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.