Travelling around Southern India in February 2025, which was a pleasant break from gloomy England, I was struck by the visible transformation since our previous Indian Urban Futures conference in Tirunelveli and Chennai back in 2019. Streets were cleaner, rural road surfaces have been upgraded, and new intercity highways have opened with imposing flyovers. Forests of new wind turbines are visible from the main roads and wind power now accounts for 23% of energy used in the Southern State of Tamil Nadu. Railway stations too have been upgraded to make crossing the line easier and now have electronic information boards. The long-distance trains are still crowded, with occasional delays, but 97% of the 65,000 route kilometres are electrified (compared with less than 40% in the UK.)
Southern India offers many memorable experiences, and it is always a pleasure to go back. The food is exceptional and the people are very friendly. The former metre gauge line across the Western Ghats from Kollam Junction to Tirunelveli, our destination, has been rebuilt to India’s standard gauge of 5’6’’ and offers a delightful way of crossing the country with some great views. It was also a pleasure to meet face to face with Charles from SCAD as well as Prachi Rampuria and Brian Love to discuss plans for the conference. Could India make more use of rail to avoid the trap of over-reliance on the private car and associated health problems.? Could planned towns or garden settlements offer a viable alternative to urban sprawl and tower blocks? And how can villages adapt to the challenges of the modern economy, and meet the needs and aspirations of younger people, who often leave to the cities to find jobs and other opportunities.
A better model for economic growth?
The national economy has been growing at 7%, the highest rate of any major economy. The South Eastern State of Tamil Nadu now has a population of 77 million, and is one of wealthiest states in India. There are concentrations of industry around the state capital of Chennai, formerly known as Madras. Yet most of the population still live in small villages, typically in units of several hundred families. Many live in the informal settlements which line the roads between towns. 40% of the population in India are still employed in agriculture with erratic incomes. Manufacturing employment and investment remain relatively low. Notable successes such as assembling Apple’s I-Phones in Bangalore (Bengaluru) – India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ could be limited due to high levels of pollution and congestion as well as by the supply of housing.
In recent years a great many people have escaped extreme poverty thanks to improved health and widespread education. India is now a leading player in the world economy and advances in IT are overcoming language barriers in a country knowns for its caste and religious differences. I discovered Tamil Nadu has done particularly well in a recent report from a French thinktank Institut Montaigne which compares it with the states of Gujerat and Bihar. The report makes some interesting points:
Tamil Nadu has also developed a very robust industrial sector, but it has relied more on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and has invested heavily in human resources. Not only are the inequalities more limited in Tamil Nadu than in most of the other states, but the level of education is also well above average. This other success story has also been seen as a “model” by its supporters, who have emphasized its societal dimension: for them, the state has capitalized on the egalitarian ethos of the Dravidians, the low-caste locals who emancipated themselves from the Brahminical elite in the twentieth century, arguing that they were the “sons of the soil,” whereas the upper castes were Aryan invaders. Tamil Nadu is a case of human resources–based development, combining industrialization and a service economy.[1]
The state of Tamil Nadu is sufficiently advanced and diverse to require a new model for urban development to make the most of its assets. It cannot simply rely on packing more people into its capital city. This means sorting out the relationship between growing cities and neighbouring villages. The adjoining state of Kerala already attracts many foreign visitors to enjoy its fine beaches and waterways, and there are lots of new hotels. But Tamil Ladu is still relatively unvisited and unspoilt despite its exceptional temples, mountain resorts such as Ooty, and a very large number of small rural villages. Housing, infrastructure and economic development need to be joined up, as is happening in Chennai. It would be tragic to repeat the mistakes that the UK and the USA made though allowing towns to sprawl into farm land, and then depending on private car ownership to get around.
Sharing experience on urban design
For most of the fortnight I was accompanied by Prachi Rampuria and Brian Love. Prachi, who teaches at Oxford Brookes University, has just published EcoResponsive Environments: a framework for settlement design, and has a planning and design practice in London which has been advising on the expansion of Letchworth Garden City. Brian’s ConnectedCities initiative is bearing fruit in England after many years hard work, and wanted to see whether it could work in India too. www.connectedcities.org Amirthan Charles, our project manager at SCAD (Social Change and Development) was a fountain of information as he took us around projects which are improving life in rural villagesm and made our complex trip trouble free. Charles had already opened up links with colleagues at FX Engineering College in Tirunelveli, and it was a pleasure to meet them face to face
Our visit started with flying into Calicut Airport in the North of Kerala, where we went on to stay at Calicut University’s visitor centre. We were greeted by staff at the Institute of Technology at Calicut University (CIT), the leading source of education for built environment professionals in Kerala. Our generous host was Dr Mohamed Firoz, who heads CIT one of the four new Regional Centres of Excellence for planning and design. CIT covers the whole of Southern India, five States in all. Calicut or Kozhikode is known for its fine sea food, was formerly a major trading centre for spices, and is a jumping-off point for the popular backwaters. We met staff who were keen to share experience, for example in using natural ventilation and insulation to avoid over reliance on air-conditioning.
