In the heart of the capital, over a thousand families watched helplessly as bulldozers shattered their homes, reducing lifetimes of hope to dust. On the fringes of another metropolis, a factory explosion claimed the lives of migrant workers, men and women who had journeyed far in search of opportunity, only to find tragedy.
Few other metropolises saw simmering tensions over language and identity leading to vandalism; while in others, the so‑called “middle class” endures endless, rain‑choked traffic jams and polluted air, daily reminders of how fragile urban life can be. These aren’t isolated incidents; they reveal a deeper reality.
Every year, countless people leave their villages and small towns for the city, chasing the promise of work that rural life can no longer provide. But what is the cost of this migration?
For many, the financial burden is only the beginning. There’s the daily grind of physical exhaustion, the weight of cost of urban life, the anxiety of insecure jobs, and perhaps most profoundly, the ache of alienation, of always being an outsider in a city buckling under the weight of never-ending ambitions and limited infrastructure.
Yet amid crumbling facades, the city keeps selling dreams, fuelling the engines of power and profit for those in charge.
It remains a magnet, even as it fails its most faithful. So the question remains: why do millions still wager everything on city life, when the cost so often outweighs the promise?
Our Historical Fixation with ‘Mahanagars’
For decades, we’ve been told that India’s future lies in its cities. But is this urban fixation a colonial legacy, or the product of post-independence elitism?
Think back to the old Doordarshan bulletins; they dutifully reported the weather in four mahanagars: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Madras (now Chennai), as if the rest of the country barely existed.
Ironically, the climate conditions in rural India, where farmers grow food for the entire nation, should have been a national priority. Yet, through this narrow lens, development came to mean cities, and cities came to mean opportunity for success.
This gave rise to the gospel of urban development, marketed as flawless and unquestionable.
We were told Bengaluru’s traffic chaos just needed one more flyover. Hyderabad’s vanishing lakes were minor glitches in a heroic growth saga. Mumbai would be saved by a coastal road. But let’s be honest: this story is broken. India’s urban development model has long exhausted its logic, land, and legitimacy. Yet the illusion persists, not because it helps citizens, but because it profits planners, builders, and investors.
The Myth of Urban Inclusivity
City life is often praised for being a melting pot of opportunity, but this is a half-truth at best. In reality, they are collections of invisible villages, where caste, religion, and class draw sharp, often unspoken boundaries. Migrants from small towns or villages may share the same urban skyline, but they live in self-segregated enclaves, ghettos of fear, aspiration, or exclusion.
As the work of Langdon Winner reminds us, infrastructure isn’t neutral; it encodes power. The very design of our cities, communities, segregated slums, and elite high-rises embeds social hierarchies into concrete. The idea that cities are inclusive is more myth than reality.
Bengaluru, for example, once India’s tech pride, is now buckling under unchecked growth, unchecked influx of migrants, and depleting natural resources. With this approach, every new traffic fix will be outdated on arrival, overwhelmed by endless waves of people, construction, and vehicles. With infrastructure maxed out and no room left to expand, the city doesn’t need more concrete, it needs urgent decongestion.
The same applies to Hyderabad, Gurugram, and many other Indian metropolises. While gleaming towers rise in the small patches of land, stress shows in access to natural resources, infrastructure, healthy and inclusive living spaces.
Yet real estate prices stay inflated, not because of demand for liveability, but due to speculation.
The market thrives on the illusion of future prosperity, not present functionality.
And haven’t we played the suburb game already? Navi Mumbai, Noida, and Gachibowli, poised to be relief zones, they’ve only replicated the chaos. Sprawling with poor planning and inadequate infrastructure, they offer no real solution.
Development For Who Exactly?
India is still a country of villages; over 65 percent of its population is rural. Yet development is imagined only in terms of metros, malls, and skyscrapers. Why? Because rural development doesn’t bring quick investor returns and there are hardly much formal employment opportunities there. The recent World Bank–Government of India report (2025) highlights that conventional employment in India is now largely an urban phenomenon, concentrated in metropolitan centres.
More concerning, however, is the report’s warning that these very metropolises are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Haphazard construction and unplanned growth have severely disrupted natural ecosystems, giving rise to urban heat islands, where night-time temperatures are 3-4°C higher than in surrounding rural areas.
Poor infrastructure now causes flash floods even after light rainfall, already leading to $4 billion in annual losses, a figure expected to surge to $30 billion by 2070. Meanwhile, air quality continues to decline due to the relentless increase in vehicles, and public transport remains overcrowded and inadequate.
The Tragedy of Rural India
But let’s not romanticise rural India either. Years of neglect have pushed many villages into crisis. Shrinking farmlands, unregulated construction, and lack of waste systems have turned once-thriving communities into fragile zones. Practices like reverse boring deplete groundwater and contaminate drinking supplies.
The rural crisis is no longer about the absence of development; it’s about active degradation.
So, if we return to rural India, the approach can’t be concretisation. It must acknowledge the damage and focus on rebuilding with ecological and social intelligence. That means modernising agriculture sustainably, enforcing land use planning, stopping unregulated borewells, and investing in resilient water and waste infrastructure. New rural policies must learn from both urban failures and past rural neglect.
The Missing Vision in Indian Urban Development
We need a new national imagination, one that values balance over bloat. Development must be measured not by towers built, but by lives improved, beyond exclusion. Rather than patching up dying cities, it’s high time we should focus on our ailing villages.
This rebalancing won’t happen on its own. It requires a fundamental policy shift, away from urban over-concentration and toward genuine decentralisation. We must stop designing a nation only for those in gated apartments. And most of all, we must stop confusing concretisation with urban development.
(Sharique Hassan Manazir is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kautilya School of Public Policy, Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)