Maharashtra May Finally Be Getting Its Urban Policy Right By Allowing Higher FSIs In MMR

The Maharashtra government’s draft development control rules (DCR) for seven municipal corporations in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Thane, Mira Road-Bhayandar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Ulhasnagar, Vasai-Virar and Panvel) suggest a changing mindset on allowing more vertical growth. This is the way to go, but the DCR does not go far enough because one unstated objective is to keep the vested interests of builders with existing properties to sell in mind. Any liberalisation will ruin their fat margins.

A Times of India report says the DCR raises the permissible floor space index (FSI, the built-up area as a multiple of plot size) to four in areas with 30 metre roads, and to six for affordable housing. This will make more land available for housing, costs of which are already going through the roof not only in the MMR, but all across the country’s urban areas.

The problem is with setting FSI limits without rational context. A government’s building permissions policy should take four or five key parameters into account:

First, keeping real (ie, adjusted for inflation) land prices moderate and stable for extended periods of time, and increasing its supplies steadily. The only way this can be done is by allowing vertical growth, through higher FSIs in land-starved urban areas.

Second, the constraints on vertical growth should be set by available infrastructure and public spaces, and not any artificial limit on FSI, however liberal it may seem at first. This means a plot of land can be allowed to go as vertical as its wants, provided horizontal space is ceded by the developer for roads and parks or public parking spaces. It is this ratio – of horizontal area ceded to vertical growth allowed – that is crucial, not FSI. In practice, if an area has enough road spaces and parks and public conveniences (including toilets), there should be practically no limit to vertical growth.

Third, zonal restrictions should be curtailed, as long as the liberalisation is not considered ecologically unsound. The coastal zone restrictions in Mumbai possibly make no sense when Hong Kong and Singapore can grow vertically almost endlessly along the shore. One way to ensure the removal of coastal zone restrictions is to allow more land to be reclaimed from the sea, so that the distance from the coast is reduced.

Fourth, the no-go (no-development) areas, and tradeoffs between infrastructure, parking and public spaces should be specified in advance, so that these do not become reasons for bureaucrats to deny or delay permissions and extract bribes from builders.

Fifth, cities should be allowed to expand even if it means taking over farmland. Much of today’s London was farmland before the city expanded. The solution to the problem of shrinking farmland may be technology – which means raising more output from less land – and vertical farming, which expands farm spaces vertically. While it may not be wise or economical to grow low-value rice in a vertical tower, other high-value crops can well be grown in vertical temperature-controlled towers in due course. Technology is fast going to allow this to happen, and will also economise on the use of water and plant nutrients. In an earlier Swarajya article, we quoted from an MIT Sloan report on a firm called Aero Farms, which occupies barely 1.5 acres of land, and expects to produce “as much food as 120 acres of traditional farmland, using 95 per cent less water, and no soil or pesticides, with harvests year-round.”

On urban rejuvenation, India can also learn a lot from Japan, where urban growth has few restrictions and land prices have been remarkably stable for decades after the last property boom went bust.

As this Robin Harding story curated by Swarajya notes, the “right to own or to hold property is inviolable (in Japan). A private developer cannot make you sell land; a local government cannot stop you using it. If you want to build a mock-Gothic castle faced in pink seashells that is your business.”

The change began in the 1990s, after the last property balloon went phut. The author writes: “In the 1990s, the government relaxed development rules, culminating in the Urban Renaissance Law of 2002, which made it easier to rezone land. Office sites were repurposed for new housing…. hallways and public areas were excluded from the calculated size of apartment buildings, letting them grow much higher within existing zoning, while a proposal now under debate would allow owners to rebuild bigger if they knock down blocks built to old earthquake standards.”

India’s urban areas hold the keys to future jobs and growth. We need more liberal land use policies. What a tragedy if we allow building laws and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats with vested interests in land, not to speak of single-interest NGOs, to ruin it all.

The Maharashtra government’s new DCR for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is a test case on whether it has finally overcome the combined forces of resistance to change.