How a 110-year-old planning tool let Ahmedabad grow fast and stay mostly legal β while Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru drowned in slums.
01 β The Problem
Why Indian cities produce slums
The standard Indian city playbook goes like this: draw a development plan, cap FSIFloor Space Index β ratio of total built-up floor area to plot area. FSI of 1.0 on a 100 sq.m. plot = you can build 100 sq.m. of floor space. low, restrict land supply, announce grand projects, execute almost none of them. Meanwhile, the city grows anyway β informally, illegally, without roads or sewers. Mumbai's slum population sits at roughly half the city. Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata β same pattern.
The author's question: is the failure baked into India, or baked into the rulebook? His answer lives 500 km north of Mumbai.
Think of it like a football club that keeps buying star forwards but never trains its academy. The talent is there. The system to develop it isn't. Ahmedabad is the club that invested in its academy β boring, patient, compounding.
02 β Geographic Luck
The head start nobody earned
Ahmedabad sits on the Sabarmati β dry nine months, a torrent for three. Geography handed it two gifts Mumbai never had:
Mumbai's constraints
Ahmedabad's advantages
Mumbai
Peninsula β sea on three sides, nowhere to expand
Land controlled by oligarchic trusts (mills, port, defence)
Every new sq.km. costs a fortune in reclamation or litigation
Result: artificial scarcity β sky-high rents β slums for half the city
Ahmedabad
Flat plain in every direction β hundreds of km before terrain changes
Farmland held in small parcels by ordinary cultivators, not oligarchs
No sea, no escarpment, no creek hemming it in
Result: expansion is cheap if you can organise it
The author is careful to note that geography only buys a chance β many flat Indian cities with cheap peripheries wasted the same opportunity completely. Ahmedabad eventually chose not to.
03 β The Old Playbook
The 1965 plan that didn't work
Ahmedabad's first Development Plan (1965) used the same Bombay Town Planning Act logic as Mumbai: green belt to contain outward growth, low FSI to keep buildings small, compulsory land acquisition for public purposes. The planner's instinct: contain, restrict, channel.
Industrial estates (Naroda, Vatva, Odhav) pulled in tens of thousands of workers. But nobody planned where they'd live. Low FSI kept legal housing scarce. Workers settled informally outside the green belt. The green belt itself got de-notified plot by plot through the '70s and '80s.
The plan that was supposed to contain the city just shifted where the unauthorised parts sprang up. By the mid-1990s, Ahmedabad looked like every other big Indian city β a statutory plan mostly ignored.
04 β The 1999 Turning Point
Three quiet amendments that changed everything
In 1999, Gujarat quietly amended its Town Planning & Urban Development Act. Almost nobody noticed. Three changes, each sounding technical and dull, each transformative in combination:
π§ The FSI Unlock
Drag the slider to see how raising FSI changes what you can build on the same plot of land.
Floors buildable (on 500 sq.m. plot)
2
Affordable 1BHK units (~45 sq.m.)
11
Mumbai stayed at ~1.0-1.33. Ahmedabad went to 1.8β5.4 along arterial roads.
πΊοΈ The Expansion Zone
100+ sq.km. of periphery zoned for new residential development. The green belt logic was abandoned. The planners accepted what the city had been saying for 30 years: it will grow β the question is whether growth is serviced or unserviced.
π€ The Town Planning Scheme
The state stopped compulsorily acquiring private land. Instead, it revived a 1915 colonial-era mechanism that had been sitting unused on the books. This is the tool that changed everything. See the next section.
05 β The Core Mechanism
Town Planning Scheme: land pooling that pays for itself
This is the tool that, more than any single other mechanism, explains how Ahmedabad ended up the way it did. Here's how it works:
Imagine a football club that doesn't buy a stadium β instead, it asks 200 local landowners to each contribute 40% of their plot. The club arranges the contributed land into a pitch, stands, parking, and access roads. Each landowner's remaining 60% is now worth 3β4x what it was, because it's next to a proper stadium with infrastructure. Everyone wins β no compulsory acquisition, no decade-long court cases. That's the TPS.
Interactive: Watch a TPS in action
Adjust the land contribution % and see how the scheme redistributes farmland into a serviced neighbourhood.
Before: Raw Farmland
After: Serviced Neighbourhood
Original farm plotsReturned to farmers (serviced)Roads & drainsParks & amenitySaleable surplus (funds infra)
60
% returned to farmers
25
% roads + parks + amenities
15
% saleable surplus
Compare: Acquisition vs. TPS
Compulsory Acquisition (Mumbai)
Town Planning Scheme (Ahmedabad)
The Delhi/Mumbai way
State forcibly acquires land for roads, schools, parks
Farmers fight in court β often for decades
State pays "market compensation" it can't always afford
Development delayed, often forever
City grows into the same land informally β no roads, no sewers
The Ahmedabad way
Planning authority declares intent, draws layout over existing holdings
Each farmer gets back ~60% β but now serviced, with road access and clear title
Pooled 40% becomes roads, parks, school plots, affordable housing plots
Surplus plots (~15%) auctioned to fund the infrastructure itself
Scheme is self-financing β no acquisition budget needed
18
TPS completed before 1999
50+
TPS completed after 1999
5,000+
hectares serviced (completed)
~4,900
hectares in process
The TPS is not a Gujarati invention. Its legal basis is the Bombay Town Planning Act of 1915, modelled on English instruments. Maharashtra's successor act has the same provisions β it just stopped using them after the 1960s. Gujarat kept at it until it got good.
06 β The Compounding
Each project built on the last
Ahmedabad's transformation wasn't one big bet β it was a sequence of projects, each building institutional capacity for the next.
07 β The Punchline
Legal housing changes lives
The author's sharpest observation: a clerk earning βΉ30,000/month who would live in a chawl room in Mumbai can get a one-bedroom flat in an Ahmedabad walk-up. He doesn't live well β but he lives legally.
Ahmedabad has more legal housing stock to absorb the lower-middle income bands β partly because of higher FSI in formal areas, partly because TPS expansions produced serviced plots that small developers can build cheap apartments on.
Slum population as % of city
Mumbai
~50%
Ahmedabad
~25%
This is not because Ahmedabad's poor earn more β they typically earn less in absolute terms than their Mumbai counterparts.
The point of urban planning is not to produce a beautiful city. The point is to produce a city in which working people can find a roof through legal channels.
The wrong lesson: "Gujarat is special β something about its culture produces results no other state could replicate." That's not an explanation, it's an excuse. The TPS has a 110-year pedigree and is legally available in Maharashtra too. What Ahmedabad had was not genius β it was consistency.
The boring secret of Ahmedabad
Indian cities don't fail because they can't imagine better. They fail because they can't execute what they've already imagined. Ahmedabad used one medium-sized idea β organise land, don't take it β applied steadily for 25 years, by people who mostly didn't get famous. That compound interest is the whole story.