CHENNAI: Despite the issuance of orders and allocation of funds, Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem, Tiruchy, Tiruppur and Hosur have been waiting for about five years for constitution of their own urban development authority (UDA) that could provide the fast-growing cities the institutional muscle to plan ring roads, satellite towns and large infrastructure projects.
Tamil Nadu currently has only one such authority, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA), while the rest of the state falls under the Directorate of Town and Country Planning (DTCP), which operates through local planning authorities (LPA). LPAs are nothing but regional offices with powers only to issue planning permissions and has no mandate to implement infrastructure projects.
On August 13, 2021, the government announced UDAs for Madurai, Coimbatore, Tirupur and Hosur, with Salem and Tiruchy added subsequently. Within months, a government order constituting the Coimbatore Urban Development Authority (CUDA) was issued in November 2021, with separate orders following for the other cities. The Tamil Nadu Town and Country Planning Act, 1971, was also amended in 2022 to formally enable the creation of UDAs, with powers equivalent to those of the CMDA.
“Fund allocations have been made by the finance department and job postings have been created. The final approval, however, is still awaited,” a source in the housing and urban development department told TNIE.
K P Subramanian, former professor of urban engineering at Anna University, pointed out that the postings issued for the Coimbatore UDA in 2025 have the structure of the existing LPA with the district collector as chairman and the the district town planning officer as member secretary. For a UDA to function on the lines of the CMDA, it needs a minister as chairman and a senior-level official as member secretary. Without that structure, Subramanian said the new authorities might remain not very different from the LPAs.