Transit-oriented development still on paper

TOD works by integrating land-use and transport planning by allowing mixed-use neighbourhoods with active frontages centered around public transport nodes

Announced in the last Budget, the central government is yet to implement its transit-oriented development (TOD) framework in 14 cities having a population of 3 million even as urban planning experts advocate that TOD could potentially resolve the twin problems of pollution and congestion by making urbanisation compact.

The India Infrastructure Report 2023 noted that some projects taken up under the Smart Cities Mission were not adequate to house people. A TOD section in Kochi (above), Kerala. (Shutterstock)

TOD works by integrating land-use planning and transport planning by allowing high-rises, mixed-use (residences, commercial complexes, office spaces) neighbourhoods with active frontages centred around public transport nodes, thereby encouraging public transport usage, walking or cycling. The concept is also resource-efficient as it not only makes commuting for daily necessities easier but also reduces the per capita cost of civic amenities, including water and sanitation.

The relaxed FAR (floor area ratio) norms are allowed within the influence zone of 800 metres to 1km around busy bus and metro stations. Its thorough implementation allows for envisaging the concept of 15-minute cities such as pushed by the Parisian city authority.

Incidentally, the Centre has mentioned the concept at least five times in its Budget since 2019 according to Rutul Joshi, an urban planning expert.

Joshi said the reason why TOD is making slow progress in India is due to disharmony in policy. “There is no defined legal mandates or statutory provisions to make TOD plans. While private development can take care of high floor area, to ensure higher walkability and access to public transport, there is also a need for adequate budgetary provisions.” Thirdly, he said the same high FAR norms are allowed in peripheral areas, including along state and national highways which attract the attention of private developers due to lower cost of land and indirectly take capital away from core-city projects where land is scarce and priced at a premium.

Another expert working with the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA), who asked not to be named, said that “a lack of political will” was the primary reason for the Centre’s reluctance to push TOD as urban planning is a state subject.

The entire nation’s urban policy framework of 2018-19 has remained a damp squib, the expert said. “MoHUA did not even engage with the states even once.”

Slow pace of work

Not only in the global North, TOD has been successfully tried out in developing economies as well. Curitiba in Brazil is one of the early adopters that began developing its transit corridors in the 1970s, focusing on creating a system that prioritised public transport over private vehicle use and facilitated high-density development near transit corridors.

In India, so far, only a handful of states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra have notified a state-level policy for TOD and identified at least one corridor along a Metro line for its implementation. But there has been an absence of any tangible help from MoHUA, said the expert cited above.

However, the Centre has given incentives to some states for notifying a TOD policy on paper, and for identifying a corridor in any of their cities for adopting urban policy reforms, under the broad scheme of special assistance to states for capital investment and also as a sub-scheme of the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT).

The MoHUA’s independent think tank, National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), is also piloting TOD implementation in Pune as part of its UrbanShift project in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Besides, following the 2024-25 Budget, the ministry had formed a new TOD cell comprising ministry officials and independent experts. But an official in the know said that nothing substantive has come up as they are also waiting for the cities to be named. The cell members were to visit the cities and help city-based officials implement the ground. “Instead, the cell has been asked to review the existing national TOD policy, 2017. Initially, the plan was to work with the cities to help them plan better in the TOD zones and also work on station area development,” the official quoted above said, requesting anonymity.

Some green shoots

While experts said that there are no recent examples of good implementation of TOD in metro cities, Ahmedabad is a bright spot.

An official associated with MoHUA said, “In Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati, there is a multimodal integration of the BRTS, conventional railway and the upcoming bullet train. The Ahmedabad master plan has already defined the area as a TOD zone and work is going on to ensure increased walkability and improve other aspects that will ensure TOD to work.”

On the other hand, HT reported in July 2024 how a greenfield TOD project in east Delhi’s Karkardooma planned a decade ago is yet to see completion.

The India Infrastructure Report 2023 co-authored by NIUA had noted that even the few TOD projects taken up under the Smart Cities Mission were inadequate and were not driven by the objective need to house and move people.

“The metros under consideration are poorly connected to the roads, have very significant issues of ingress and egress, and are not thickly connected to existing mass transport rail (such as Mumbai Suburban or the Egmore-Tambaram line of Chennai), or railway lines that circle the city as in Delhi. These debilities take away their value for commuters, so that the new metros are bound to be highly underutilised and operated well below their capacities, leaving aside the issue of being able to take a significant part of the non-pedestrian movement in the city,” a paper in the report authored by Sebastian Morris noted.

Prem P Singh, the chief town planner for Haryana’s Town and Country Planning department said the state’s policy allows all metro zones in three cities of Faridabad, Gurgaon and Bahadurgarh to have higher FAR since 2016-17. He said the reception of the policy is dependent on the sentiments of the real estate market from time to time. “As and when metro arrives in other parts, the same will apply there too.”

The ministry official cited above said that in Indore too, there has been some work by the city planning department. “There, the town planning department’s office is in a mixed-use building where some of the officers actually stay in the residential part of the same building.” The official added that the same building has commercial and other office spaces on the middle floors. “Ideally, all cities with metros or even BRTS should have gone for this vertical growth, but instead we have spread horizontally in all directions without any plan.”

India currently has the third largest metro network in the world with only the US and China having more length of metro networks.

Delhi’s Chandni Chowk area was retrofitted with some local areas planned to make the area more pedestrian-friendly. In Mumbai, there has been a lot of redevelopment going on in the recent years where old structures are getting rebuilt in bulk with active frontages, the official said, said but without a holistic planning framework.

In Bengaluru, the state’s directorate of urban land transport had planned a pilot of TOD in six stations ahead of the completion of construction but the pilot did not take off due to bureaucratic hurdles. Similarly, in Mumbai, the TOD policy along the metro lines 2A and 7 remains unimplemented.