Why Are Open Spaces Deteriorating in Indian Cities?

Walk through any Indian city today and you will notice a quiet pattern. The neighbourhood park where children once played is now a parking lot. The playground attached to the school has a wedding hall growing out of it. The lake that appeared on the older city map is now a housing colony. The deterioration of open spaces is not an accident of growth. It is the predictable outcome of how cities are planned, governed, and disconnected from the people who live in them. Understanding why this happens matters, because open spaces are not luxuries; they are essential to public health, climate resilience, and the social fabric of urban life.

The shrinking lungs of Indian cities 🔗

The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 9 square metres of green space per urban resident, with residents ideally living within a 5-minute walk of a public green area. Most Indian cities fall dramatically short. The national average for per capita open space in Indian cities is about 2.7 square metres, far below the WHO benchmark of 9 square metres. Cities like Chennai and Pune have even more alarming figures, with green space availability close to 1 square metre or less per person.

This shortage is not just a numbers problem. Open spaces moderate the urban heat island effect, recharge groundwater, absorb stormwater, filter air pollutants, and offer the only affordable recreation available to lower-income residents. When these spaces deteriorate, the costs are paid in higher temperatures, flooded streets, polluted lungs, and stressed minds. The deterioration unfolds through three deeply interconnected forces: a planning approach that prioritises efficiency over ecology, a governance system fragmented across agencies with little public involvement, and an absence of reliable data that allows neglect to continue unnoticed.

The techno-legal approach: When efficiency overshadows sustainability 🔗

Indian urban planning is dominated by what scholars call a techno-legal approach. This framework treats city planning as a technical exercise of measuring plot sizes, calculating Floor Space Index, and ensuring legal compliance with building bylaws. Land is sliced into use categories such as residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational, and the planner’s job is to make these categories work efficiently on paper.

The problem is that open spaces do not behave like buildings. A park is not a static plot; it is a living ecosystem that depends on soil, water tables, tree canopies, and community use. When planners apply the same engineering logic to a wetland that they apply to a parking structure, the wetland loses. Efficiency-driven planning treats a stretch of greenery as “underutilised land” waiting to be converted into something more productive on a balance sheet.

Parks as legal grey zones 🔗

The techno-legal system also leaves open spaces in a vulnerable legal position. Unlike a road or a building, a park rarely has a clearly defined custodian, a maintenance budget proportional to its size, or strong protection against land-use change. Many parks in Indian cities sit on land that was originally allocated for other purposes and only temporarily designated as recreational. When real estate pressure grows, that designation can be quietly reversed. In 2016, the Karnataka Governor returned the Karnataka Urban Development Authorities (Amendment) Bill, which sought to reduce the area of parks and open spaces within residential layouts, showing how easily legal protections can be diluted when growth lobbies push hard enough.

Master plans that exist on paper 🔗

Compounding this is the fact that only about a quarter of Indian cities have updated master plans, leaving the majority of urban development to proceed without comprehensive guidance. In cities without active master plans, open space norms are aspirational at best. Where master plans do exist, the standards are often weakly enforced. The Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation guidelines specify that a metropolitan city should have 20 to 25 percent of its area under green cover, but in Kolkata, for example, only around 9.5 percent of land falls under open space categories.

Fragmentation and alienation: When no one owns the park 🔗

Even when an open space is protected on paper, its day-to-day fate depends on who is responsible for it. In Indian cities, the answer is rarely simple. Fragmented governance is one of the most powerful drivers of open-space deterioration because it diffuses accountability so thoroughly that nobody can be held responsible when things go wrong.

Too many cooks in the garden 🔗

Consider the case of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, where roughly nine different departments have an interface with open spaces, including a gardens department, a tree authority, the water supply department, and the sewage department. Each department has its own mandate, budget, and reporting hierarchy. A single neglected park might require coordination between four agencies to function properly, and none of them treats open-space management as its primary responsibility. The result is institutionalised neglect. Trees are planted but not watered. Lawns are mowed but the boundary fence falls. Encroachers move in because no single official has the authority or the data to evict them.

This pattern is visible across the country. Even where controls exist on paper, they are often poorly enforced, and peri-urban areas of expanding cities typically fall outside the purview of city or regional planning agencies. Public open spaces in these fringe zones, where most urban growth is now happening, are rarely preserved systematically.

The alienation problem 🔗

Fragmentation is not only administrative. It is also social. Many open spaces in Indian cities feel alien to the communities living around them because residents had no role in deciding where the park would be, what it would contain, or how it would be used. A telling example is Dyaneshwar Udyan in Dadar, where the municipality evicted a few households to create a garden, making it the corporation’s garden, owned and to be maintained by them rather than by the residents of the community. When residents have no stake, they have no incentive to protect, maintain, or advocate for the space. They will not push back against encroachment. They will not report misuse. They will simply stop visiting.

