Janpratinidhi Dainik

  Gurugram Needs a Metropolitan Planning Committee — Not Another Agency By Gaurav Malik President, Mission 7374 Foundation Gurugram is no longer a peripheral city. It is a metropolitan region in its own right — economically powerful, demographically complex, and spatially expanding at extraordinary speed. Yet, despite this transformation, its governance architecture remains fragmented and structurally incomplete. The Constitution of India anticipated this very situation. Under Article 243ZE — inserted through the 74th Constitutional Amendment — every metropolitan area with a population exceeding one million must constitute a Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC). Gurugram clearly meets this threshold. However, to date, it does not have a functioning MPC. This absence is not a technical oversight. It is a structural gap. The Current Governance Landscape of Gurugram To understand why an MPC is necessary, we must first understand how Gurugram is presently governed. Infrastructure resp...

Reform Capital: Replacing Rent-Seeking with Innovation-Led Urban Governance By Gaurav Malik, President, Mission 7374 Foundation India’s cities are standing at a historic crossroads. One path continues the familiar model of rent-seeking urbanization—where political finance is sustained through liquor vends, real estate speculation, opaque contracts, and regulatory discretion. The other path leads toward what I call Reform Capital: a new political and economic ecosystem where clean money, transparent institutions, and citizen-driven innovation become the primary fuel of governance. Today, the uncomfortable truth is that a large part of political funding is generated from the rent economy—liquor auctions, sand mining, waste management contracts, parking tenders, advertising rights, and manipulated land-use changes. These flows shape city priorities. Roads, drains, parks, and stormwater projects are often designed not for outcomes, but for extraction. Open tenders are delayed, contracts re...