that placed people of similar economic backgrounds next to each other were predicted to erase caste and region-based affiliations, but this was not necessarily the ground reality. A study by Michael Ames (1969) discusses the various ways in which caste, religion and regional affiliations manifested in the company town. Most workers had strong connections with their rural roots and followed to some extent what the author calls (1969:1221) “class for the city and caste for the village.” However, caste was still evident when it came to marriage, dining and certain occupations (such as sweeper and mochi). Ames also argued against the belief that the Indian joint family system will die out in industrial modernised towns, showing that the joint family system itself is flexible and has helped the modern young family adapt to the pressures of industrialisation.

Today Tata Steel remains the largest employer in Jamshedpur, but several new industries have developed, many of these catering to the needs of the Tata Steel factory and town. Some of the tribal villages that surrounded the town, initially transformed into shanty towns or bustees and subsequently were planned as worker housing colonies. Unplanned bustees in the periphery continue and constitute the 35% of Jamshedpur that does not have access to the basic services of clean drinking water and sewage. The disparity in the distribution of basic services in the ever expanding town is one of the major problems with Jamshedpur. Recent development programmes in Jamshedpur seek to rework the density of the residential fabric thereby housing a larger number of people within the planned areas (Singh and Sinha 2011).

Jamshedpur is unique also in its governance and service provision. It began as a privately owned town and till today it does not have a municipal corporation. Instead, Tata Steel provides all municipal services such as water and electricity to those residing in the town (see Sood 2015).

Bhilai

Bhilai is located in the Durg district of Chhattisgarh and was a small village until the late 1950s. In 1959, the Government of India and the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) signed an agreement to establish an integrated iron and steel plant in Bhilai. Bhilai was chosen due to its location and the availability of natural resources in close proximity, The Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) is a public sector undertaking that functions as a unit of Steel India Limited (SAIL). The BSP symbolises the Nehruvian vision of modernity and technological advancement for India. Nehru spoke of BSP as “a symbol and portent of the India of the future.” Sanjeeva Reddy (the then Congress president) likened it to “a modern temple of Indian prosperity. ” The BSP today is the largest steel plant in India and covers nearly 17 sq km. Adjacent to the plant is the planned town of Bhilai, laid out in sectors. Each sector is a mix of residential houses, shopping, centres schools and playgrounds. The houses for managers consist of bungalows complete with a lawn and verandah, while the workers’ housing consists mainly of barracks. This planned part of the town is surrounded by unregulated urban sprawl in the form of bustees (Parry 2003).

Apart from developing the Indian steel industry, one of the primary planning priorities of the time was generation of employment. It was by design then that the location for the plant was chosen in a “backward” rural area. However, it has been documented that in the initial phase, the villagers from the surrounding villages were hesitant to join the factory. The reasons cited range from the limited needs of the rural populations that did not compel them to take on additional work and also certain superstitions prevalent in the area regarding the plant. It was, therefore, migrant labour from all over the country that congregated to build the plant and the city. The recruitment process at that time then was very much in tune with the ideology of national integration.

Crook (1993) has argued that there were two separate streams of migrants into the city. Prosperous and educated migrants were employed as plant operatives, whereas those from the poorest groups were hired as construction workers. However, Parry’s interviews (2003) with BSP workers reveal that these categories might be more fluid and that many of the workers he interviewed had initially come in as construction workers and were now assigned to other jobs. The initial migrants came from famine- stricken neighbouring states such as Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. Parry also notes that while Tamil and Telugu migrants came in mixed sex groups often accompanied by families, the north Indian migrants usually came as individuals and only called in their families later. Even though regional identity continues to be marked through dress, food and language, most early employees took pride in the cosmopolitan character of Bhilai. In Parry’s words, Bhilai embodied the Nehruvian national imagination of a modern, secular India and in that sense was as much about “forging society as about forging steel” (Parry ,2003: 221). The backwardness associated with peasantry was to be abolished; the movement from farm to factory was understood as instrumental in creating this modern ideal. The migration of workers from village to city was then not just a spatial movement, but a shift in attitudes and way of life.

