Emerging Urban Places: An Opportunity for India's Next Generation Development

The map below highlights an important but most promising opportunity in India's development trajectory. Across the country are thousands of emerging urban settlements with populations between 10,000 and 25,000.

These emerging urban places present an opportunity to create a distributed network of economic hubs that balances growth with sustainability.

These emerging urban areas occupy a unique position—they are closely connected to surrounding villages, agricultural landscapes, forests, grazing lands, and water bodies, while simultaneously possessing the potential to become centres of enterprise, services, education, healthcare, and innovation.

Unlike large cities, these small urban towns can evolve while retaining their rural character and ecological assets. The objective should be to create urban centres that grow with nature and a sustainable living by design. A distributed pattern of urbanisation would ease pressure on megacities by reducing overcrowding, traffic congestion, housing shortages, pollution, and the escalating costs of urban infrastructure. At the same time, stronger economic linkages between rural and urban areas would create new markets, making regional economies more resilient.

Physical infrastructure—including roads, electricity, quality housing, healthcare, education, logistics, and public transport—must be complemented with best of class digital infrastructure such as high-speed internet, digital public services, and shared digital platforms for higher order services to prosper. These towns also become nodes for supporting a catchment of 100 odd villages/25 Panchayats each, hosting whole lot of professional support to the entire area.

Strategic public investment can transform these settlements into attractive destinations for both people and enterprises. Such a model would create meaningful local employment opportunities for educated youth, reducing the compulsion to migrate to already congested metropolitan cities. Young professionals would be able to access modern workplaces without sacrificing family ties, community networks, cultural identity, or quality of life. Businesses, in turn, would benefit from lower operating costs, improved employee well-being, and access to a growing skilled workforce.

This imagination requires a paradigm shift in planning and governance—one that treats emerging urban places as regional growth centres embedded within living landscapes rather than isolated municipalities. Putting in place urban governance unit would be key for planning with Town Hall meetings to discuss key decisions. Town Hall meetings can shape the character and culture of the town. Key designs elements should imbibe 15 minutes facilities principles, planning must integrate composite land use, water security, commons governance, climate resilience, circular economy principles, and local economic development. Urbanisation should strengthen rather than weaken the ecological and social systems that sustain these regions.

WATER SECURITY or WATER STEWARDSHIP

I have been part of the water security discussions and may be one of the accused of taking the vocabulary to the villages without really understanding it.

Water is a fugitive resource and it flows both on the surface as well as in the aquifer. Therefore, there is really a tension in the use of the term – it is a difficult term as it is inherently relative and is shaped by rainfall variability and seasonality, groundwater availability and recharge (aquifers), storage (tanks, ponds, anicuts), slope, soils, and land use, crop choices and livelihood need, and dependent population and equity of access.

When we say “water-secure village”—especially under Localised SDGs— sounds like the issue of water security is solved or achieved and thereby unintentionally risk creating the illusion of permanence.

In my understanding, when we talk about water, it is about living in bounds, there is a limit to water conservation/ storage naturally, therefore after a certain point of time, it no longer remains a supply issue – it becomes an issue of managing demands – which is about behaviourial change, it is about governance!

This, therefore, brings forth uncomfortable questions, like -

1. What does “enough” mean for domestic use vs livelihoods mean?
2. Who uses how much water—and for what? Should everyone get equal water?
3. Which crops are we growing? Which crop are we shifting to?
4. Are upstream actions harming downstream users?
5. How much water does the ecosystems need? How do we budget for the same?

This is where the role of institutions and governance comes in. This is the least attended to or discussed area programmatically. Water security may mean different things for different people—women, farmers, brick kiln owners, livestock owners, pastoralists, etc. This is the role that institutions need to play – is to understand varied needs, to balance demands, to allocate or restrict, and bring optimal use of resources equitably.

When it comes to water security, I have learnt, institutions matter more than infrastructure because they define rules of access, norms of use, enable enforcement (formal or social), evolve conflict resolution mechanisms.

With governance - water security gets defined as WATER STEWARDSHIP - the focus shifts from emphasis on supply to collective restraint and coordination – by regulating demand, prioritising uses, protecting recharge zones and sharing scarcity.

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The evolution & typology of rules have been evolved with support from Bryan Bruns and engagement with communities across locations. Several participatory tools have helped in engaging with governance of water. Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Thomas Falk and colleagues from Foundation For Ecological Security (FES)