Why the Chandigarh Region Needs Its Own Policy Lens
Updated: Jul 27
Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula are governed separately but increasingly function as one metropolitan economy. CTT Founding Paper No. 001 examines the resulting governance gap and proposes a practical framework for regional coordination without administrative merger.
This article presents the principal findings and recommendations of CTT Founding Paper No. 001, Why the Chandigarh Region Needs Its Own Policy Lens. The complete paper contains the supporting evidence, comparative precedents, original analytical frameworks, figures, source notes and bibliography.
Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula are administered as separate jurisdictions, but residents, businesses and institutions increasingly experience them as one metropolitan economy.
People cross administrative boundaries every day for employment, education, healthcare, housing, commerce and air travel. Firms recruit from a shared labour pool. Hospitals, universities, courts, transport infrastructure and commercial centres serve regional catchments. Decisions taken in one jurisdiction routinely create consequences in another.
Chandigarh Think Tank describes the resulting mismatch as the Metropolitan Governance Gap: the distance between the geography in which the region’s economy functions and the geography within which public institutions ordinarily plan, regulate, finance and deliver policy.
One Metropolitan Region, Fragmented Evidence
The Chandigarh Region is already connected through shared systems of labour, housing, mobility, public services, infrastructure and the environment. Yet the evidence required to understand these systems remains divided among different governments, departments and administrative units.
Even a basic question—how many people currently live in the functional metropolitan region—cannot be answered precisely through a single, comparable dataset. India’s latest completed decennial Census remains Census 2011. Moreover, Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula are represented through geographically different administrative units. Chandigarh is a compact Union Territory, while the available figures for Mohali and Panchkula frequently relate to entire districts containing urban, peri-urban and rural areas. These figures cannot simply be added together and presented as the population of the functional Chandigarh Region. This absence of comparable regional data is not a minor statistical inconvenience. It affects the ability of governments to understand commuting patterns, forecast infrastructure requirements, assess housing demand, evaluate environmental pressures and measure the region’s economic performance as an integrated system. The problem is not that Chandigarh, Punjab and Haryana remain separate governments. Each possesses legitimate constitutional, statutory and democratic authority. The governance gap arises when decisions generate material cross-boundary effects that no standing mechanism consistently evaluates at the scale of the functional region.
A large housing project in Mohali may increase traffic and public-service demand in Chandigarh. A road improvement in one jurisdiction may merely relocate congestion into another. Housing restrictions in the core may redirect development pressure towards Zirakpur, Kharar, Dera Bassi or New Chandigarh. Air quality, drainage, groundwater, solid-waste systems and transport networks do not stop at administrative borders. Similarly, the region’s competitiveness depends on the combined availability of talent, educational and healthcare institutions, commercial space, housing, connectivity and quality of life—not on the performance of any single department or jurisdiction in isolation.
Why the Governance Gap Matters
Cities benefit economically from proximity. Deeper labour markets allow firms to find specialised skills more easily. Workers gain access to a wider range of employment opportunities. Businesses benefit from suppliers, services, institutions and knowledge concentrated within an interconnected urban region. Economists describe these advantages as agglomeration economies. Such benefits operate across functional urban regions rather than municipal boundaries. When planning systems remain fragmented, the region may experience delayed infrastructure, incompatible land-use decisions, duplicated effort, higher transaction costs and weak coordination between housing and transport.
The Chandigarh Region already offers practical illustrations of both the possibilities and limitations of regional action. Chandigarh International Airport is governed through a tripartite ownership structure involving the Airports Authority of India, Punjab through the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, and Haryana through its urban-development authority. It demonstrates that an important regional asset can be jointly owned and managed without merging the participating governments. The long-running tricity Metro proposal illustrates the other side of the problem. Its economic logic is inherently regional, but its planning and implementation have repeatedly depended on coordination among multiple governments, agencies and financing arrangements. Delays over institutional responsibility and cost-sharing show how a project serving one functional region can still be processed one jurisdiction at a time.
Lessons from Other Metropolitan Regions
The complete paper examines governance arrangements in London, Greater Manchester, India’s National Capital Region and Canada’s Ottawa–Gatineau region.
It does not recommend copying any one model wholesale. The Chandigarh Region has a distinctive constitutional structure: a Union Territory serving as the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana, surrounded by rapidly urbanising areas governed under separate state laws. Instead, the paper identifies one bounded lesson from each precedent:
London: metropolitan strategy can be separated from local implementation.
