Delhi Master Plan 2041: People, processes, accountability key to implementation

A plan is only as good as its execution. Here is how to ensure that MPD-2041 does not meet the fate of its three predecessors, which mostly remained on paper

Starting in 1962, the three master plans of Delhi (MPD) gave broad directions for planned growth. But experts believe that not all ground realities of the time got covered in these policy plans. It didn’t help that the planning process was top-down and had little community participation, and involvement of elected representatives.

Representational image. (HT Archive)

Besides, several plan provisions slipped through the cracks because of inadequate coordination among agencies, shortcomings in the existing civic laws, and the complexities of the provisions themselves.

Even as Delhi gets a new master plan, experts say that the ground rules of successful implementation remain the same: Putting in place monitoring and coordination mechanisms; ensuring the design, launch and delivery of projects on time; and holding agencies accountable if they falter.

Most importantly, though, the key to the success of MPD will be its democratisation — participation of immediate stakeholders in the entire process from planning to enforcement — and making funds available for its implementation.

Legally enforceable

After going through the process of public scrutiny, revisions and government approval, a master plan is notified when it is published in the Gazette of India. “A master plan is a notified document defined under the Delhi Development Act so is legally enforceable. It is not a wishlist or a policy,” explained Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at Centre for Science of Environment.

Just as it is obligatory for all citizens to follow the master plan, said KT Ravindran, former chairman of Delhi Urban Art Commission, it should also be obligatory for those who make the plan to implement it. “The plan should have targeted time periods for various implementers and that they should be made accountable to those time targets,” he said.

The monitoring challenge

Delhi’s first master plan, MPD-1962, emphasised the need for periodic revisions and scientific studies to meet the new demands of a growing city, saying that its provisions “are not intended to provide a rigid delineation of the pattern of growth until 1981… and the year 1981 gives only a working range and no more.”

But the next plan, MPD-2001, which was notified in 1990, faulted its predecessor for not anticipating and putting in place a monitoring system to record the changing socioeconomic profile, thereby making quick reactions and adjustments difficult. The result, it said, was large areas of unintended growth such as unauthorised colonies and squatter settlements, which overwhelmed the master plan during its implementation.

To remedy this, the 2001 plan provisioned a review and creation of a monitoring unit with the data processing facilities to bring the important changes to the notice of DDA once a year.

MPD-2021, however, blamed MPD-2001 for failing to anticipate Delhi’s population growth. Noting that the two previous plans followed the same planning process, MPD-2021 talked about redevelopment of existing urban areas to accommodate more people, strengthen infrastructure, and create more open space.

The plan further mandated that an “enforcement and plan monitoring group”, comprising professionals, local bodies and residents be formed to evolve action plans. It also called for a mid-term review to assess “the appropriateness of the plan policies.”

But even MPD-2021 failed to make headway on two of its key provisions: Regenerating existing areas, and enforcing decentralised local area planning.

“The monitoring unit lacked focused functioning. As many as seven policy changes were introduced in the mid-term review. But hardly any field studies were conducted to understand and quantify how the ground realities had changed,” said DDA’s former planning commissioner (in-charge), Sabyasachi Das.

Gaps in data

Data gaps caused by inadequate monitoring of changing urban conditions is one of the reasons why successive master plans have remained under-implemented, said Rumi Aijaz, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.

In his paper, Delhi Master Plan 2021-41: Towards a People’s City, Aijaz said that little attention was paid to the scale of inward migration and the needs of the people coming into the city. The growth of the informal sector in trade and services was also underestimated. Residential areas, particularly resettlement and unauthorised colonies, have developed at densities much higher than those proposed in the plan, mainly because residents couldn’t afford any better, Aijaz said, adding that unabated growth of vehicles, congestion, pollution, and shortage of parking remained unquantified.

For an effective plan implementation, concurred Roychoudhury, it is critical to track changes, set indicators and targets, and design projects and schemes to meet those targets.

“The last MPD had stated that, by 2020, the modal share for public transport in the city should be 80%. MPD-41 sets the same target. This is because the city never had a system of monitoring the changes in the modal share,” she said.

Ear to the ground

The Delhi Development Act, 1957, mandates a civic survey for the preparation of the master plan. For MPD-41, a baselining exercise involving stakeholder agencies, about 200 experts and citizens groups to assess the ground situation and identify development gaps was conducted.

“The focus is on making planning more evidence-based,” said Hitesh Vaidya, director, National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), a think-tank on urban planning, which ĎDA partnered with to prepare MPD-41.

The draft MPD-41 proposes to set up a data-sharing protocol among implementing agencies and a dedicated web portal to upload data pertaining to each key performance index to make it accessible to monitoring agencies.

The plan also proposes a dedicated plan monitoring and review unit comprising professionals to provide support such as developing a database, preparing annual review reports, managing Geographic Information System (GIS) database with real-time inputs, online citizen portal, conduct and commission studies to evaluate trends and challenges, and give technical support to the apex review committee.

New mechanism

The draft MPD-41 has also proposed an outcome-based framework, tracking of objectives through 20 key performance indicators (KPIs) and devising a liveability index for assessing the overall progress on these indicators.

The KPIs include reduction in air, water pollution and flood risk, groundwater augmentation, seismic compliance, increasing the share of small-format housing in the new housing stock, a shift towards public transport, more electric vehicles, heritage conservation, vibrant public streets and female participation in the workforce.

For multi-agency coordination — a big concern in governance in the national capital — the plan proposes setting up three monitoring committees on environmental sustainability, built environment and city vitality. These committees, the draft plan states, will track progress, address hurdles, and submit annual progress reports to an apex committee chaired by Delhi’s lieutenant governor.

