Every few years, familiar images return to India's television screens: a deluge submerging an underpass in a gleaming IT corridor, commuters wading through a flooded metro station. The commentary follows a script — shock, blame, promises of a master plan — then the waters recede and the city resumes growing at a pace that humbles its planners. India's cities are not failing to plan; they are growing faster than planning, as currently practised, can comprehend.

This is the defining urban fact of our time. India's urban population, already counted in the hundreds of millions, continues to expand as migration and natural growth add residents to cities every single day. The question is no longer whether India will urbanise — it will, decisively — but whether its cities will be shaped by design or by default. At present, default is winning.

The housing deficit nobody plans for

Consider housing. Formal housing supply in most Indian cities serves the upper middle of the market; everyone else improvises. The result is the familiar dual city: planned colonies and IT parks on one side, dense informal settlements on the other, often within sight of each other. Slums are not a planning failure in the abstract — they are the market's answer to a planning system that zones for a city that does not exist while ignoring the one that does.

Analysts argue the core problem is regulatory: restrictive building norms, frozen land markets and years-long approvals throttle legal supply and push construction into informality. Until planning treats affordable, dense, well-located housing as the central task, the dual city will keep reproducing itself — one unauthorised floor at a time.

Water, floods and the vanishing commons

If housing reveals what planning ignores, water reveals what it destroys. Indian cities once relied on tanks, lakes and wetlands that buffered both scarcity and flood; in the rush to build, many were encroached upon or filled in, often with the complicity of the authorities charged with protecting them. The consequence arrives with the monsoon: stormwater with nowhere to go, flooding neighbourhoods that were lakes within living memory.

The cruel symmetry is hard to miss. The same city floods in July and rations water in April, because it paved over the infrastructure — natural and built — that once balanced the two. Urban hydrologists argue that the fix is less about mega-projects than about restoration: protecting remaining water bodies, mandating rainwater harvesting that actually functions, and treating stormwater drains as the critical infrastructure they are. None of this requires new science. It requires institutions that can say no to encroachment.

The capacity problem at city hall

Beneath these sectoral failures lies an institutional one. India's municipal governments are among the weakest links in the governance chain: short of revenue, staff and expertise, and frequently overridden by state-level authorities that answer to no elected city leadership. A mayor here often controls a fraction of the budget and authority the job commands elsewhere.

This is less an accident of history than a failure to decide. Constitutional amendments three decades ago promised empowered urban local bodies; the promise remains substantially unfulfilled. No central scheme can substitute for financially autonomous, professionally staffed, democratically accountable city governments — and a city that cannot raise revenue, hire engineers or enforce its plan is not governing itself.

The way forward is not mysterious, even if politically difficult: empower city governments with real fiscal authority, professionalise planning, protect the ecological commons, and build public transport before the car fleet locks in congestion for a generation. Informality is not the enemy of planning but its informant — telling us where the official plan has failed the real city.

India's urban century is already underway. Whether it becomes dynamism or dysfunction will be decided in a thousand municipal offices — by whether those running India's cities are finally given the power, money and mandate to run them.