Residents of a small Kerala town rejected a state-led development blueprint they feared would destroy farms, water systems and livelihoods.
Instead of going to court, the municipality spent nearly three years creating a participatory “People’s Plan” with planners, volunteers and hundreds of residents.
The new master plan prioritises pedestrian mobility, climate resilience and the protection of historic water systems and urban commons.
On October 18, 2021, residents of Chittur-Thathamangalam, a small town in Kerala’s Palakkad district, received something the town had never had before in its 125-year history: a Master Plan.
The Draft Master Plan 2031, prepared by the state’s town planning department, outlined an ambitious vision for the town’s future. It proposed a wide range of infrastructure projects, including extensive road widening, four bypasses and ring roads, two lorry terminals, a new bus stand, and a terminal market, among 85 development initiatives intended to spur economic growth.
But when the town’s newly elected Left Democratic Front (LDF) municipal council and its roughly 32,000 residents examined the proposals closely, many were alarmed.
They concluded that, if actualised, the infrastructure projects proposed under the Draft Master Plan’s “pro-growth” paradigm could fundamentally reshape the character of their town. Local representatives argued that these proposals would wipe out nearly 80 per cent of the town’s retail economy, while also requiring the demolition of hundreds of homes, community buildings and acres of agricultural fields.
Residents warned that such development would inevitably lead to flooding, drought, unemployment, and displacement. They feared that any intervention altering their existing landscape—nearly half of which is under agriculture, mainly paddy, banana, and coconut cultivation, along with locally managed irrigation systems that shape water flows, ecology, and the commons—would jeopardise their future.
So instead of accepting the state’s blueprint, the town decided to challenge it.
Faced with widespread opposition from residents, including associations of traders, merchants and paddy farmers, the municipality chose an unusual path. Rather than simply reject the Draft Master Plan 2031, it began work on its own alternative — a participatory planning process that would ultimately produce the Chittur-Thathamangalam Master Plan 2042.
Over the next 33 months, the municipality worked with planners, volunteers, local residents and academic experts to create what supporters say is India’s first municipality-led participatory master plan aimed at protecting shared community resources while preparing for climate change.
The initiative drew on provisions in the Kerala Town and Country Planning (KTCP) Act 2016, which mandates public participation during the preparation of master plans.
To guide the process, the municipality appointed a two-member Master Plan Expert Committee (MPEC), consisting of urban planners Jayaraj Sundaresan and Malini Krishnankutty.
Rather than taking the draft plan to court, the committee decided to focus on building a locally grounded alternative.
“We believed that the best way to counter the draft plan was to develop a better one,” says Sundaresan, who is originally from Chittur-Thathamangalam.
One of the most significant issues overlooked by the original draft plan, planners say, was the town’s centuries-old water management system.
According to Sundaresan, the town contains a remarkable network of 171 human-made ponds — known locally as kulams. The heritage water management system is connected by canals and natural streams flowing through cascading paddy fields.
Together with the Sokanasini river, these features form an integrated drainage and irrigation system that enable water harvesting and more, typical of many historic settlements in South India. “These water-channelling systems have evolved over roughly 1,500 years,” Sundaresan explains. “They support groundwater percolation, agriculture, livestock, drinking water supply and flood mitigation. They act as the ecological foundation of human settlements.”
Yet the Draft Master Plan 2031 did not recognise this network.
The planners also found that other shared spaces — including a yarn-stretching ground used by the town’s textile weaver community and a temple festival ground — had been classified simply as vacant land and proposed for redevelopment as parks.
For Krishnankutty, these omissions highlight a deeper problem with conventional urban planning methods. Existing Land Use (ELU) maps, she says, typically rely on broad categories such as residential, commercial or industrial land use. While useful in large cities, such classifications often fail to capture the complex and overlapping ways in which land is used in smaller towns.
“In reality, the same piece of land can support multiple activities and it is important to record all of them,” Krishnankutty says. “Paddy fields, for instance, may also be used seasonally by pastoral duck owners whose flocks fertilise the fields.”
Understanding these layered relationships between people and land, she argues, requires planners to document all practices using terms from the local language and create appropriate terms for categories. “In India, a large number of people live in informal housing and rely on informal livelihoods,” she says. “Very often, it is the so-called ‘unplanned’ commons — shared spaces and natural systems — that sustain them.”
Krishnankutty says it is imperative to move away from modernist planning approaches that prioritise protecting property rights and acknowledge the long tradition of treating land and water as shared resources. “Historically, both land and water were viewed as commons, to be used judiciously in the larger public interest. Across India’s older settlements, diverse systems of water management exist—from qanats and eries to khazans and many others. These traditions and practices must be integrated into our planning,” she says.
The effort to develop the People’s Plan relied heavily on volunteer work and local cooperation, establishing the mandatory special committee to invite and review suggestions and objections on the Draft Master Plan. The municipality itself had no budget for the exercise, so the MPEC planners worked on the project without payment. A local collective contributed expertise from various fields, while sectoral experts joined on a pro bono basis.
