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This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here. 

In my previous blog, I had listed out the modalities by which the spatial planning process could be split, so as to distribute the responsibilities to the state and to the local governments. While the state is best positioned to undertake the perspective plan and the regional plans that covers urban and rural areas, each city town and Panchayat will have to prepare its detailed master plan. Following the preparation of these master plans, each local government will then have to prepare its CDP, the City Development Plan, which in turn will comprise implementable projects. Then, to ensure that this does not remain on paper, the projects listed in the CDP will have to be funded, by the LG budgets allocating funds for these.

Yet, is this enough for the extraordinary and grim reality that may strike us in future, due to climate change? Won’t these processes still result in haphazard development, with each local government being blissfully unaware of what is happening in the next local government, and the state unable to rein in local decisions to the extent required for the common good?

The future is not going to be easy for any state to tackle. There are several Hobson’s choices before the state, when planning for a safe and climate resilient Kerala. Besides, as I said earlier, Kerala’s approach is only a case study; each state in India is faced with making these choices in their own climatic and environmental contexts.

Let us get back to Kerala, though.

Land is at a premium in Kerala like in very few states. Caught as it is between the environmentally sensitive coast and the Western Ghats, there is very little by way of available land for future expansion. Take further into account the fact that the natural topography of the land has resulted in wetlands that are fit for nothing other than paddy cultivation, the area available for habitation expansion narrows down further. The traditional Malayali abhors high rises; never is she happier than to live in their sprawling village homes in the midst of plantations of coconut and banana. But the days when every Malayali could afford not only to dream of bucolic rural living, but actually go out and live that dream, are long gone. The compromise is an uneasy one; turn a corner in a sylvan village in Kerala and one may come across a row of flats. Urban housing in completely rural settings. This low density sprawl is the uneasy compromise that most Malayalis have reconciled themselves to; if not a coconut tree in my backyard, why not some fronds in my apartment verandah? However, the recent floods have shown that such sprawls also put a high pressure on the environment; roads that cater to these dispersed apartment blocks and housing areas cut into hillsides and destroy the environment. There is thus a strong case for Kerala to go in for more densification in its urban areas so as to prevent the medium rise sprawl spreading out into precious and environmentally sensitive rural, coastal and hill areas. Densification is an euphemism for high rise structures. Kerala will have to make the choice to enable more high rise islands of urbanisation to be developed so as to reduce the pressure on rural land. This will be a political anathema to most people and will go against traditional beliefs and practices on lifestyles. But is there a choice?

A similar choice has to be made with respect to transport as well. Anyone who travels on National Highway 47, which serves Central and South Kerala would realise that Kerala is now one gigantic traffic jam. When the floods hit the state, the road was breached between Palakkad and Trissur due to landslides. This section of road is a bottleneck as road widening has to be done after denotifying forest areas. A similar bottleneck exists between Alappuzha, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram, where the process of land acquisition for widening the road to four lanes has been proceeding slowly and painfully. The local people do not give up their land so easily.

At the same time, the Kochi Metro has been a success of sorts; it follows more or less the path of the National Highway, from the northern to the southern reaches of the city. It begs the thought as to whether the Metro may not be extended along the spine of Kerala; it may be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly approach than widening highways, which has proven to be a bugbear in Kerala.

The third example is that of solid waste management. This issue has become a contentious one between local governments, because nobody wants to have a landfill in their locality. City municipalities have been blocked by peri-urban Panchayats from dumping their garbage in the latter’s environs. Political parties have justifiably crossed swords on this issue; which has not led to the finding of solutions but a gridlock. Even though solid waste management is a local government responsibility, the situation at present begs for the intervention of the state; as it is the state alone that may be able to find a solution to the problem of landfills. It will be the burden of the state to find place for a few landfills that cater to the requirements of all local governments in Kerala, even as the latter initiate and implement strict standards on segregation and recycling.

There will be many more such choices to be made, with respect to equal access to services, ensuring social justice and such like. But given the potential threat to Kerala from climate change, wicked problems cannot be allowed to fester. The floods have been a wakeup call. The people of the state cannot afford to go back to sleep.

This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here. 

In my last blog I wrote about various new and innovative approaches to urban planning, which aimed to address the problems of traditional rigid approaches. However, we just cannot wish away the fact that implementation of plans will remain a problem as it is dependent upon broader socio-political factors outside the control of the planning system. It is not going to be easy to change the regulatory system and enforce decisions that are in the larger interest of society, because of entrenched legal rights and interests.

Having said that, a good place to start is to check out the different kinds of planning envisaged in the law. In the case of Kerala, as shown in the Working Group Report, there is a great deal of fragmentation when it comes to different planning exercises. The Kerala Town and Country Planning Act 2016 provides for the following kinds of plans to be prepared (Table 1):

At the same time, there are other planning processes that straddle the spatial planning aspect  and that are still in vogue, either as statutory processes, or as mandated by various funding programmes for urban development (Table 2):

The dichotomy between Tables 1 and 2 illustrate the wide variation between the approach taken by the Town and Country Planning Act 2016 and the adaptive approaches to urban planning envisaged through various schemes and guidelines. This creates plenty of scope for confusion and lack of coordination.

How does one overcome this recipe for planning disaster? The best way would be to reduce the number of planning exercises to the minimum required and then ensure that they interlink with each other in a manner that is easy to understand.

