This essay examines the dynamics of development and growth in post-Independence Bombay. It examines the manner and extent to which the Indian planning enterprise has been implicated in the wider domain of societal ‘structures’ within which the state apparatus operates, and outlines the analytical grid within which Indian development planning ought to be located. It situates the dynamics at work within an active geographical arena, pertinent to a particular set of people in a particular place – in this case, the country's largest urban enclave.

Urban Development Planning : The Indian Context

Planning, here, is contextualised as the Indian state's attempt to lay the groundwork for capitalist growth and enhancement. The Bombay Plan of 1944, promulgated by eight prominent captains of industry, unequivocally viewed the strategic control of the key sectors of the economy by the public sector as an essential means to the primary accumulation of capital. Cooperating with the state in this project has been the ‘modern’ sector, comprising the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, the landholding classes, and the whole panoply of professional, service and small-scale sectors within the domain of industrial production and the reach of its markets.

Functionalist readings of the Indian state regard it, variously, as a neutral entity providing a socialist, ‘developmentalist’ impetus in its role as central allocator, or (in Miliband's sense of the term) as a willing ‘instrument’ of class rule. The Rudolphs' Weberian notion posits the view of a technocratic ‘self-determining’ state, as does the neoliberal ‘dogmatic dirigisme’ model.