To what extent does this secular and modern attitude translate into social relations in today’s Bhilai? Scholars have observed that compared to many other towns in India, Bhilai has been able to maintain somewhat benign ethnic relations except for an incident of anti-Muslim violence in 1964. For example, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 did not affect relations in Bhilai (contrary to the experience in Rourkela). In Bhilai, it is argued that tensions exist not so much between different ethnicities, or castes or religions but between the indigenous populations, “sons of the soil,” and the “outsiders.” The spatial distribution of ethnic and religious populations in comparatively more heterogeneous and even urban ghettoes originally set up by Malayalis or Maharashtrians have over the years acquired mixed populations (Parry 2003).

Some part of the unique Bhilai work and life ethic is attributed to the Russian influence. When compared to Rourkela, also a public sector steel town set up with help from the Germans, the BSP has performed much better. In the first 12 years of its existence, the BSP was in profit for five years and has ever since maintained their profits. The Rourkela plant on the other hand, has frequently failed to meet its production needs and has been in loss. The Russian work ethic instilled a culture of egalitarianism and austerity in both the Russian and Indian managers of the time, while at the same time, managing dissent by encouraging only the management-friendly trade union to operate. Any disparity between Russian and Indian workers was discouraged right from the outset and an exploitative relationship with the locals was minimised through policies such as dissuading managers from keeping adivasi ayas as concubines (which was the practice in Rourkela). Knowledge was freely shared and the Indian workforce was trained to take over the plant from the Russians. The success of the project, it has been argued, played a significant role in the people’s willingness to buy into the Nehruvian project and accept the “melting pot” (Parry and Strümpel 2008: 53).

Rourkela

Rourkela in an industrial town in north-western Orissa that like Bhilai was set up around a public sector steel plant as part of India’s Second Five-Year Plan (1954-55). Rourkela was the first of these public sector steel townships and seen as one of the “temples of modern India.” At that time, Rourkela was a small settlement adjacent to a rail line along the Calcutta-Mumbai route. The present population of Rourkela is around 500,000.

The Rourkela plant was set up with German technical assistance. Since employment generation was a key objective, all of these towns were set up in the rural areas encouraging the local people to transition from peasantry to proletarians and facilitating an influx of migrants from all over the country. These steel towns brought together ideas of industrial progress, secular India and national integration. The hopes of the country were pinned on industry-led urbanisation to propel India into the modern world. However, very soon, in about 15 years of their establishment, these “exemplary national dreamworld” came to be viewed as “exemplary national catastrophes” (Roy 2007). So what happened? What went wrong?

Several scholars have shown that ethnic tensions and caste antagonisms were heightened in these steel towns, particularly Rourkela. In Rourkela, tensions between Hindustan Steel and the Government of Orissa existed right at the outset basically related to the composition of the workforce. Punjabis and Bengalis, many of whom were Partition refugees made up a large percentage of the higher grades, and the clerks were mainly Malayalis. In terms of local employment, an enquiry done in 1959 by a state government commission found that only 12% of the Class 1 and 2 employees, while 33% of Class 3 and 61% of Class 4 employees were from Orissa (Parry and Strümpel 2008: 48)a. By 1961, Rourkela housed and employed around 76,000 migrants from outside the state, and at the same time, the project had displaced locals from 30 villages, many of them adivasis. These tensions often resulted in violence targeted at out-of-state migrants, particularly in the early years of the project.

In 1964, anti-Muslim riots broke out in Rourkela. Refugees from East Pakistan were routinely packed into special trains in Calcutta and taken to resettlement sites in Madhya Pradesh. Jamshedpur and Rourkela were two of the stops midway where the refugees were given their meals. On one such transit stop, the local Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Jan Sangh activists used loudspeakers to spread anti-Muslim sentiments and violence erupted. It spread from the railway station into the nearby bastees and soon the whole town was up in arms against the Muslim minority. The violence lasted two weeks during which large numbers fled while many were dead (Parry and Strümpel 2008). As compensation, Muslim employees of Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) were given a three month paid leave to return home and by the time they came back, a seperate housing block was constructed for them. Over 700 Muslim families initially moved into this newly constructed block which paved the way for ethnic ghettoisation. A similar ghettoisation happened for the Sikh population after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Rourkela. Tensions still persist between Oriyas and the adivasis as between the Oriyas and the Bengalis (Parry and Strümpel 2008).

