I'm wondering about the aw, actors and role of central/state government underneath zoning policy in India.

I would like to know which are the policies that regulate Zoning and urban planning, and what concretely happen.

This is what I have read so far, but I 'm still confused about taxes and fiscal regulation between Central and state level, which is relevant to understand the acquisition and distribution of land for urban planning.

--> The ‘master plan model’, covering a horizon of about twenty years, presents detailed view of the built-up form of an Indian city in its new-born urbanized country. Usually, plan implementation envisages the tool of legal protection to the plan, zoning, sub-division and building regulations, capital budgeting, infrastructure development, and urban renewal. Other instruments include taxation policy, particularly land and property taxation, land assembly, and capacity building. (Ahluwalia, 2014)

The master planning model, however, ignores the dimensions of city and regional economic growth. Land use planning and transportation planning have been pursued as separate processes in India, besides, the Master plans of cities haven’t been synchronized with their income distribution structure. There is need of strategic focused inclusionary urban planning and a need to stop informality at all levels and sectorsotherwise the urban population will continue to be deprived of ‘legal space’. (Mohanty, 2014 & Mishra, 2017)

Master plans, in the past, have not been rooted enough in regional planning,the inclusion of this government level will be occurred only with a grounded model of urban planning (Mohanty, pp85, 2014 & Mishra, pp193, 2017). According to Prasanna K. Mohanty (pp 5; 107-108, 2014) with “a rigid ‘plan-led’ model of development, these plans will adopt detailed zoning of land use and public acquisition of land, as key instruments for planned urbanization.“

The most important feature of all development plans dealing withthe implementation of the spatial plan are land use zoning, aimed at controlling the classification and at intensifying the land use. It also aimed at regulating development through planning permission.

Zoning is advocated to promote housing and local economic development. There is also a Committee on Urban Land Policy (1965), Ministry of Health, that identify the key issues of urban policies. (Mohanty, 2014)

Zoning regulation provide norms for conforming and non-conforming land uses, densities, infrastructures.Housing, including light and ventilation fire safety requirement, etc. Zoning regulation are supplemented by (1) sub-division regulations, prescribing street layouts, lot sizes, land allocation for public use, taxes and fees for infrastructure and civic services, etc. and (2) building codes, setting standards of construction. The objective of zoning is “to balance residential, commercial, institutional, and other land uses, correct for externalities due to factors like pollution, congestion, noise and indiscriminate conversion of agricultural land to urban use, and to provide for infrastructures facility”. (Mohanty. P (2014) pp76-78)

In fact, land use zoning in India is Euclideanbased, it means that it creates land use classifications (i.e. residential, multi-family, commercial) by geographic area, but instead of keeping those uses separate, land use in Indian cities typically builds off of the uses in one zone to create a more integrated approach.

Planning typically is done by the state, not the city, and only looks at main arterials, which results in streets like the above.  The smaller streets and the connections within an area are often missing. So while land use zoning fosters all facilities within walking distance, the connections to make that happen – the micro street grid – are missing, especially in new area as in Greater Noida, that we will illustrate later. (Jenkins, R. Kennedy, L., Mukhopadhayay, 2014)

Apparently, as United Kingdom did, there is a need for India to move towards decentralized and strategic urban planning.(Ahluwalia, 2014) The urban planning process must be responsive to current evolving demands. The planning system must also be dynamic to respond to the demands of structural and geographic transformation. (Jenkins, R. Kennedy, L., Mukhopadhayay, 2014) Policy-makers should consider urban planning development as “a ‘process of value creation’ through the market, giving ample scope for value captyre and recycling to promote inclusive urbanisation”.(Mohanty P., Mishra A.K, pp194; 213,2017)

As far as I know, there is also typically the problem of Land dispossession:

--> Today, there is a displacement from land: the land distribution is forced by the government for ‘public purpose’ through the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. There is need of land reform, especially a demand of policy for the fiscal regularization focused on fragmentation rather on dispossession: surplus land should be distributed due to demographic reasons. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act,2013 tried to address these issues. However, the issue has been re-opened by the PM Narendra Modi.(Chandrasekhar,C.P, 2017)

In this context of profound restructuring of the socio-economic order, India has chosen to accelerate industrial development by introducing the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) experiment among Indian states. (Jenkins, R. Kennedy, L., Mukhopadhayay, 2014) We will not develop the SEZ policy here, we are just remembering that SEZ represent a stylized microcosm of the spatial and temporal inequalities that have always taken place in India ‘s industrialization. SEZs is today one of the most controversial reform measures in India that accurately performed the “accumulation by dispossession” that was supposed to rationalized India. (Levien, M. (2012) in Chandrasekhar, C.P. 2017)