Empower Cities and Prioritise Public Infrastructure Over Mega-Projects

India's cities have built striking mega-projects such as stadiums, sea-link roads and metro lines, but they have a poor record of building the everyday public infrastructure that delivers lasting environmental and social benefits. Appeals to citizens to change personal habits, from working from home to pooling car rides, cannot succeed unless the city itself enables better choices. For residents struggling with air pollution, extreme heat and flooding, the gap between what is demanded of them and what is actually provided has rarely been wider.

Basic public infrastructure does outsized work. Safe footpaths, which the Supreme Court recently linked to a fundamental right, lower emissions by reducing car use and widen access to buses and metros, improving job prospects for low-income workers, especially women. Paved or green kerbs cut road dust more durably than the water-sprinkling many cities rely on. Public toilets extend women's mobility. These are unglamorous investments, but they shape daily life and sustainability far more than headline mega-projects.

Behind the building boom lies the most powerful and most corruptible instrument of urban governance: land-use decisions. What land is labelled residential or commercial, which highway corridor is sanctioned first, and who shapes the master plan all carry enormous value. When knowledge of how the state will tilt leaks to a few, it deepens information asymmetry and rewards insiders. A reported investigation into land dealings in Ujjain, where a politically connected family is said to have acquired many plots in zones marked for changes in land use, illustrates how such asymmetry can enable cronyism.

The remedy lies in empowering city governments and making land-use governance transparent and accountable. Municipal bodies need real powers, finances and capacity to plan and deliver public goods, while master-plan changes and approvals must be open to scrutiny to prevent capture. Prioritising broad-based public infrastructure over showpiece projects is both an environmental and a governance choice.

For aspirants, this connects urbanisation, municipal empowerment and the 74th Constitutional Amendment with the politics of land use and corruption. Strong exam hooks include the Supreme Court linking safe footpaths to a fundamental right, the role of master plans, and the case for transparent, accountable land-use governance in fast-urbanising India.