Stringency of land use regulations: Evidence from India’s cities
Shwetha Harish Pai and Kala Seetharam Sridhar
Abstract
It is now accepted that land use regulations in cities have long-lasting impacts on
their urban form, along with their associated welfare implications. However, the
literature on the stringency of land use regulations in India is limited. A
Residential Land Use Regulatory Index (RLURI) has been developed for 66 major
cities in India. This index distinguishes de jure norms from de facto measures.
Unlike past studies, this index accounts for multiple dimensions of land use
regulations such as zoning, sub-division and density norms, provision of public
goods, building norms, and so on. Our results show that cities in the south and
Tier I cities have more flexible regulations. De jure and de facto restrictiveness
are positively correlated, and cities that are highly restrictive in one dimension
are not necessarily restrictive across other dimensions. This index provides a
relative measure of supply-side institutional constraints for future land, housing
and labour market studies.