SAS Nagar Master Plan 2031: Why Mohali Was Planned For 13 Lakh People ## SAS Nagar Master Plan 2031: मोहाली की योजना 13 लाख लोगों के लिए क्यों बनाई गई ## SAS Nagar Master Plan 2031: ਮੋਹਾਲੀ ਨੂੰ 13 ਲੱਖ ਲੋਕਾਂ ਲਈ ਕਿਉਂ ਯੋਜਨਾਬੱਧ ਕੀਤਾ ਗਿਆ ਸੀ

Every town in the Greater Mohali Region has a master plan. Mohali's is the one the others were drawn around.

It projects a population of 12,95,000 by 2031 and 17,26,500 by 2056. It classifies Mohali not as a town but as a Metropolitan Town. It works across an available land area of 16,674 hectares, which is roughly four times the Zirakpur planning area.

The plan explains where those numbers came from.

The document

The Master Plan for S.A.S Nagar, 2006 to 2031 was prepared by Jurong Consultants Pte Ltd of Singapore for GMADA, under the Department of Town and Country Planning, Punjab, and approved by the Government of Punjab.

Every other plan in the series runs 2008 to 2031. Mohali's starts in 2006, because Mohali is where the regional exercise began.

GMADA publishes it in three parts on its own site: the Plan, the Report, and the Revenue Master Plan.

Where 13 lakh came from

The regional exercise modelled several growth scenarios for the Greater Mohali Region. For the purpose of land use planning, the consultants state that they assumed the very high growth scenario, in order to accommodate the greatest demand and to maximise GMADA's potential to develop into a competitive region on par with successful cities elsewhere.

Having taken the most expansive of the available forecasts, they then distributed that population across the six local planning areas, with S.A.S Nagar taking the main share at 45 per cent.

So the 12,95,000 figure is not a prediction of what Mohali would most likely become. It is the share Mohali received of the largest number the region's planners were prepared to model. The plan is built to accommodate that outcome rather than to forecast it.

There is a second figure in the same report that sits oddly beside it. The development framework section states that Mohali's population is projected to increase to one million by 2031, which is a quarter less than the headline number. The report carries both.

Planning parameters follow from the larger figure: a gross residential density of 175 persons per acre, across that 16,674 hectare area.

What Mohali was meant to become

The vision in the report is unusually declarative. Mohali was to be a premier township in the Greater Mohali area of Punjab and the benchmark for other towns in India to emulate, a showcase environment for its citizens to live, work, play, learn and strike business deals.

The land use drawing shows what that meant in practice, and Mohali's zone list is materially richer than any other town's in the series.

Alongside the ordinary categories of residential, commercial, institution, park and rural and agriculture, Mohali's plan carries two separate grades of mixed use, an industry zone specifically for technology and research and development, a separate industry and warehouse zone, a wholesale centre, an expo site, a sports and recreation zone, and a PR centre on the arterial network.

It also carries something the other plans do not: a recurring designation called the Floral Mile, running through the plan at several points as a landscape feature.

And it carries three separate parcels marked Reserve Site, Airport Expansion, alongside a zone for airport facilities. The plan set aside land for an airport to grow into, which is the single clearest link between this document and the Aerotropolis that followed.

The problems the plan named

The report is direct about what stood in the way.

It states that the GMADA area is land locked, with connections to other cities and countries possible only by air, road and rail.

It states that the local road network is far from ideal, with limited connectivity to Mullanpur and Panchkula from Mohali.

And it observes that the various towns within the Greater Mohali Region are not directly connected to each other.

Those three sentences describe the regional road programme that followed. The PR alignments running through every plan in the series, PR-4, PR-5, PR-6, PR-7 and PR-11, exist to answer exactly that diagnosis. So does the elevated road now recommended for sanction on the Mohali to New Chandigarh route, and so does the bypass now contracted around Zirakpur. A decade and a half after the plan named limited connectivity to Mullanpur and Panchkula as a constraint, both of those links are still being built.

The report also flags competing developments in the vicinity as a constraint, Mohali being the most urbanised town in the region while other centres grew around it, and notes the need to organise informal markets within the planning area.

The mirror image of Zirakpur

The same consultant made opposite errors in the same exercise.

Zirakpur's plan projected 1,29,038 people by 2031. The town passed that figure twenty years early and the state's own revision put it on course for more than eight lakh. The plan was far too small, and the consequences are visible in the roads that were built over and the drainage that was never laid.

Mohali's plan went the other way. It took the most expansive forecast available, assigned Mohali nearly half the region's population, and zoned 16,674 hectares to hold it.

In Zirakpur the risk is that the plan is behind the town. In Mohali the risk is that parts of the plan are ahead of it, with land zoned for uses that assume a population that has not yet arrived. A wholesale centre, an expo site and a technology and research zone are all provisions for a city of 13 lakh people.

What the plan can tell you, and what it cannot

It tells you the zone, and the zone is specific. Mohali's plan distinguishes between industry for technology and research and industry for warehousing, and between two grades of mixed use. A parcel described simply as commercial or industrial has not been described.

It tells you what is reserved. The three airport expansion reserve sites, the river reserve, the forest and open space zones and the utility reservations are land that was never intended to carry ordinary development. Vacant land next to a plot is not always land awaiting a buyer.

It does not tell you the stage. Zoning says what may be built. It says nothing about whether the sector is serviced, whether it has been acquired, or whether an acquisition notification is running over it. GMADA's own public notices for Sectors 87, 101 and 103 sit on the same page as the master plan.

And it does not tell you the colony is legal. In a planning area of 16,674 hectares, the approval status of any individual colony is a separate check against a separate list.

Mohali's master plan is the most ambitious document in the GMADA series, and it states the assumption it rests on. The city was planned for 13 lakh people because the planners chose the largest number they were willing to model. Everything zoned in it follows from that choice.

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Sources

- Master Plan Report 2006-2031, S.A.S Nagar, Jurong Consultants Pte Ltd for the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, for the very high growth scenario assumption, the 45 per cent regional share, the projected populations of 12,95,000 by 2031 and 17,26,500 by 2056, the Metropolitan Town classification, the 16,674 hectare land area, the gross residential density of 175 persons per acre, the vision statement, and the constraints on connectivity and the land locked region
- S.A.S Nagar (2031), Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, for the Plan, Report and Revenue Master Plan, and for the current public notices on land acquisition in Sectors 87, 101 and 103
- S.A.S Nagar land use plan drawing, a published copy of the drawing sheet, for the zone categories including the two mixed use grades, industry for technology and research and development, industry and warehouse, wholesale centre, expo, PR centre, Floral Mile, river reserve and the three airport expansion reserve sites, and for the PR road alignments. The authoritative version is the Plan file on GMADA's own site