“We have introduced instruments of coordination, which were missing in the past master plans. Also, if we have a KPI-based monitoring framework, targets are set. Then it is not process monitoring, but output monitoring,” said Vaidya.

Plan versus strategy

The draft MPD-41 makes a range of proposals to promote green-blue (green spaces and waterfronts) infrastructure, rental and small-format housing, the night-time economy, transit-oriented development, land-pooling for new housing, and the redevelopment of existing neighbourhoods.

But a plan is only as good as its execution. Experts warn that there is a wide gap in the planning and implementation strategies.

“Master plan gives only the broader contours of city planning. Implementation requires strategic planning. But the problem is which agency will get this strategic planning started,” said Vaidya.

For congruity between planning and action, Roychoudhury said provisions of the master plan must be fully internalised in the project approval process. “You cannot have two unconnected, parallel developments happening in the city,” she said.

For example, the new MPD focuses on making streets pedestrian-friendly, building cycling infrastructure, and improving public transport while road infrastructure projects remain car-centric, she added.

Stakeholder involvement

The absence of immediate stakeholders in planning and enforcement mechanisms, said experts, is one of the major reasons why successive plans have remained on paper.

Under the Delhi Development Act, one of the DDA’s key functions is to formulate a master plan for Delhi. The idea behind keeping the planning process with a statutory autonomous authority was to keep it away from the “political messiness”, said urban researcher, Gautam Bhan, in a podcast for Main Bhi Dilli, a people’s campaign by 40 civil society groups, activists, and researchers to engage citizens in the process of the MPD-41.

“But with this, the accountability of democracy was also taken away. In many parts of the world, planning is the function of municipalities. So people you vote for are also the people who make your plan (and can be held accountable in elections), which is not the case with Delhi,” he explained.

The draft plan said that consultations for its baselining exercise also involved residents and market associations, professionals, traders and industry bodies, non-voluntary sector, residents of unauthorised colonies and slums etc. But, Bhan pointed out, the entry into such consultations is also by invitation.

For the ongoing public scrutiny of MPD-41, the Main Bhi Dilli campaign has held multiple consultations with a wide section of citizenry including underrepresented communities such as street vendors, domestic workers, waste workers, residents of informal settlements among others to come up with their own set of recommendations for the plan.

“Because the plan itself is not democratised, we need to aggregate all voices,” explained Bhan.

The key demands of the collective include land reservation for affordable housing, support for small-scale economies, allocations for spaces of informal work, the introduction of a “gender lens” in all elements of city planning and formulation and implementation of zonal and local area plans in a time-bound manner.

Public accountability

The master plan, a broad vision with a 20-year perspective, is further broken into strategic plans called zonal development plans. To implement these, layout or project plans are formulated. To decentralise planning, MPD-21 introduced local area plans (LAP) that were to be prepared and approved by municipal agencies.

AK Jain, who was DDA’s planning commissioner during the preparation of MPD-21, said that the provision for LAP was in line with the 73rd and 74th amendment of the Constitution that gave constitutional status to urban local bodies to increase the involvement of the community in planning and implementing schemes.

But local area planning could never take off even as the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) engaged the School of Planning and Architecture and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) to prepare 33 municipal ward-wise plans, essentially because of legal inadequacies in the existing civic laws.

Shamsher Singh, former chief town planner with the unified MCD, said that local area planning did not get any legal sanctity because even as the Delhi Development Act gives power to DDA to make and notify zonal and sub-zonal plans, it does not have any such provisions for local area plans.

“So DDA asked MCD to formulate, approve, notify, and implement these plans. However, to do this, the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act needed to be amended because, in the national capital, planning is in DDA’s domain. The Acts were not amended, and LAPs couldn’t be implemented,” he explained.

The provision for LAPs is missing in the draft MPD-41, which experts said is an “unfortunate omission” and takes away the elements of public participation and political accountability from the planning process.

Vaidya said that the new master plan decentralises planning further and takes it down to neighbourhoods. “We will focus on making small neighbourhood plans and have zonal plans that lead to the master plan to complete the planning cycle.”

Experts, including Arunava Dasgupta, associate professor at the School of Planning and Architecture that designed 22 LAPs under the last master plan, stressed the importance of adequate statutory provisions to bring in people participation and political accountability into the system.

“Different neighbourhoods within a municipal ward might have different needs but they are still in synergy with any other locality within that same ward. Ward to ward relationships can be handled at zonal and sub-zonal levels, thus maintaining the planning hierarchy. Also, municipal ward councillors as elected representatives are accountable to their electorate,” he said.

To make the plan fully participatory, Ravindran said the consultation process needs to be reversed and the master plan should be sent for local area consultations before a complete zonal plan is made and turned into a law.

“But we are continuing with the idea of a master plan and a zonal plan being made into law before we go for local area planning. So the zonal plan, which has already become law, already specifies what will happen in local areas and are no longer fully negotiable by the community,” he explained.

Financing the master plan

Experts said that successive master plans have failed to provide the financial cost of implementing the provisions. “The master plan never specifies how much funds will be needed for implementation, what should be the sources of these funds, and how should the agencies mobilise them,” said Aijaz.

Vaidya agreed. “Financing of the master plan should be integral to planning. Whether the planning agency takes up this responsibility or gives it to the municipal bodies is something that can be worked out. But the master plan should have this element,” he said.

In his paper, Aijaz suggested two ways to garner funds for master plan projects. One is the traditional model of judicious utilisation of various taxes duties, fiscal transfers and grants-in-aid, and private-sector financing.

The second approach could be implementing remunerative schemes, followed by the use of revenue generated on infrastructure development. This, Aijaz said, would make the development activities self-sustaining, with minimum dependence on budgetary support.

(This is the second of a two-part series on Delhi’s master plans)