Moreover, there was a shift in the demographics of the workforce at RSP that further fuelled antagonisms amongst the multi-ethnic residents of Rourkela. The first shift happened when in 1969, the Union Ministry of Labour made it mandatory for all jobs with salaries less then Rs 500 per month be filled from applications registered at the local employment agency. This dislodged the seniority and expectations of many who had been working on contract with the RSP with the hope of getting regularised. Then in 1989, a new regulation made registration in the employment exchange open to only those who had a certificate of residence in Orissa. By then, a whole generation of “outsider” children had grown up in Rourkela and considered the city their home, but were considered ineligible for employment registration. The result was a large scale “Oriya-isation” of the workforce. Alongside, adivasis who still lost out in this ethnic realignment have been protesting regularly outside the plant for issues ranging from employment, to pollution to land acquisition (Parry and Strümpel 2008:50).

In today’s Rourkela, the mineral-rich landscape of western Orissa has attracted many more industrialists, government projects and multinational corporations. A large number of tribal populations have been dispossessed. The developmental policies of the government too have shifted from its emphasis on employment generation to profit-making. This is evident in the dramatic reduction in the regular workforce at the RSP. The workforce in RSP in the 1990s was of 36,000 people, but by 2009, it has been reduced to only 19,500. One sees in these company towns, a certain “aristocracy of labour” of those employed in the regular public sector (Parry and Strümpel 2008: 48). However, the formalisation of trade union politics and the alienation of these workers from those employed on contractual or informal basis led to a fragmentation of the working classes. One sees therefore that despite the reduction in number of employees in the RSP, there has not been a single protest on this issue. In the neoliberal environment of Rourkela today, the government’s aspiration has been to attract as much foreign capital into the state without regard to actual local labour needs or natural resources. Orissa today stands as one of the prime investment destinations within India.

State Capitals

The three decades after Independence can be characterised as a period in which several new towns were planned. The expectation was to create a new kind of modern citizenry, to free the nation’s population from darkness, poverty and tradition and to move towards a developed nation through urban planning Owing to the centralised control intrinsic to the construction of a planned city, many governments have found planned towns to be one of the primary ways through which their political and social agendas can be realised. Planned cities are looked at as arenas through which modernisation, social change and economic growth can materialise. Postcolonial Indian government too bought into this reasoning and attempted the construction of capital cities in the first few decades after independence. Prominent amongst these are Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar and these three are presented here as case studies. As you read through the case studies, notice the optimism and the idealism that characterised the initial years of the construction of these state capitals. However, as seen with the industrial towns and other planned cities in India, these cities too failed to meet the promises of universalism and modernity.

Chandigarh

“Let this be a new town, unfettered by the traditions of the past, an expression of the country’s faith in the future”, proclaimed Nehru, outlining his vision for the new city of Chandigarh in the early 1950s. Chandigarh was planned as the new capital city for Punjab since Lahore was in Pakistan. It was meant to resettle the displaced populations, bring some hope and stability to a region that had undergone the trauma of Partition, and most importantly, to serve as the symbol for new, modern, independent India.

Chandigarh is located about 250 kms north of Delhi and this location was chosen because of its distance from the border (as opposed to Amritsar), relatively flat terrain. Also the cost of acquisition of land there was much lesser than alternatives such as Ambala or Ludhiana. Further in Nehru’s words, this site was “free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and old traditions.” For the first phase of Chandigarh, 8,500 acres of fertile land, consisting of 17 villages were acquired in one go under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Plots were sold to the general public with the first preference reserved for displaced groups and individuals.

In order to fulfil this dream of setting up a new town that would resolve social and economic problems of the nation, Albert Mayer, an Amercian architect who had several years of prior experience in India was hired. Mayer along with his associate Matthew Nowicki came up with a fan- haped plan spanning the land between two rivulets – Patiali ki Rao and Sukhna Choe. He divided the city into superblocks and in his planning was searching for an idiom that was modern and Indian at the same time. However, Nowicki died in a plane crash soon after and a new team led by Le Corbusier was ushered in to take on this grand project of town planning. Corbusier was to be assisted by two architects, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. The idea was that in this process, several Indian architects would be trained who would then go on to plan and develop at least 300 new towns in India.

Corbusier’s and Nehru’s modern sensibilities meshed well and Corbusier had a free hand in dictating the Chandigarh plan. He took the superblock from Mayer’s plan and converted these into sectors – self-sufficient neighbourhood units – each sector had its own marketplace, schools and religious institutions.

