ABSTRACT
Improving the information base for human settlements planning in India has been an objective of government policy for a number of years. The task of co-ordinating and automating information for planning in the nearly 3,500 municipal jurisdictions in India remains a daunting one — to say nothing of doing so in the more than 576,000 villages that make up the rural areas of India. The responsibility for establishing an information system for human settlements planning has been assigned to the Town and Country Planning Organization (TCPO) of the Ministry of Works and Housing. TCPO has also been developing a number of modest “prototype” information systems for use at national and state/territory levels. The most important lesson of the TCPO experience, therefore, seems to have been to underline the fundamentally dynamic and interrelated nature of information systems. The goal of a national urban and regional information system is fundamentally a very ambitious one.
