Introduction:

The fundamental constraint to the continuing transformation of India’s urban areas and habitat is human resources, institutional and governance capacity and the reform of an often-dysfunctional legal and regulatory framework.

A large part of this human resource deficit lies in the multi-decade long failure of India’s publicly funded higher education system to educate enough capable professionals and practitioners to enable the effective functioning of urban areas, real estate, infrastructure, and housing and the failure to spawn a generation of social and political change makers.

India’s existing schools of urban planning and design deliver curricula developed in the 1970s and1980s. They are unable to address the need to transact an integrated 21st century curriculum that needs to straddle technology, social sciences and management sciences to respond to dramatic changes in society, the economy, technology and the environment that we expect to see. As a result, thousands of young professionals are streaming to the US, Europe and Australia for an education each year. Simultaneously domestic services, construction and infrastructure markets are being filled by firms and workers from East and South East Asia, in spite of huge unfulfilled domestic livelihood demand.

Well over 40,000 Habitat-related professionals a year will be needed to be educated over the next two decades via a mix of undergraduate and graduate degree programmes, distance learning and in-service training to fill a yawning human resource gap in India’s municipalities, planning and development authorities, urban utilities, private and public infrastructure organisations, design firms, social enterprises and real estate companies.

The IIHS seeks to fill a significant fraction of this demand, as it scales outward from an initial urban campus.

A copy of the concept note is available at the IIHS Library for reference.