At the 9th India Land Development Conference (ILDC) 2025, Jana Urban Space Foundation and Janaagraha convened a roundtable at which experts emphasised that Development Control Regulations (DCRs) must shift from static compliance tools to live instruments that shape inclusive, investment-ready cities.
Jana Urban Space Foundation and Janaagraha convened a roundtable titled ‘Urban Land for Equitable Growth: Making Planning Instruments Work in India’s Cities’ at the 9th India Land Development Conference (ILDC) 2025 on 20 November at the Ahmedabad Management Association.
The session brought together senior government officials, urban planners, economists, and land policy experts to discuss how India’s planning ecosystem can better respond to the 4E challenge of Economy, Equity, Environment, and democratic Engagement.
Participants examined how Development Control Regulations (DCRs), core tools that shape a city’s built form, can unlock more productive land markets, promote affordable and climate-aligned development, and strengthen the connection between planning, budgeting, and implementation.
Key themes
The discussion explored four thematic areas:
- Planning systems must evolve to match the pace and complexity of India’s urban transition
India’s cities are growing in form and function far more rapidly than existing planning systems can accommodate. Several Town & Country Planning Acts remain outdated, over half of statutory towns lack Master Plans, and even where plans exist, implementation is fragmented. Participants stressed the need to modernise planning laws, strengthen accountability, and embed planning within the reform agendas of economy, equity, climate, and infrastructure.
- DCRs can be powerful levers for equitable and climate-aligned growth
The discussion emphasised that DCRs shape land use, density, mixed-use potential, and housing supply more directly than Master Plans. When designed well and updated adaptively, they can support transit-oriented development, expand affordable housing, enable redevelopment, reduce sprawl, and align development intensity with infrastructure capacity.
- One-size-fits-all regulations cannot serve India’s diverse city typologies
State-wide unified DCRs often apply blanket norms across metropolitan regions, fast-growing mid-sized cities, and small towns. The roundtable underscored the importance of differentiated, context-specific DCRs that reflect variations in land values, infrastructure thresholds, and development patterns — not only across city types, but within million-plus cities themselves, where diverse micro-contexts demand tailored regulations for central business districts, established neighbourhoods, and rapidly expanding peri-urban areas.
- Implementation capacity, data systems, and enforcement need rapid strengthening
Participants pointed to severe capacity deficits — finances and human resources, outdated enforcement systems, and the absence of data-driven monitoring. Without capacity and enforcement, even well-designed DCRs fail to deliver their intended outcomes.
- Aligning land regulation with national priorities
Participants discussed how planning reforms must connect with India’s broader agenda — economic competitiveness, ease of doing business, climate resilience, procurement reform, and institutional efficiency. DCRs can support these goals by improving predictability, reducing discretion, and enabling market-responsive development.
Unlocking the full potential of DCRs
The ILDC platform allowed experts to identify reforms that can make DCRs more responsive and catalytic:
- Shift from static rules and regulations to adaptive systems linked to transit, land value, and infrastructure availability, and differentiated DCRs that respond to the varied contexts within and across cities.
- Enable transparent implementation with measurable feedback loops and data-driven revisions.
- Use DCRs to secure public benefits with affordable housing, green/open spaces, climate resilience, and mixed-use neighbourhoods.
- Create a reform loop where implementation feeds into iterative plan updates, strengthening long-term planning systems.
Participants agreed that reforming DCRs is an immediate opportunity, one that does not require waiting for the long cycles of rewriting planning Acts or overhauling Master Plans.
Roundtable participants
Participants included:
- Dr Amarjit Singh, IAS (Retd.), Former Chairman, RERA Gujarat
- Jignesh Mehta, Senior Consultant and Team Leader, Center for Urban Planning and Policy (CUPP), Ahmedabad
- Manan Patel, Partner, Sattva Developers
- Paromita Roy, Cities, Planning, and Design Lead, Arup India
- Shishir Gupta, Senior Fellow and COO, Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP)
- Shreshtha Saraswat, Senior Manager – Municipal Finance, Janaagraha
- Suyash Rai, Chair of Research, CEPT Urban Planning and Design Foundation
- Dr Vijay Anadkat, Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute (WRI) India.
The roundtable was moderated by Nithya Ramesh, Director – Planning and Design, Jana Urban Space Foundation, with a context presentation by Pravalika Sarvadevabhatla, Associate Manager – Urban Policy, Jana Urban Space Foundation.
Perspectives from participants
Nithya Ramesh, Director – Urban Planning and Design, Jana Urban Space Foundation, said: “Planning reforms often require amendments to State Town and Country Planning Acts and a paradigm shift in how planning is taught and practiced. It is probably a decade-long process. In the medium term, the most impactful lever we have is to fix the regulations that directly shape built form. However, updating regulations alone is not enough. Even city-specific or typology-based DCRs will fall short unless they are supported by incentives that make change viable for both government and the market. Instruments such as Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPs), Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), and revenue-sharing mechanisms can enable economic growth to coexist with equitable, sustainable development.”
Dr Amarjit Singh, IAS (Retd.), Former Chairman, RERA Gujarat, said: “In conversations on master planning and regulations, we often focus only on planners and bureaucrats and completely miss the role of elected representatives. Yet, politicians are critical to making planning instruments work. We know who the Mayor of New York is, but rarely who our own city’s mayor is. There is an urgent need to empower mayors and urban local governments, and to decentralise planning powers genuinely.”
Jignesh Mehta, Senior Consultant and Team Leader, Center for Urban Planning and Policy (CUPP), Ahmedabad, said: “It is essential to adopt a differentiated approach to planning and regulations, not just city by city, but also grounded in the local context. Even within a single city, markets function differently. Regulations must therefore be not only city specific, but also area-specific, especially in the areas with specific development and urban character. Local supply and demand conditions should drive how we design and implement planning instruments.”
Manan Patel, Partner, Sattva Developers, said:
“Across cities, low-income communities are increasingly pushed to the peripheries. We need truly inclusive zoning that brings affordable housing closer to economic opportunities within the city. While many schemes mandate affordable housing, implementation on the ground remains ambiguous, and both state- and city-level policies require greater clarity. Developers do not need incentives, but end users do. Today, affordable housing is often priced beyond the reach of those it is meant to serve. Ultimately, the strongest lever for reforming our planning system is meaningful stakeholder consultation, especially with citizens who live these realities every day.”
Paromita Roy, Cities, Planning, and Design Lead, Arup India, said: “More than 50% of India’s population is below the age of 25, and about 65% is below the age of 35. They may not want to own a house because they move frequently, but they do want to live in good homes. Are we designing for them? Governments must remember who their critical users are today. It is essential to provide dignified, high-quality housing for our young people.”
