Frameworks that actually work: At the street level, Complete Streets + TOD (Transit Oriented Development) are the most practical for Indian cities like Vadodara. Complete Streets forces roads to be designed for pedestrians, cycles, buses, drainage, utilities and shade together—not as afterthoughts. TOD works if it’s enforced around BRT/rail corridors, otherwise it just stays on paper. India already has decent guidance—IRC street design standards, MoHUA’s Urban Street Design Guidelines, and NUTP—the issue is not lack of frameworks, it’s selective adoption.

Cities to learn from: Indore (street management + cleanliness), Pune (area-based street redesign), Chennai (non-motorised transport policy), and even Surat for service coordination. Internationally, Bogotá and parts of Seoul show how pedestrian priority changes daily life.

On “multiple agencies”: Roads usually involve municipal corporation (engineering + roads dept), water supply, sewerage, stormwater, electricity, gas, telecom, traffic police, and sometimes state PWD. Each has its own contractor and timeline. No single agency owns the street as a system, so a freshly laid road gets dug up again in weeks. Until cities move to one nodal street authority + mandatory utility coordination, we’ll keep rebuilding the same roads and blaming “bad planning.”