India faces many of the same challenges as the UK for example in overcoming inequalities plus the additional pressures of coping with climate change that has led to water shortages and periodic flooding. As India extends its High-Speed rail line through the adjoining South Western state of Kerala there are similar arguments to those in the UK over how it connects up with existing settlements. Planning is still too weak to avoid land being wasted. While there is a mass of data freely available on land ownership or natural resources, there is an acute shortage of trained planners and urban designers to ensure the lessons are applied. As both India and the UK have associations for town planners and urban designers and English is used as a common language it may be possible to share expertise on topics of common interest such as coping with cars. But this will require collaboration to cross professional and other barriers. We learned that Calicut Institute of Technology already has links with Oxford Brookes University, which could be reinforced.
Garden Settlements for the 21st century
The main reason for our visit was to speak at the sixth Indian Urban Futures conference which we funded, and which was held at FX Engineering College in Tirunelveli. It was six years since we ran events in both Tirunelveli and Chennai on Building Eco-Neighbourhoods in Mid-Sized Cities, and attended the inauguration of the experimental SCAD URBED Ecohouse. www.urbedtrust.org This forms part of SCAD’s centre for sustainable development which they aptly call Garden of Delight. www.scad.org.in. This has been set up to raise awareness, educate the future generation, and provide a ‘multi-faceted oasis of sustainability. One innovation that might be copied in the UK is for students at SCAD institutions to spend 15 days a year working in villages putting what they have learned into practice.
We particularly wanted to see a possible site for a model garden settlement. SCAD had used its mapping skills to identify a promising site for a Garden Settlement for the 21st Century’. This lies next to a modern station on the main line twelve miles North of Tiruneveli by road, and on the main line to Madurai. However at present only two passenger trains a day stop there. A short talk away is a huge state-run industrial estate which has attracted Tata’s Renewable Energy Division to set up a large factory for making solar panels. Other hi-tech companies such as Bosch have set up there too. This could offer the perfect site for creating a model garden settlement or New Town. A model scheme would not only prove the viability of sustainable development, such as generating energy locally, but would also make it easier to attract and retain good staff. Hence we thought the idea should secure support from both businesses and the State government if it proved viable.
SCAD as a social catalyst
SCAD, which stands for Social Change and Development, is an award-winning group of social enterprises set up by Dr Cletus Babu, who now chairs the group. He started some 35 years ago in Cheranmahadevi on land owned by an Irish monastery that had fallen into disuse. SCAD is improving life in some 600 rural villages, working to support Womens Groups who pool resources. SCAD also believes in working with nature. Extensive tree planting grown from seeds by volunteers on the once bare hills of the Western Ghats has transformed the climate around Tirunelveli. We saw how water quality has also been upgraded, and the tanks renewed that retain monsoon waters.. SCAD has also raised educational levels through primary schools and its various technical colleges. 240 villages have benefited from new schools and water supplies. 2,000 kitchen gardens and microbe supplements are being used to improve soil quality and grow food locally. While this has not been enough to stem the flow of young men to the big cities, we were really impressed by what we saw and the people we met.
Our visits reinforced the view that SCAD offers a model for community engagement and rural development that the UK could well learn from. Significantly SCAD’s centre for sustainable development was inspired by a visit we ran to CAT, the Centre for Alternative Technology in Mid Wales, which shows the value of study tours. This led on to CAT running a course on getting to Net Zero for staff at SCAD. Our hope is that links will continue to grow, for example through students volunteering to work in one of SCAD’s many enterprises as part of their course.
What next for Indian Urban Futures?
The conference was a great success, drawing over a hundred participants with some ten expert presentations and of course we ran out of time. Videos and reports of our events are freely available on www.urbedtrust.com Over the course of two weeks we learned a great deal about the issues facing India, as it starts to urbanise on a major scale. Currently only a third of Indians are recorded as living in urban areas compared with the world average of a half. Much of growth has been in the mega cities such as Chennai, which attracts most of the investment. But housing has also spread out in ‘informal settlements’ all along the roads between towns and cities.
‘Ribbon developments’ could increase polarisation and traffic. There will also be growing congestion in towns as car ownership takes off. It is considered ‘smart’ to live in a modern apartment, built out of concrete, which is eating up natural resources and adding to carbon emissions. A barrage of Western style advertising on roadside poster sites promotes the merit of an individualistic consumer based life styles. Hence rural villages could end up becoming depopulated as young people look to the cities for a better life and their parents are left to fend on their own, as happened in England many years ago. Alternatively they could be swallowed up by urban expansion.
After the conference Cletus Babu asked how could the URBED Trust help narrow the gaps between life in the town and country Ebenezer Howard’s original ideas for Garden Settlements might help. His original Social City theme of organic growth was for a cluster of connected towns that combined the best of both town and country, that complemented each other rather than trying to be self-sufficient, and that were connected by high quality public transit. With English as the common language, and similar legal systems and institutions, there turned out to be interest in sharing good practice in urban planning, but it must relate to Indian conditions and values. So our small team of Prachi, Brian and myself came back committed to finding the resources to provide solutions, starting by looking at the opportunities in villages that SCAD works with, and at the scope for training young planners to help plan sustainable growth.
The report from the conference and related videos are available on www.urbedtrust.com in the section on Indian Urban Futures, and we welcome any reactions or offers of help.
Nicholas Falk, May 2025
[1] India: The challenge of concentrated regional dynamics, Institut Montaigne, 2025