Building Sustainable and Inclusive Cities in India: Key Challenges

India is in the middle of one of the largest urban transitions in human history. Cities already generate the bulk of national economic output, yet they also concentrate some of the country’s hardest problems in a small geographic space. The goal of building a sustainable city (one that lives within ecological limits) and an inclusive city (one that works for everyone, not just the affluent) often pulls in opposite directions on the ground. Understanding why these two ideals are so difficult to achieve together is the first step toward planning cities that can actually deliver both.

Why sustainability and inclusion clash in fast-growing cities 🔗

A useful way to see the problem is as a paradox. Urban growth creates jobs, services, and opportunity, which is exactly why people move to cities. But the same growth, when it happens faster than planning and infrastructure can keep up, produces pollution, displacement, and exclusion. According to a review of urbanisation trends in India, expanding cities routinely cause environmental degradation, social inequality, and infrastructure strain at the same time, which makes sustainability genuinely hard to achieve. The challenge is not growth itself, but managing it so the benefits are shared and the costs are contained.

The three pressures that follow (environmental deterioration, climate vulnerability, and the urbanisation of poverty) are deeply linked. Environmental damage hits the poorest residents first. Climate shocks deepen poverty. And poverty pushes people into the very settlements that are most exposed to environmental harm. They form a cycle, not a checklist.

Environmental deterioration and resource depletion 🔗

Rapid, unplanned expansion is the single biggest driver of urban environmental decline. As built-up areas spread outward, forests, wetlands, and farmland are converted into concrete, and the natural systems that once absorbed water, cleaned air, and cooled neighbourhoods disappear. The result is a measurable drop in environmental quality across most large Indian cities.

Air, water, and the loss of green cover 🔗

Air quality is the most visible casualty. Vehicular emissions, industrial activity, construction dust, and the open burning of waste combine to produce dangerous levels of pollution, and several Indian cities regularly appear on global lists of the most polluted urban centres. Water is the second front. Untreated sewage and industrial effluent flow into rivers and lakes, with urban waterways like the Yamuna and the Mithi turning into heavily contaminated channels. At the same time, the steady conversion of parks, ponds, and open ground into “grey” built space reduces the green cover that cities depend on for cleaner air and natural cooling.

The role of slums and over-urbanisation 🔗

Over-urbanisation, where population growth outpaces the capacity of a city to absorb it, feeds directly into environmental stress. When formal housing and services cannot expand fast enough, people settle in informal areas with inadequate sewage, drainage, and waste collection. Overcrowded conditions and improper waste disposal then add to pollution and the degradation of land and water. This is not a moral comment on the residents of these settlements; it is a consequence of cities failing to plan for the people they attract. Tackling environmental deterioration therefore cannot be separated from the question of where the urban poor are expected to live.

Climate change vulnerability in Indian cities 🔗

If environmental deterioration is the slow problem, climate change is the accelerating one. Indian cities are increasingly exposed to extreme weather, and the damage falls hardest on low-lying and poorly drained areas. Urban flooding, once an occasional event, has become a recurring crisis in Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Delhi over the past two decades.

Why low-lying and coastal areas are at risk 🔗

Coastal megacities face a double threat: heavier rainfall on one side and rising seas on the other. A study published in Scientific Reports on sea level rise found that Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai are especially vulnerable because of their low elevation and dense populations, with extensive flooding projected under high-emission scenarios. Reporting on the same research notes that these cities sit at higher baseline sea levels and face peak flood intensity across their coastal and riverfront zones, which is why embedding climate-resilient infrastructure into long-term planning is treated as urgent.

Drainage built for a different era 🔗

The infrastructure problem makes the climate problem worse. Much of the drainage in Indian cities was designed decades ago for far smaller populations and lighter rainfall. Mumbai’s stormwater system, parts of which date back to the colonial period, was built to handle around 25 mm of rain per hour, while the city now sees downpours well above 100 mm per hour. When short, intense bursts of rain (sometimes called cloudbursts) hit a city that has also paved over its wetlands and water bodies, the runoff has nowhere to go. The flooding that follows is therefore a planning failure as much as a weather event.

