India's Trickiest Urban Planning Obstacle? Gandhi's Legacy

BANGALORE, India — Before he became India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru received a letter from his mentor. “I am convinced,” the sender, Mohandas Gandhi, wrote, “that if India is to attain true freedom, and through India the world also, then sooner or later the fact must be recognized that people will have to live in villages, not towns; in huts, not in palaces. Crores [tens of millions] of people will never be able to live in peace with each other in towns and palaces.”

Six decades later, there are three Indian cities where over 10 million people live with each other. In 1951, four years after Independence, five Indian cities had populations over one million. Today, there are 53. And the growth is not relenting: one estimate pegs the capacity that Indian cities must expand by at 400 percent over the next 50 years, a growth rate needed to accommodate the nearly one billion expected additions to the population.