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This article posits an intellectual genealogy for understanding how comprehensively planned new towns became a focus of planning attention in twentieth-century India. Though comprehensively planned new towns were built in small numbers in India beginning in the nineteenth century (and earlier if we consider pre-British period examples such as Jaipur, for example), the largest number were built following independence in 1947. According to Robert Home, 'India accommodated some five million people in 118 new towns built between independence in 194[7] and 1981, in what has been probably the largest new town programme in the world.'1 If we add the several new towns built prior to independence and the many that have been constructed since 1981 then we would find the numbers - in terms of both towns and population - to be considerably higher than that. Indeed, new town developments are enjoying a resurgence in popularity across South Asia today though it is perhaps too soon to say whether the genealogy traced here remains as relevant as it once was.2
There were a number of factors that made new town development plausible and desirable. These include economic imperatives that grew out of post-independence industrial policy, when both state-run and private industries secured efficient ways to combine industrial capital with locally available resources and labour. Most of the new towns built in India housed managers, workers and support personnel for steel, fertilizer, oil refining and other industrial concerns, though towns planned for administrative and other purposes shared both conceptual and spatial principles in common with them. Demographic forces also played a crucial role in the history of India's planned new towns, including crises resulting from periodic famines and the influx of political refugees into cities at India's partition. In this regard, new towns were seen by many as a way to ensure the even distribution of population between larger and smaller cities. Finally, in a variety of ways only hinted at here, both of the last century's two world wars indelibly shaped the rationale (and designs) for new towns in India, not least by mobilizing an international coterie of new town proponents to place their planning agenda on firmer institutional footings. While these larger events and processes directly...