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Satellite Town Development in India in Retrospect and Prospect : A Case of

Navi Mumbai

Article · July 2015

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Amit Chatterjee Soumendu Chatterjee

School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal Presidency University, Kolkata
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Satellite Town Development in India in Retrospect &

Prospect : A Case of Navi Mumbai

Amit Chatterjee
Assistant Professor, School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India
amit.chatterjee@spabhopal.ac.in

Soumendu Chatterjee
Head, Department of Geography, Presidency University, Kolkata, India
scgeovu@yahoo.co.in

Abstract : In the early 1960’s urban development policies in India focused on growth control strategies of Metropolitan
cities and the idea of new town/counter magnet/satellite town/ring town emerged widely. Unlike many other planned
cities in India, Navi Mumbai (also known as New Bombay) was specifically built as a planned decentralization to the
larger metropolis in 1971. Literature evidences stated that by 1971, the year when construction of Navi Mumbai started,
there were already112 new towns in different scale (both in terms of area and population sizes) in existence. In 1971,
City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) was formed as the officially designated Town Planning
Authority to undertake the planning and development of the largest (344 sq.km.) green-field urban development project
in India. One of the main objectives of designing Navi Mumbai was to create a self-sufficient urban settlement to reduce
the growth of population in Mumbai city that would absorb immigrants and also attract some of Bombay’s population.
The success of Navi Mumbai was thought of in adequate creation of jobs and accordingly 750,000 jobs for a population
of 2 million was anticipated. This paper attempts to find out the objectives and purpose for which Navi Mumbai was
planned originally and to ascertain the extent to which those objectives are achieved after four decades of its origin. The
paper will focus on the demographic, housing and economic aspects of satellite city development experiences and it
shall trace the success, failure and future development prospect of satellite city.

Keywords : Decentralization, Navi Mumbai, Prospect, Retrospect, Satellite town

1.0 Introduction dispersal of population from metropolitan city. Bombay

Ebenezer Howard (1946) is known for his concept of
‘garden city’, a self-contained new city to contain the
spillover from an already congested metropolis. The
garden city was later replaced by the simpler and less
confusing term ‘new town’ (Osborn and Whittick, 1969).
There were several initiatives taken worldwide for
controlling urban growth in Metropolitan city. Japan was
one of the first Asian countries to attempt control of the
growth of its largest city, Tokyo, through the enactment of
National Capital Region Development Law in 1956
(Nakamura and White, 1988). In India, from Third Five
Year Plan (1961-66) onwards particularly from the Fourth
and Fifth Five Year Plans, the central concern about
management of urban area has been particularly the
Metropolitan Regional Planning Board (BMRPB) in the
early 1970s proposed a regional plan for Bombay
Metropolitan region and one of the alternative future
growth patterns suggested was to develop a twin city of
metropolitan character, opposite the old city
(Government of Maharashtra, 1974). Accordingly,
Government allocated land opposite to Bombay Island
for development of a green-field city i.e. New Bombay.
As per 2011 census, the population of the country was
1.21 billion and 31.16% of this population resided in the
urban areas. In 2011, there were 53 urban agglomerations
and cities with population of one million or more, which
were 35 and 23 in Census of India 2001 and 1991
respectively. This magnitude is bound to lead to massive

ISSUE 8, 2014 S P A N D R E L

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