Assessing growth management strategy: A case study of the largest rural-urban region in India

Abstract

Considerable progress has been made in theoretically understanding the process of sprawl and devising corresponding growth management strategies in the global North. However, urban growth as sprawl remains a serious challenge in the global South, cutting across various geographic and municipal boundaries. The undesirable consequences are excessive expansion as well as inadequate infrastructure and service provision. At the core of steering this development are growth management strategies aiming to secure economically, socially and environmentally sustainable growth.This paper evaluates the performance of the growth management strategy in the National Capital Region of India based on a conceptual framework covering programme design, institutional setting and market interactions. It uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate policy performance across multiple scales (city, metropolitan, state and region).The research found the limited success of policies, the failure to combine policy with regulatory and non-regulatory instruments, and insufficiencies in the institutional environment, all of which hinder effective growth management. To curtail sprawl, this paper recommends moving towards flexible growth boundaries, introducing self-contained communities as policy component, integrating and enforcing land-use and transport planning, empowering lower-tier authorities and adopting regulatory and non-regulatory instruments for plan implementation.