In Sector One, the head of the city, Corbusier placed the major government offices – the Secretariat, the High Court and the Assembly building. An artificial lake was also created. To one side of this grid plan was placed the university and a medical research hospital, whereas on the other side was the industrial area. The city was to be surrounded on a radius of 5 kms on all sides by forested land. An existing rivulet running through the city was framed on both sides by green spaces and called the Leisure Valley. The sectors or “containers of family life” as Corbusier envisaged them were segregated on the basis of social class. Traffic circulation too was segregated into a hierarchy of roads ranging from V1s to V7s – V1s would be the high speed roads with mixed traffic, The V7s were designed as bicycle paths. The Capitol Complex towards the North dominated the plan by its sheer monumentality and symbolism woven into its architectural gesture.

Notable amongst the structures at the Capitol Complex is the open hand monument. This is a graphic representation of an open palm that is placed on top of a tall column and pivoted in a manner so as to move with the wind. The open hand is placed within an open air theatre called the Trench of Consideration. Two symbolic ideas in this structure revealed the social and political dreams of the architect. The Trench of Consideration was envisaged as a place, where the citizens of the city collect and deliberate upon the matters of the state. The open hand itself proclaimed the idea that this city was open to giving and receiving ideas. That the open hand monument today is closed to public gatherings and the plaza surrounding the Trench of Consideration is used as a heavily guarded parking for high court judges speaks volumes to the huge gap between planning intentions and real urban politics.

In 1966, Punjab was further partitioned into Punjab and Haryana based on religious and linguistic differences. Chandigarh today is the capital for both Punjab and Haryana apart from being a union territory itself. It therefore houses the government offices for Punjab, Haryana and the central government. There are two high courts and two assemblies. Both Punjab and Haryana have constructed satellite towns flanking Chandigarh on two sides – Mohali and Panchkula, respectively. These towns too follow the same grid planning and sectors as planned neighbourhood units. For several decades after its inception, the primary population of Chandigarh consisted of government officials and their families. The neighbourhoods and sectors were planned based on government ranking and a hierarchy was clearly woven into the planning. Much as the city promised a socialist ideal, the inequality was woven into the design itself. Moreover, Sarin (1979) in her study on Chandigarh shows how the planning process does not take into account the informal sector (which employs a significant proportion of the workforce in a typical Indian city). The informal economy is treated as an “enforcement problem” rather than as an intrinsic part of the city.

Post-1991, with the advent of a more neoliberal era, many things have changed. The government acquired large tracts of land from areas surrounding Chandigarh (originally part of the 5 km green belt) and sold it to high-end real estate developers and the IT industry. Subsequently, land use in the industrial area changed such that it is pretty much an agglomeration of malls, hotels, automobile showrooms and cinema halls. These transformations in the urban landscape are demonstrative of the shifts in Indian economy from a manufacturing-centred one to a more service-centred one. One can see signs of affluence in the high consumption patterns of the residents of Chandigarh. The city also has the highest per capita car ownership in the country. The poor populations in the city are carefully concealed in the peripheral areas. Their contributions to the labour of building the city remain unacknowledged.

Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar

While Chandigarh was being planned as the new capital of Punjab in North India, Bhubaneswar was being planned as the modern capital of the State of Orissa. The planning of the new town was done by a German-Jew architect Otto Königsberger, who had been working in India since the 1930s. Influenced by the garden city movement, and also aware of the realities of Indian social life, Königsberger planned a modern town complete with wide roads and parks. However, today’s Bhubaneswar has far exceeded the planned boundaries and just like most other Indian towns a mix of planned and unregulated growth characterises the contemporary city. Chandigarh and Bhubhaneshwar, both state capitals, were planned by western architects, but by the 1960s, when Gandhinagar was to be built, the country had enough trained expertise in both architecture and engineering. Gandhinagar was built as the capital of Gujarat after the Bombay Presidency was partitioned in 1960. Located on the banks of the river Sabarmati, not too far from Ahmedabad on fertile plains, the new capital had to live up to the legacy of Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Local business elite in Gujarat, therefore, invited the American architect Louis Kahn. However, the political pressure to make Gandhinagar an indigenously planned town and a legacy of Gandhi’s ideals was too strong, and eventually, two Indian architects who had apprenticed with Le Corbusier were chosen – H K Mewada and Prakash Apte. Like Chandigarh, Gandhinagar too has sectors and the street grid is oriented in a way so as to avoid the afternoon glare. Inspired by Chandigarh, sun, space and green cover were elements that the architects sought to incorporate in Gandhinagar. The central Capitol Complex was surrounded by 30 residential sectors that were just a little smaller than those in Chandigarh. The idea here was that no resident would need to cross a road in order to get to the basic needs of shopping, health care and school. The use of the bicycle was to be encouraged.