Across cities, this alienation produces a depressing cycle. Even where municipal parks exist, they are often run down and turn into spaces for gambling or drinking, which makes families wary of using them. Families avoid the park, the park gets used by fewer respectable visitors, and the cycle of decline accelerates. In Kolkata, one survey found 711 parks in the city, but most of them are poorly maintained. The space exists; the social contract around it does not.

Inequality in access 🔗

Fragmentation also produces stark inequality. Desirable and safe green zones are often confined to relatively affluent neighbourhoods, contributing to disparities in public health and well-being. A gated colony in a posh area will have manicured lawns maintained by a residents’ association. A working-class basti two kilometres away might have no usable open space at all, even though both pay taxes to the same municipal corporation. Open space deterioration is therefore not evenly distributed; it concentrates where political voice is weakest.

The data deficit and the governance gap 🔗

The third major cause of deterioration is the simplest to describe and the hardest to fix: most Indian cities do not actually know what they have. Without an accurate inventory of open spaces, their boundaries, their condition, and their patterns of use, strategic planning is impossible.

Planning without numbers 🔗

Detailed spatial data on public open spaces is missing for most Indian municipalities. Most local authorities are struggling to even have proper consolidated spatial data of public urban green spaces, which hinders detailed assessment and the planning process. When a city does not know how many parks it has, where they are, or how large they are, it cannot benchmark itself against any standard, cannot prioritise investment, and cannot detect when a park silently disappears. Encroachment thrives precisely in this informational darkness.

The Ministry of Urban Development’s Service Level Improvement Plans require cities to assess green space provisions against the URDPFI guidelines, but for most cities this assessment is either incomplete or absent. Where it exists, the benchmarks fall far below the prescribed standards. Modern tools like GIS mapping, satellite-based change detection, and mobile-based citizen reporting remain underused in most Indian planning departments, even though the technology is now inexpensive and widely available.

Late warnings and slow responses 🔗

Without monitoring systems, problems are usually identified only after the damage is done. A wetland is filled in, a hillock is flattened, a playground is built over, and the city responds with after-the-fact litigation rather than preventive enforcement. Lake Pichola in Udaipur, once the centrepiece of the city’s tourist identity, fell into such bad shape that a special Lake Development Authority had to be formed to rejuvenate it. The pattern repeats with the Hussainsagar in Hyderabad, the hills of Pune, and water bodies in Chennai. By the time a dedicated agency is created, decades of degradation have already occurred and the cost of restoration is many times the cost of protection would have been.

Climate change adds urgency 🔗

The data deficit becomes more dangerous as climate pressures grow. The imbalance between built and natural spaces is deteriorating the thermal environment of Indian cities, and lack of technical data and scientific awareness among city dwellers has contributed to the devaluation of green cover. Open spaces are the most cost-effective tool cities have to manage rising temperatures and erratic rainfall. Losing them now, without even measuring the loss, is a particularly expensive mistake.

How the three causes reinforce each other 🔗

It would be easier if these three factors operated independently, because then any one of them could be fixed in isolation. In reality they reinforce each other. The techno-legal approach treats open spaces as residual land, which makes fragmented governance acceptable because the spaces are not seen as critical. Fragmented governance reduces public engagement, because residents do not know whom to approach. Public disengagement reduces political pressure, which means cities feel no urgency to invest in better data systems. The absence of data then makes it easier for planners to justify converting “underused” land for other purposes, completing the loop.

Breaking this cycle requires action on all three fronts simultaneously. Reforming the planning framework to treat open spaces as ecological infrastructure rather than residual land. Consolidating governance under a single accountable authority for each open space. Investing in citizen-accessible data so that communities can monitor what they are losing in real time. Frameworks like the Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework have begun pushing municipalities to set budgetary allocations for rejuvenation, issue utilisation certificates, and notify protected areas more formally, but the pace of adoption remains slow.

Open spaces will not return to Indian cities through good intentions alone. They will return only when the planning system, the governance architecture, and the information environment all begin to treat them as essential infrastructure rather than decorative leftovers.

What do you think? Looking at the neighbourhood you grew up in, can you identify an open space that has disappeared or deteriorated over the years, and which of these three causes do you think played the biggest role? If you were given the responsibility to protect one park or playground in your city, would you focus on fixing the planning rules, the governance structure, or the data systems first, and why?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1618866719301062
2. https://citizenmatters.in/how-green-is-my-city/
3. https://medium.com/@girivasishta07/why-does-indias-urban-infrastructure-look-lifeless-and-disarrayed-07bb4d3c3312
4. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/39205/1/Unit-4.pdf
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14615517.2019.1690864
6. https://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-indian-cities-are-sorely-lacking-in-neighbourhood-parks-2519531
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4824703/
8. https://niua.in/c-cube/blog/content/cscaf-monitoring-urban-green-spaces