India must treat design as a civic skill to build more liveable cities

India’s cities are expanding upwards, outwards, and into new forms of daily life. While the urban landscape evolves at extraordinary speed, the institutions shaping it have barely kept pace. The result is a tension visible in every metropolis: Design problems that everyone can see, and a municipal architecture too constrained to solve them at scale. Improving the design of cities, then, requires more than better drawings or clever guidelines. It demands building the design capacity of the state itself, so that good ideas are not defeated by the very procedures meant to deliver them.

 

The scale of the challenge becomes clearer when one examines who is expected to design India’s urban future. A few years ago, UN-Habitat estimated that India has just 0.23 urban planners per 100,000 people, compared with 38 per 100,000 in the UK, and below Nigeria, which stands at around 1.4. The Town and Country Planning Organisation records only 3,945 sanctioned town-planning posts across all states and Union Territories combined. For a country with nearly 8,000 urban centres, the paucity is staggering. NITI Aayog’s 2021 assessment found that over half of India’s statutory towns have no master plan, and close to three-quarters of census towns have urbanised in the absence of any formal spatial framework. Yet the absence of planners is only part of the story. India’s city-making machinery, from budgeting, procurement, maintenance, departmental silos is structured in ways that often override, dilute or reverse design intent. Even when cities know what to build, the how defeats them.

 

This is why design failures in India cannot be understood purely as aesthetic or infrastructural shortcomings. A dangerous intersection, an unusable footpath, or a metro station hostile to pedestrians is rarely the product of one poor decision. It is the cumulative outcome of processes that were never built to integrate design thinking in the first place. Correcting India’s urban form, therefore, requires nurturing design intelligence not just among specialists but across the entire governance ecosystem.

 

Design, in the civic sense, is not about ornamentation. It is about alignment between the built environment and human behaviour, between mobility and safety, between public investment and public experience. The World Bank’s work on liveable cities stresses this repeatedly: Infrastructure succeeds only when it is designed around how people actually use it, not how bureaucracies imagine they should. United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) design-thinking frameworks go further, describing public systems that listen before deciding, test solutions before scaling them, and view citizens as co-creators rather than passive recipients.

 

This approach is needed in India, where municipal routines still default to a mid-20th-century logic. Budgets are allocated departmentally rather than by outcome, such as walkability or heat resilience. Procurement frameworks reward the lowest-cost contractor even for complex public-space or transport projects where design quality determines long-term performance.  In such a system, design intent disintegrates on contact. The newly built footpath that narrows unexpectedly, the bus stop placed in full afternoon sun, the flyover that channels pedestrians into blind corners are the visible symptoms of a capacity failure. The people making daily operational decisions — engineers, ward officers, contractors, accounts clerks, traffic police — rarely receive training in spatial thinking or user-centred design, yet they shape more of the city than any architect ever will.

 

Some Indian cities are beginning to experiment with this shift, even if unevenly. Chennai’s “Complete Streets” programme, for instance, moved beyond one-off beautification by training engineers, updating street design templates, and piloting corridors that were refined through on-ground observation of pedestrian behaviour. Pune’s street design guidelines similarly offered departments and contractors a shared framework, modestly improving consistency in implementation. Surat’s resilience planning has attempted to integrate climate data, flood patterns and land-use decisions, treating extreme weather as a design and governance issue rather than a purely emergency response. These efforts are far from perfect, but they show what can happen when design principles start entering municipal routines rather than remaining isolated in consultant reports. Even India’s flagship metros are recognising the costs of neglected design capacity. In Bengaluru, the newly constituted Greater Bengaluru Authority recently moved to recruit in-house urban designers and planners after years of public frustration with flooding, fractured footpaths and uncoordinated projects. These efforts are telling without embedded design intelligence; even significant investment yields disappointing outcomes.

 

What would it mean, then, to treat design as a civic skill? It would mean shifting budgets from line items to outcomes — for example, not “₹X crore for roads” but “X per cent improvement in pedestrian safety”. It would mean procurement models that evaluate quality and usability, not just cost. It would mean training ward engineers to evaluate projects by walking them as end-users, not just reviewing drawings. It would mean that citizens including street vendors, commuters, students, waste workers are invited into the design process because they hold the tacit knowledge planners often miss.

 

Much of the infrastructure the country will rely on in 2050 has not yet been built. Decisions taken now will lock in mobility patterns, heat exposure, public life and climate resilience for generations. Good design will matter and so does the capacity to deliver good design. India needs more design-thinkers inside its institutions. If it becomes a normal part of governance, then cities will begin to work in ways that feel intuitive rather than exhausting. The challenge is immense, but the opportunity is greater.

The author is chair, Institute for Competitiveness.

X: @kautiliya. With inputs from Meenakshi Ajith