Item — HN Reader

> Like Gurugram reminded me of some type of ecological disaster dystopia out of Blade Runner

That's because of zoning. Much of Gurgaon isn't zoned as a municipality but as villages or agricultural land, which means there is no unified municipal government in vast swathes of the city. This is the same issue with Bangalore.

Other large Indian cities (eg. Pune, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc) are nowhere near as bad

> So I was particularly glad to see this story was about an Indian village

My ancestral family is from village and small towns, and counterintuitively (edit: for people who do not know India) they tend to be much cleaner because they have more formally defined municipal and local governments.

Of course, this depends state to state, like everything else in India.

Edit: quick explaination of local government in India

Local government in India is heavily dependent on whether your block is zoned as "rural", "urban", "agricultural", or "industrial".

In the first generation of megacities like Bangalore and Delhi NCR, zoning never actually got updated because a lot of urbanization happened before zoning caught up, and changing zoning could impact your tax burden, as agricultural income isn't taxed in India.

So if you are a landlord (eg.) running a backpacker hostel in Delhi, if your land was rezoned from agricultural to urban it would also be reassessed from a tax burden perspective so landlords have an incentive to fight rezoning tooth and nail.

Additionally, a lot of areas that are colloquially called (eg.) Bangalore aren't actually within the borders of the city of Bangalore but historically unzoned or miszoned land.

In smaller towns and the newer generation of megacities (eg. Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune) zoning was more tightly enforced and local governments are more aligned becuase they are much more homogenous.

This is something the PM Office is now starting to address [0], but will also depend on local and state governments. Some states like Kerala, HP, TN, Punjab, and Gujarat have been more proactive about fixing zoning, but others like Delhi and Karnataka have been less inclined.

[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...

3 comments

> My ancestral family is from village and small towns, and counterintuitively they tend to be much cleaner because they have more formally defined municipal and local governments.

Indian, and this is not counterintuitive to me at all. I have also seen this, really small rural villages with their tight local governments tend to be pretty clean.

Yep. The added issue is half of the "cities" non-Indians visit in India aren't actually zoned as cities.

In essence, India had hidden urbanization occur [0], but zoning never caught up to it.

[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...

Seems like quite the stretch just to blame it on zoning. Gurugram was particularly bad but the other places around New Delhi I visited weren't much better.

Much of Delhi isn't zoned as a city either but as villages (in Delhi they are called Lal Doras) [0]. Most of the hostels and hotels backpackers stay in when visiting Delhi are located in these lal doras.

Additionally, the local government and the federal government have been at loggerheads for over decade because it's municipal government was ruled by the BJP but it's state government was ruled by the opposition (AAP), so both attempted to undermine the other.

Delhi NCR and Bangalore are two of the worst managed metropolitan areas in India from a local government perspective because of overlapping jurisdictions and extremely wonky zoning. Of course, those are the two Indian cities most HNers historically ended up visiting.

That said, it's highly likely most non-Desi HNers haven't visited India since 2020 because most businesses now send Indian Americans directly to India and India was never a strong tourism market aside from diaspora.

[0] - https://theprint.in/ground-reports/lal-dora-villages-delhi-h...

Blaming it on “culture” makes me feel good about myself and my in-group.

It's not a culture thing though. The ethnic groups and castes that dominates Gurgaon and Delhi local government also dominates local government in the Chandigarh Capital Region (CCR) as well as other urban agglomerations in Haryana such as Karnal and Kurkushetra which are all much better managed than Gurgaon.

The key difference is zoning is nowhere near as screwy in those metros compared to Gurgaon. Gurgaon's urbanization in 1990s to 2010s was completely unplanned. It was the literal Wild West.

Same with Bangalore compared to other large metros in Karnataka like Mangalore and Mysore.

This whole thread is 100% correct. Zoning, rezoning, related points are all correct. One minor correction though, the megacities where the comment mentions zoning being better is in most cases only true definitionally. For example, there are portions of chennai which are by the book, not part of chennai, but for all practical purposes, are. e.g, the new major city-wide bus stand is definitionally outside the city, but practically it is the bus stand to go to if you want to travel to the rest of the state, is not at all zoned properly and faces the same issues.

The only exception where rezoning has actually been done properly is hyderabad.

Here is the reason for this:

- The 74th amendment in india only calls for a _planning commitee_ (reminiscent of india's past) for any area with a population of over 10 lakh. But this MPC is completely distinct from the organisation that does the actual service delivery. In Chennai's example, the CMDA are the planning guys, and the GCC (greater chennai corporation) are the execution guys who actually employ garbage collection folks, buy cleaning machines, fix storm water drains, etc etc,.

CMDA covers ~6000 sq. km. and all that is practically chennai, and they plan bus stops and FSI and roads and all that across this region. However, the GCC is _still_ limited _to this day_ to just 500 sq. km and this is the "chennai" that appears in reports. So all your sanitation workers and clean roads, tree lined roads, good storm water drains, etc, that you see in say besant nagar, are completely absent in the remaining 5500 sq. km. Instead, you have multiple different corporations, Tambaram, Avadi, Kanchipuram, etc, and the coordination problems here are just insane. It also absolutely does not help that political fracturing happens due to dominant castes differing across these regions. You also lose the simple concept of rich people cross subsiding poor people - which is essential in any public service. The taxes paid by boat club road residents, remain with the GCC, and does not contribute even a little bit towards better roads on land under the Tambaram corporation, ironically leading to worse infrastructure for even the boat club road resident making a trip to Trichy. So you get nice parks and heart-shaped traffic lights in nungambakkam before even a road is paved in thoraipakkam.

In hyderabad, they did a very nice thing. They merged 27 ULBs directly into the GHMC, tripling its area from 650 to 2000 sq. km. So its the same thing CMDA did but through a merger. Those 27 bodies - with their staff, their ward councillors, their budgets - are now part of GHMC. The sanitation workers who used to report to, say, Medipally Municipality now report to GHMC. The property tax collected there now goes into GHMC's budget. The roads there are now GHMC's responsibility to maintain.

This unified thing devoid of coordination problems and with great cross subsidisation seems to work much better. It will be a good model for other cities to follow.

I don't know about amdavad and pune but I am willing to bet they are also good for similar reasons.