The Development Plan (DP) of Mumbai is a statutory document that lays out important parameters of growth in the city, such as land use and Development Control Regulations (DCR). This plan is comprehensively reviewed once in 20 years; currently, the DP 2014-34 is under review, scheduled to come into effect over the next year. In this day and age of technology access, this plan is very different from all other plans.

The municipal corporation and the team of consultants hired have taken great efforts to make data available and visible to people. It is common knowledge that a lot of data used in the map is secondary data available in the public domain, however, what the DP does for the first time, is it links the data to the land use plan using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), geo-coding quantitative data to a physical map. Based on these analyses a comprehensive…