Urban Development

With unprepared institutions, rapid growth, stretched infrastructure and proliferating low income settlements, urban India presents a challenge for policy makers, city administrators, business and civil society. At TARU, we aim at pro-poor urban governance and planning in the firm belief that a vibrant, viable City is one that responds to its poor.

Our policy and regulatory assessments, strategic reviews of Development Partner-supported initiatives and city infrastructure investment planning exercises have consistently reflected the special situation of the urban poor and successfully integrated pro-poor governance and planning elements. Assessment tools such as the Infrastructure Deficiency Service Analysis (IDSA) that we have deployed and slum improvement models that we have conceptualized and implemented have broken new ground.

As Country Partner to the recently launched Asian Cities Climate Change Resource Network (ACCCRN), we are working on strategies that will enable urban India to prepare, withstand and recover better from Climate Change.

Strategizing, designing and reviewing several ‘generations’ of Development Partner-supported Urban Sector initiatives in Andhra Pradesh, Bengaluru, Cuttack, Gangtok, Lucknow and Kolkata has provided us an opportunity to engage with, and influence, the Sector’s evolving reform agenda and, importantly, devise and reinforce elements of pro-poor urban governance and planning in each instance.

Elements of pro-poor urban governance and planning that we have devised and reinforced, in turn, have owed to our extensive research on poverty and our city infrastructure planning experience. We have undertaken urban poverty assessments in over a dozen major cities and played a key role in the Urban Services Master Plans and infrastructure investment and implementation planning for Bengaluru, Gangtok, Lucknow and Panjim.

Slum infrastructure models we conceptualized and implemented in Bengaluru and Lucknow broke new ground. Lucknow saw one of the first comprehensive attempts to link local slum infrastructure upgradation with citywide infrastructure development. Based on a phased area upgradation approach and linked to incremental standards, this demand-driven framework for participatory planning and monitoring was taken forward in Bengaluru.