Existing Practices for Land Use Planning Practices in Hill Cities of India

Land Use Planning is a key component of Urban Planning and is important for planned development. It ensures that the resources are used efficiently, and orderly development is taking place. However, Land use planning in relation to hill regions is not a well-known or researched topic in India. Many scholars and researchers have expressed their views related to inappropriate development in the hills due to the lack of land use planning in these eco-sensitive areas but there are no in-depth studies on the land use planning pertaining to the hill towns of India. Therefore, the paper, focus is on understanding the prevailing land use planning process in Indian hill towns. The methodology opted is the in-depth literature study of the land use planning in the hills followed by a semi structured interview of various town planning officials in the hill states of India such as Himachal Pradesh, Jammu, Kashmir, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura and Uttarakhand. In addition, mapping of the steps to be followed for land use planning provided by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and followed in hill states of India has been analysed in order to understand the gaps and problems in the land use planning process in India's hill cities. The current study uses land use suitability and seeks to identify various criteria from literature and expert interviews that can serve as the basis for land use planning in the hills. The determination of weights of the criteria is also carried out with the questionnaire expert survey. As a result, the study contributes to the understanding of how and to what degree the land use planning process is effective at present and provides a set of criteria that can be the basis for land use planning for hill cities of India.