Greater Manchester: regional capacity can be built incrementally, one defined function at a time.
India’s National Capital Region: a comprehensive regional plan is not the same as coordinated execution.
Ottawa–Gatineau: a neutral convening body can coordinate across provincial boundaries without governing the constituent cities.
India’s experience with Metropolitan Planning Committees and Unified Metropolitan Transport Authorities also provides an important warning: creating a formal body on paper does not guarantee that it will function effectively. Evidence, financing clarity, defined responsibility and an established habit of cooperation must support institutional design.
The CTT Metropolitan Policy Lens
The paper proposes a practical middle path between complete fragmentation and administrative merger.
It does not recommend replacing Chandigarh, Punjab or Haryana with a new metropolitan government. Instead, it proposes that major policies and projects should be examined through a shared regional lens before being treated as entirely local matters.
The CTT Metropolitan Policy Lens asks public authorities to:
Define the functional geography of a problem before assigning the institutional response to it.
Measure metropolitan outcomes, rather than only departmental or municipal outputs.
Coordinate where costs and benefits materially cross jurisdictional boundaries.
Share evidence while preserving each government’s legal and constitutional authority.
Present the Chandigarh Region as a combined economic proposition to investors, professionals, institutions and the Union government.
The framework is deliberately selective. Not every issue requires regional coordination.
Neighbourhood amenities, local streets and routine municipal services should generally remain within the jurisdiction best placed to manage them. Regional assessment becomes necessary where material spillovers exist—for example, in mass transit, arterial roads, housing markets, strategic land use, air quality, drainage, waste management, water systems and major economic clusters. The objective is not to pull every decision upwards. It is to determine the correct scale at which each problem should be understood.
A Gradual Institutional Roadmap
CTT recommends building regional capacity incrementally rather than creating another authority immediately.
Stage 1: Build Common Evidence
The first step should be a limited Chandigarh Region Evidence Partnership.
It could begin by compiling selected datasets on commuting, land use, housing supply and prices, major infrastructure projects, air quality and water indicators through a common and publicly disclosed methodology. The purpose would not be to transfer authority from any government. It would be to ensure that Chandigarh, Punjab and Haryana are examining regional questions through compatible evidence.
Stage 2: Measure Shared Outcomes
A concise Metropolitan Outcomes Dashboard could track indicators such as travel time, access to employment, housing affordability, air quality, infrastructure reliability and investment conversion. A regular Chandigarh Region Competitiveness Report could also present the region as one economic proposition, combining its talent base, institutions, commercial infrastructure, connectivity and quality of life.
Stage 3: Introduce Regional Impact Notes
Major projects with credible cross-boundary consequences could include a short Regional Impact Note before final approval. Such a note would identify implications for mobility, infrastructure demand, the environment, public finance and neighbouring jurisdictions. The approving authority would remain unchanged, but the regional effects of the decision would become visible before the project was finalised.
Stage 4: Consider a Formal Mechanism Only After Value Is Demonstrated
Only after the first three stages create a credible evidence base and a demonstrated record of cooperation should the governments consider whether a more formal metropolitan mechanism is justified. Any such arrangement would require clearly defined functions, financing responsibilities, voting rules, transparency requirements and dispute-resolution procedures.
The guiding principle is simple: demonstrate value before adding authority, cost or permanence.
A Region Worth Governing as It Lives
The Chandigarh Region does not need to be invented. It already exists in the daily behaviour of its residents, businesses and institutions. People organise their lives across Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula and the surrounding corridors without treating administrative boundaries as the limits of the regional economy. Employers, investors, hospitals, universities, transport systems and environmental pressures operate across the same geography.
The immediate challenge is therefore not to create a new government. It is to build a shared evidence base, measure outcomes at the correct geographic scale and establish a disciplined method for recognising regional consequences before major decisions are finalised. A region does not need a new government to begin acting like one economy. It needs shared facts, proportionate coordination and institutional arrangements that respect existing authority while addressing genuinely regional problems.
The economy integrated first. Governance can now catch up—carefully, constitutionally and incrementally.
Read the Complete Paper
The 39-page publication contains the complete analysis, four-stage Metropolitan Governance Gap framework, comparative institutional precedents, CTT Metropolitan Policy Lens, institutional roadmap, guardrails, twelve figures, editorial verification note and detailed bibliography.