The Kerala Institute of Local Administration provided limited funds to support two junior planners who assisted with fieldwork. Professors and students from nearby universities helped with GIS mapping, terrain modelling and verification on the ground.
A core group of political activists, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals coordinated with the bureaucracy and managed finances, while local residents organised participatory meetings and mobilised support for the movement.
The participatory planning process unfolded in three stages.
The first phase focused on explaining the Draft Master Plan 2031 to residents, Krishnankutty says. In March 2022, the town’s 29 wards were grouped into nine clusters and meetings were held in Malayalam to discuss the proposals and their potential implications.
The second phase involved a series of focus group discussions designed to capture residents’ aspirations, needs and concerns.
The process began with 50 children from 12 schools describing their needs for the town’s future. It eventually expanded to include around 550 participants organised into 20 discussion groups covering 32 themes. Topics ranged from education, employment and mobility to gender equality, ecology, sanitation, caste relations and social equity.
Local teams also mapped land use in detail, documenting activities using Malayalam terms to better capture local realities.
The participatory process culminated in October 2022 with a three-day workshop known as the Master Plan Shilpashala. For the event, the planning committee invited 15 planning and sectoral experts from across India to work alongside 186 local residents.
The aim was to analyse the findings from the consultations and translate them into concrete planning proposals or the key framework.
“The workshop allowed people and experts to sit together and collectively shape the direction of the plan,” Krishnankutty says.
The ideas generated during the workshop became the foundation of the People’s Master Plan 2042.
Many of the most controversial proposals in the original draft plan were removed.
The new plan eliminated large-scale road-widening projects and other infrastructure developments that residents believed would cause widespread displacement. Instead, it focused on people’s aspirations and improving everyday concerns within the town, like mobility.
“Walking is the primary mode of transport here,” Sundaresan says. “But there are very few footpaths, several accident hotspots and serious road safety issues.” The plan therefore proposes continuous pedestrian walkways across the municipality as well as cycle tracks.
Climate resilience is another key focus.
To address flooding risks, the People’s Plan introduces an Ecological Protection Zone (EPZ) covering the town’s interconnected water bodies, canals, streams and cascading paddy fields. A separate Flood and Riverine Buffer Zone (FRBZ) along the Sokanasini river is designed both to reduce flood vulnerability and to create accessible public space along the riverfront.
These measures aim to protect the hydrological network while allowing sustainable agriculture to continue. To tackle rising temperatures, the plan also proposes increased tree cover, shaded public areas and integration with the state’s Heat Action Plan.
Several of the town’s ponds may also be repurposed.
Some water bodies could be upgraded into natural swimming areas, while degraded ponds may be converted into multifunctional ecological spaces combining sanitation, recreation and environmental restoration, says Sundaresan.
The People’s Plan also places strong emphasis on identifying and protecting urban commons, precincts and assets of heritage value.
Among the features documented are large banyan trees known as aalmarams, along with the aaltharas — circular platforms built around them that serve as community gathering spaces. The plan also records chumaduthangis, stone supports placed along historic trade routes that allowed travellers carrying goods on their heads to rest their loads. Several heritage buildings have also been identified for possible adaptive reuse.
Krishnankutty says that formally recognising these features in the master plan is an important step towards long-term conservation. A strategy for the identified residential and commercial heritage assets and precincts will be developed later through a participatory process.
Shared spaces like festival grounds, school playgrounds and weavers’ working areas were recorded under a new category of “urban commons” to protect their traditional uses. The plan also proposes small parks and widened pavements in every ward. In one unusual idea, a disused bridge could be transformed into a dedicated “women’s room”, or a safe public space designed for women.
For Sudeesh Yezhuvath, a member of the municipal special committee that oversaw the planning process, the success of the initiative reflects a long tradition of collective action in the town. He points to the many religious and cultural festivals organised every year, often drawing tens of thousands of visitors.
One example is the Konganpada temple festival, a historic war re-enactment that takes place annually.
“Many of these festivals last more than two weeks and require careful coordination and crowdfunding,” he says. “They are organised entirely through voluntary contributions and local participation.”
That culture of volunteerism, he says, helped sustain the demanding participatory planning effort.
The People’s Master Plan 2042 officially replaced the Draft Master Plan 2031 in July 2024 after being submitted to the state government through the Chief Town Planner’s office.
Because the new plan introduced major changes, like the Ecological Protection Zone and flood buffer areas, residents were once again invited to submit suggestions and objections.
To make the process accessible, the municipality distributed a 40-page handbook explaining the plan in Malayalam to every household.
After a 60-day consultation period, the special committee submitted its final report to the government. The plan is now awaiting formal state notification, with only minor technical procedures remaining.
For Yezhuvath, the experience illustrates a familiar Malayalam proverb: oruma undengil olakka melum kidakkam — meaning that with unity, even the most difficult challenges can be overcome.
For Chittur-Thathamangalam, that unity may have reshaped the future of the town.
(The reporter is recipient of Promise of Commons Media Fellowship 2024, on the significance of Commons and its Community Stewardship)