It is the state’s responsibility to approve the perspective plan covering the entire physical area of the state, including both rural and urban areas. At the same time, such an exercise cannot be undertaken without consultation with citizens. The best way to do this would be for the state government to declare a Charter of Urban reforms and Urban Governance Improvement Measures, in which planning is a key component.

There must be a regional plan, which conforms to the broad non-negotiable principles enunciated in the Charter of Urban reforms. The Regional Plan would guide individual master plans for each LG within the region. The emphasis in the Regional Plan would be on recognising the potential for economic growth of the UA concerned and strategising for reaching it.

Every city, town and /or Panchayat within the UA can prepare its detailed Master Plan within the broad framework of the Regional Plan. Whilst doing so, the Master Plan for each LG should not be developed as self-contained plans in isolation of each other. The Master Plan would then become the ‘comprehensive long term development policy’ for the LG, within the overall context of the urban agglomeration.

Then would come the next level of detail, which is the CDP for each local government, with a 5 to 10 year perspective.

Finally, the CDP is split into programmes; and implementable projects.

In my last and final blog on Kerala’s spatial planning, I will lay down the institutional mechanism that could support such an approach, as also what are the Hobson’s choices before the state, when planning for a safe and climate resilient Kerala.

This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here and the previous blog here. 

To say that there must be a spatial approach to local planning, would sound like the ultimate cliché. Is there any other approach? One might well ask. However, the fact that spatial considerations are dismissed during local planning, is clear in the kinds of violations that come to light when there is a natural disaster. The floods in Bangalore a couple of years back resulted in plenty of damage to houses along the drainage canals – the Rajakaluves. So did the floods in Uttarakhand, where houses perilously closed to the banks of the Ganga were washed away. However, in both cases, these buildings ought not to have been there in the first place; they were encroachments and unauthorised constructions.

In Kerala, the creeping occupation of paddy lands through slow conversion into coconut gardens, and then house sites, is against the law that prevents the construction of buildings in such low lying areas. However, these considerations are ignored, till damage is suffered in a flood.

It is paradoxical that in Kerala, which takes a participatory approach to the process of budgeting, there is not as much participation in the process of spatial planning. Campaign mode participatory planning approaches in the state have focused on how budgets for local governments should be spent, with little regard for where the facilities on which they are spent are to be located. This has resulted in a dichotomy, with spatial planning remaining a technocratic process, whilst budgeting has been invested with participatory processes.

Kerala passed a new Town and Country Planning Act in 2016, which provides for Perspective plan preparation at the State, District and Metropolitan areas, Master Plans for Municipalities and Panchayats and Detailed Town Planning Schemes within each local government. The master plan is the key document, and it is supposed to include a situational analysis of the present state of development, a long term development concept and strategy for about 20 years. It also includes land use proposals, development control regulations and infrastructure development plans, which covers the hierarchy of commercial areas, dispersal of commercial activities and industries, population assignment, space requirement for various activities and designating land use for various activities such as reserving land for ecologically sensitive areas. In furtherance of these, regulations for land use are also to be put down, including details like FAR, height and number of storeys and other density related matters.

That sounds wonderful, but it hasn’t worked in the past. Equal to the effort put in to make master plans, is the effort made to ignore them. Master plans are seen as narrow, regulatory instruments that impose unwarranted and inflexible restrictions on land use. Therefore, even the Municipalities that are supposed to follow them, disregard them in favour of short term, day to day approaches towards building licence sanction. There is tension between the Town Planning Department that makes master plans and the Municipalities, which choose to ignore them. Finally, the absence or violation of master planning is only noticed when large scale problems arise as in the recent floods.

Seen from that angle, the natural answer would be that Kerala needs to enforce the compliance to its master plans. However, that in itself would be hampered because many of the Municipalities do not have currently valid or updated Master Plans.

But even as we go down the conventional approach of strict compliance to master plans, internationally, there has been a growing disillusionment with conventional master planning! This is a paradox, because internationally, in the developed world, the trend is to make master planning flexible and participatory, whereas we might still be going down the path of adopting top-down, technical and expert-driven approaches to master planning and land-use zoning, which are at odds with community priorities, leading to poor ownership of master plans and implementation failure.

The Kerala report puts it succinctly when it says;

“The disconnect between people and master plans have led to two trends. Where Master Plans are strongly enforced, those who cannot afford to comply have been pushed out to areas where they can evade detection, such as slums. Where Governments have lacked the capacity to enforce master plans, it has led to a free for all where even the fundamental norms of master planning are ignored. Either way, unrealistic planning regulations have directly contributed to the exacerbation of poverty and spatial marginalization, forcing the poor to violate laws in order to survive”.

The report also points out that another reason for the discrediting of conventional master planning has been the fragmentation of the responsibility for its preparation and implementation in various departments and local government levels. In particular, this has delinked the directive aspects of spatial planning from day to day regulation and land-use management. Furthermore, when spatial plans were not linked to how budgets are prepared and funds allocated, the ensuing lack of coordination has resulted in spatial plans being simply ignored in the scheme of things. This leads to a paradox; departments concerned with urban infrastructure often ignore master plans in the face of the need to solve emergent problems, overlooking the fact that if Master Plans were indeed complied with, these problems might not have emerged in the first place.

So, if that is the case; if we are at one level opposed to master planning as it is unrealistic, but at the same time fear that the absence of some regulation will lead to a free for all with disastrous environmental consequences, is there a golden mean somewhere?

More about that in my next blog.