Conference on Political Economy of Contemporary India, Second Edition, 9-10 January 2017, IGIDR 1 The Politics of Making Greater Hyderabad Metropolitan Scale-Building and Local Government Capacity Loraine Kennedy December 18, 2016 (Draft only. Please do not cite or circulate.) I. Introduction This paper deals broadly with urbanisation processes and urban governance in contemporary India, in connection with economic growth strategies. It examines some keytendencies of urban development in the largest cities and analyses the multiscalar politics that are in play, focusing primarily on state actors situated at various spatial scales (central, state, local). In particular, it engages with the tension between efforts to promote economic growth in urban spaces and parallel efforts to enhance the capacity of municipal corporations and make them more accountable and more effective in delivering basic services and ‘development’. It reflects on the consequences of these developments in terms of (more macro processes of) state restructuring, on one hand, and urban governance and citizenship, on the other. The starting point for this paper is the observation that India’s largest urban agglomerationsare not onlygrowingdemographically and spatially, the built-up area spreading ever further afield,they are being reconfigured politically, via the extension of municipal boundariesto cover increasingly vast areas. In this process, smaller towns and villages get merged with larger urban agglomerations. As Shaw notes, between 1991 and 2001, 221 towns were thus merged, twice as many as in the previous decade (2012: 32). This trendhas been observed across various scales and categories of settlements (Pradhan 2013), but the focus here is on the expansion of the boundaries of metropolitan cities, such as occurred in Hyderabad and Bengaluru in 2007 and in Chennai in 2011. 1 This paper will argue that these processes, which I call metropolitan scale-building, areprimarily an expression of a broader strategy on the part of state governments to leverage their large cities as growth engines. By channelling public and private investments to particular urban spaces, usually in in the peripheries where land is more easily available and less costly, state agencies accompany and shape metropolitan restructuring and initiate new areas of growth, notably through large-scale transport projects (ring roads, mass transit) and the development of industrial estates, often in partnership with private developers. The most common rationale for metropolitan scale-building, a trend observed throughout the world (Lefèvre 1998), is the felt need to enhance political capacity in order to produce outcomes that will allow these cities to better compete with other urban regions in India and globally for investments. Significantly, such initiatives are also often framed as an urban planning imperative, a response to the need to scale-up administrative capacity for providing infrastructure and services to fast-growing peripheral areas and alsoregularise existing unplanned construction. Regardless of the rationale, it will be argued here that territorial rescaling, which involves different types of actors situated at different spatial scales, is always a contested process. To engage with these issues, a case study approach is adopted. It focuses on the politics of creating Greater Hyderabad, a political project acted in 2007, and examines how the process of territorial integration is playing out, with a specific focus on the western peripheries of the city, which have undergone rapid transformation in the past 15-20 years. This paper will question what this territorial reorganisation changes in terms of governance, understood to be the configuration of actors shaping 1 Areas increased respectively in Hyderabad from 172 km 2 to 725 km 2 in Bengaluru from 161 to 741 km 2 and in Chennai from 176 to 426 km 2 .