Centre sets up expert panel to train 5000 urban planners in the next five years 

The training programme for urban planners will include topics such as how to improve land use efficiency with the right kind of planning elements among others

The Centre plans to train 5,000 urban planners over the next five years as part of urban reforms it unveiled in Budget 2022.

The ministry of housing and urban affairs has formed an eight-member expert committee to prepare a strategy for training the planners in emerging and innovative concepts, working with state governments and local bodies.

The committee, constituted last month, is headed by PSN Rao, director of the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi.

“We will be submitting a report by July on what should be done on a pan-India basis and the way forward,” Rao told Moneycontrol.

A five-day course and a month-long session will be organised to train the planners. These will be undertaken for town planners working in the state town and country planning departments and urban local bodies/ urban development authorities and consulting private practitioners.

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The committee members are Sanjay Gupta, professor of transport planning at SPA, New Delhi; N Sridharan, director of SPA, Bhopal; Saswat Bandhyopadhyay, professor at CEPT University, Ahmedabad; OP Agarwal, CEO, WRI India; Subrata Chattopadhyay of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; and Shreya Gadepalli (transport expert at Urban Works Institute) and R Sriniwas, a town and country planner at Town and Country Planning Organisation.

Land-use efficiency, transit-oriented development

The programme will cover emerging areas for sensitizing town planners. These would improve land use efficiency with the right kind of planning elements, ensure transit-oriented development and incentivize heritage conservation and infrastructure development through transferable development rights.

It would also focus on modernizing building byelaws or zoning regulations in terms of removing restrictions to promote development, officials said.

The focus will also be on integrating blue and green infrastructure and ensuring sustainability of green spaces and water resources.

The role of the expert committee will also be to identify subject-specific capacity-building institutions such as CEPT University, Schools of Planning and Architecture, Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her Budget speech that India @ 100 will become 40% urban and will have more people moving from rural to urban areas, forcing cities to accommodate bigger populations.

Satellite imagery, digitisation 

“For cities to expand, more sectors, extensions, layouts will be required for which the planning departments may not be ready. Town planners working in state departments need to be trained in emerging urban design concepts. Today, some of the positions are either manned by diploma holders or engineers, people who are not trained in town planning,” explained Rao.

For planning extensions, good roads, neighbourhoods, you require satellite imagery. For planning townships, you require geospatial information systems, you cannot undertake this exercise through traditional town planning methods.

British architect Edwin Lutyens may have surveyed what is today’s Central Delhi riding an elephant, but today you require satellite imagery, knowledge of digitization processes and use of drones to carry out surveys, Rao said, adding that many town planning department officials lack this knowledge.

The programme will include a variety of training capsules -- short training sessions on specific topics and some long-duration workshops on child-friendly neighbourhood, rainwater harvesting, waste management and multi-storey car parking and so on, Rao said.

These programmes will also help urban planners become aware of concepts such as mixed land use, transit-oriented development, transfer of development rights, green and blue infrastructure and land pooling. They will be able to learn how to implement these on the ground.

Climate-change impact, economic vision 

Planners will have to be trained on several new urban planning concepts. For example, in the case of land pooling, case study materials will have to be developed on how land pooling has been implemented in different cities, where it has been successful and places where it failed and why, Rao said.

Agarwal, CEO of WRI India, said such a programme should include in its ambit new urban development issues such as the impact of climate change.

“I think there are several new things in terms of how new cities should be planned. How do you embed climate change into urban planning as it was not part of the educational curriculum these planners have gone through. The emphasis should also be on urban planning with an economic vision. On how existing land is going to be used, where do you have residential areas, where do you have commercial areas, industrial areas etc. It is now increasingly being recognized that there should be an economic vision behind even land use planning and this has to be more on a regional basis,” he told Moneycontrol.

Finance minister Sitharaman had, in her Budget speech, announced that a high-level panel will be set up for urban planning and that institutes will frame policies for sustainable urban development for India @ 100.

India @ 100 

“By the time of India @ 100, nearly half our population is likely to be living in urban areas. To prepare for this, orderly urban development is of critical importance. This will help realise the country’s economic potential, including livelihood opportunities for the demographic dividend. For this, on the one hand we need to nurture megacities and their hinterlands to become current centres of economic growth. On the other hand, facilitate Tier 2 and 3 cities to take on the mantle in the future,” she said in her budget speech.

“This would require us to reimagine our cities into centres of sustainable living with opportunities for all, including women and youth…For this to happen, urban planning cannot continue with a business-as-usual approach,” she said.

“We need to facilitate Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities to take on the mantle in the future. This would require us to reimagine our cities into centres of sustainable living with opportunities for all, including women and youth,” she observed.

“We plan to steer a paradigm change. A high-level committee of reputed urban planners, urban economists and institutions will be formed to make recommendations on urban sector policies, capacity building, planning, implementation and governance,” she said.

States will be provided support for urban capacity building, Sitharaman said.

“Modernisation of building bye-laws, town planning schemes (TPS) and transit-oriented development (TOD) will be implemented,” she said, adding this would facilitate reforms for people to live and work closer to mass transit systems.

The Budget earmarked Rs 250 crore each for creation of five centres of excellence across India which would provide certified training in urban planning. The idea was to assist in fostering real estate development across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.