However, the way Gandhinagar has developed tells of the influence of state bureaucracy and pressure from industrialists. Today the pressure to develop and profit from real estate has taken over and peripheral areas around the city are seeing aggressive development, especially on the 23 km road leading to Ahmedabad. In fact, it has been argued that such haphazard development will stall the sustainable economic and social growth of Gandhinagar and make it into nothing more than a suburb of Ahmedabad.

In Brief: Why India Cannot Plan its Cities?

What is common to the experience of all the planned cities in India, including those discussed in this module? Why is it that all of these cities start out with grand utopian visions, but then collapse into the same chaotic conditions that plague unplanned urban growth? Can urban planning and design resolve societal problems? What is the relationship between an architect’s/planner’s conception and resident’s/user’s perception of a city? Did the modern cities planned in India, actually create the kind of modern sensibilities that were imagined by our political leaders and propel India into becoming part of the developed world?

Looking at the experience of diverse planned cities such as Jamshedpur and Chandigarh among others, we can perhaps arrive at commonalities and lessons that help us understand urban transformations in contemporary India. In all of the cities presented in this module, we see that while a small part of the city was planned and designed with grand visionary gestures, the planners focussed more on form and aesthetics. The problems of migration, labour, caste, class, regional and religious differences were hardly taken into account while planning; but all of these issues came to the fore once the cities started getting inhabited

Ananya Roy (2009) has argued that the urban crisis in India can be attributed to a planning process that is in itself informalised even as it blames informal settlements for its woes. A planning process that accepts, and in fact, reproduces the divisions in society is a hangover from the colonial times where the British settlement always stood apart from the native town (Shaw 2004). We saw that even in postcolonial state capitals, such as Chandigarh, hierarchy and social difference were given form in the masterplan itself despite promises of modernisation. In industrial towns, ghettoisation of religions and regional groups emerged early on.

In this module, we have discussed cities created in the 20th century and were either industrial cities or state capitals. In both cases, the agenda was to build a certain national space and citizen. However, urbanisation is changing in the 21st century and we see the shift from a more industrial to a consumer-based model (Gotsch 2009). This is evident in the rise of privately built and owned towns cropping up in all regions of the country. The primary aim of these newly emerging private towns and special economic zones is to create urbanisation that is geared towards capital accumulation (Chen et al 2009). More recently, Sood (2015) has shown how the new legislative regime allows for the privatisation of urbanisation, thereby, fostering an unequal distribution of public goods. This flexibility of laws are often very rational processes that aid in territorial expansion and capital accumulation for a select class. It is time, therefore, that we take a deeper look at the urban processes, planned or otherwise in order to reclaim our cities as inclusive spaces.

For further reading

• Apte, P. (2012). The Building of Gandhinagar: New Capital of Gujarat, India. Mumbai.
• Ames, M. M. (1969). Modernisation and social structure: Family, caste and class in Jamshedpur.
• Economic and Political Weekly, 4(28/30): 1217-1224.
• Chen, X, L Wang, and R Kundu(2009): “Localizing the Production of Global Cities: A Comparisonof New Town Developments around Shanghai and Kolkata,” City and Community. 8(4): 433-65.
• Crook, N. (1993). Labour and the steel towns. Dalit movements and the meanings of labour in India, 338-54.
• D’Souza, V. (1976). Chandigarh: People prevail over plan. Economic and Political Weekly, 11 (38):1526-1528.
• Galantay, E. Y. (1975). New towns: Antiquity to the present. George Braziller.
• Gotsch, P (2009): “Neotowns: Prototypes of Corporate Urbanism,”,  PhD dissertation.
• Kalia, R (1990). Chandigarh: the making of a new town. Oxford University Press.
• ______. (2004). Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India. University of South Carolina Press.
• Kling BB. (1998). Paternalism in Indian labor: The Tata Iron and Steel Company of Jamshedpur.
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