The unequal burden of climate shocks 🔗

Climate vulnerability is not evenly shared. Analysis of recent urban flooding points out that coastal slums in Mumbai face repeated flooding and the threat of sea-level rise, Kolkata’s low-lying informal neighbourhoods struggle with waterlogging and damaged sanitation during heavy rain, and informal workers in Bengaluru and Chennai are increasingly exposed to heatwaves because of overcrowded housing and limited green space. When a flood or heatwave strikes, daily-wage earners lose both their homes and their income at once. Adaptation, in other words, is also a question of equity.

The urbanisation of poverty 🔗

The third challenge ties the first two together. As migration drives people into cities faster than housing and jobs can keep pace, poverty itself is becoming an urban phenomenon. People arrive in search of work, but many find that cities carry their own hardships, funnelling new arrivals into the informal economy as street vendors, domestic workers, construction labourers, and waste pickers with little security.

Slums and the housing shortfall 🔗

The clearest symptom is the persistent housing gap. Despite government programmes, the supply of affordable homes meets only a fraction of demand. Data linked to Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban points to a shortfall running into millions of housing units across Indian cities, which forces low-income families to settle in whatever informal space they can find, often on marginal land along railway lines, drains, and flood-prone zones. Mumbai illustrates the structural nature of the gap: the city needs roughly a hundred thousand new apartments a year but builds only around a fifth of that. This is a deficit decades in the making, not the failure of a single government.

Inequality in access to basic services 🔗

Inclusion is about more than a roof. Urban services are unevenly distributed, so that affluent neighbourhoods may enjoy round-the-clock piped water while nearby low-income areas rely on intermittent supply, shared taps, or costly private tankers. Sanitation, healthcare, and quality schooling follow the same pattern. Researchers describe this as socio-economic segregation, where city development increasingly caters to the wealthy while leaving the broader population to cope with breakdowns. Social factors such as caste, religion, and a migrant’s regional identity can further shape who gets to live where, layering exclusion on top of economic disadvantage.

Policy responses and their limits 🔗

India has built a substantial policy toolkit to address these gaps. Beyond PMAY-U for affordable housing, schemes like AMRUT for urban infrastructure, the Smart Cities Mission, and the Deen Dayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission for skilling and livelihoods all aim at more inclusive cities. Yet implementation tells a more mixed story. Analysis of these interventions notes that flagship efforts such as the Dharavi redevelopment in Mumbai face delays, land-acquisition hurdles, financing gaps, and resistance from residents who fear losing their place in the city. The lesson is that inclusive policy on paper does not automatically produce inclusive outcomes; the design and delivery matter as much as the budget.

Connecting the three challenges 🔗

The deepest difficulty in building sustainable and inclusive cities is that these challenges reinforce one another. Environmental degradation lowers the quality of life most sharply in poor areas. Climate shocks hit the badly drained, low-lying settlements where the poor are pushed to live. And the housing shortage keeps producing exactly those exposed settlements. A solution that treats any one of these in isolation (cleaning a river while ignoring sanitation in nearby slums, or building flood barriers while displacing the families behind them) will tend to fail. Genuine progress depends on planning that treats environment, climate resilience, and inclusion as a single problem rather than three separate ones.

What do you think? Should Indian cities prioritise upgrading existing slums in place, or invest in building large stocks of new affordable housing elsewhere, and what would each choice mean for both sustainability and inclusion? When a climate-resilient project requires moving residents off vulnerable land, where should the line be drawn between protecting people and respecting their right to stay in the city they help run?

References

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392245779_URBANIZATION_IN_INDIA_TRENDS_CHALLENGES_AND_STRATEGIES_FOR_SUSTAINABLE_GROWTH
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-13394-5
3. https://www.indiaspend.com/climate-change/indias-coastal-cities-face-heavy-flooding-risk-due-to-sea-level-rise-970906
4. https://m.thewire.in/article/urban/as-flooding-wreaks-havoc-across-cities-a-nudge-for-urban-policy-to-address-climate-change/amp
5. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/
6. https://iisppr.org.in/urbanization-poverty-and-policy-interventions-in-india-challenges-and-pathways-forward/