know what you come from.
Jamshedpur's establishment predated the great experiments—New Delhi, Islamabad and Chandigarh—of the twentieth century in city planning in the Indian subcontinent.
When New Delhi was being planned in 1911 as a grand imperial capital, an industrial town was taking shape in the backwaters of eastern India as a new experiment in urbanism.
an introduction.
Unlike New Delhi, an exercise in legitimating the empire in the eye of its colonial subject, Jamshedpur was an indigenous industrial development, initiated, financed and built by Indians, using local resources and labour albeit aided by foreign expertise.
Jamshedpur was not a colonial capital, a hill station, or an expanded cantonment or civil lines. It was for the Indian subcontinent a new kind of settlement built around the steel factory that was the primary source of employment for its residents and governed all aspects of their lives. Daily life was structured around the industry and its demands for efficient production. Paternalistic welfare policies managed the live-work space of the town.
Jamshedpur could thus lay claim to ushering in modernity whose source lay in the East but was shaped by indigenous entrepreneurship, capital and labour. Unlike colonial urban forms, it did not represent jarring juxtapositions of traditional and modern or their amalgamation, rather it attempted to create from scratch a new kind of spatial order. This becomes all the more noteworthy because the company town had no precedents in India.
plans.
The Kennedy Plan (1911) was a small company town that became a full-fledged industrial township in the Temple Planning Report within a decade. The close attention given by F.C. Temple (1920) to the landscape in planning the urban infrastructure went far beyond the conservancy approach practised by civic improvement trusts of nineteenth-century colonial India.
The Stokes Plan (1936) appears to be a mere extension of Temple’s innovative ideas and a response to the looming housing crisis following the astonishing expansion of the town.
The Koenigsberger’s Plan (1944-45) reflected the current vogue of the garden city and the neighbourhood unit in planning circles, although Jamshedpur with its core of steelworks could never conform to Ebenezer Howard’s prototype.
the design.
The design encompassed a secular outlook, valued open space and greenery as an antidote to social ills and as settings for play and recreation. This sensibility was shaped by his life experiences as an industrial entrepreneur. His cotton mills in Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Kurla were successful not only because of modern technology but also because of investment in welfare programs in worker education and health. His involvement in civic improvement and reclamation schemes in Bombay demonstrated a profound interest in making life better for those in living in squalid conditions in the old Fort and creating a productive landscape from swamps.
Jamsetji Tata exhorted his son Dorabji in 1902 to ‘lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of quick variety’, to provide ‘plenty of space for lawns and gardens’, to ‘reserve large areas for football, hockey and parks’ and ‘earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and Christian churches’.
The development of the company town should be understood in the context of Tata Steel’s efforts to stem workers’ discontent with inadequate housing and well as ideas popular at the turn of the century that physical environs would improve productivity.
Sound business management policy and philanthropic motives combined with a desire to make the industrial township a model that would be envied and emulated throughout India.
Welfare programs for workers such as the 8-hour working day (instituted as early as 1912), bonus and provident funds, sick leave, free medical aid and programs for workers’ safety, and technical skill training programs were developed. Designed to improve worker morale and productivity, they succeeded in improving the working conditions and prevented the lightning strikes of the 1920s from recurring again.
Enlightened welfare policies extended to improving the living conditions of the worker and guided town planning initiatives.
While the first Plan responded to the need to provide bungalows for ‘covenanted’ officers and quarters for skilled workers as the steel plant was being built, the next three were driven by an ever-increasing requirement for worker housing created by extension and modernization programs. Urban infrastructure, open green spaces for recreation, public health programs, medical and educational facilities, were part of the city building exercise. Their aim was to create living conditions for promoting the health and well-being of employees in turn leading to enhanced productivity.
the ethos.
Not only did the Tatas build, but they also controlled and managed the urban landscape through the Town Planning Division and Health Department.
Public hygiene was an important aspect of landscape management with many innovative programs for disease control, waterborne sanitation and urban greenery as an antidote to atmospheric pollution introduced over time.
Unlike a Municipality that levies taxes, a Notified Area Committee consisting of Tata management governs the city through the Town Planning Division (now reconfigured as JUSCO—Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company) with company funds.
In addition to housing, Tata Steel provides the employees with water, sanitation, electricity, schools, medical and recreational facilities.
These amenities provided free of charge to Jamshedpur residents annually cost the Company Rs. 15 million with a current deficit of Rs. 500 million incurred by Town Planning.
Exceeding the average municipal functions its regulatory powers may be perceived coercive but are nonetheless effective. This kind of governance and day to day management has ensured the long term success of town planning in Jamshedpur.
"We are not putting up a row of workmen’s huts in Jamshedpur—we are building a city".
governance.
town to to township.
The origins of the steel city lay in a small company town built from a camp in the tiny tribal village of Sakchi.
P.C. Tallents in the 1921 census report describes the spectacular growth of this company town into an industrial township as ‘a romance of the twentieth century’ and that the ‘story of its birth in the wilderness in 1907 and its amazing development during the next 14 years reads like a fairy tale’.
Contrary to the popular belief the setting was not wilderness. Although the site was thickly forested, there were a few hamlets subsisting on rice cultivation on terraced ridge slopes and on forest produce. They were strung along cart tracks or nalas (natural swales) where water tanks were constructed by digging or embanking a stream.
Tata Steel acquired 3,564 acres of wasteland in Sakchi and a few neighbouring villages on the undulating central ridge, a watershed between the two rivers.
The plan shows little influence of the garden city/suburb ideal of the ‘new’ American company towns that were being designed in the US by professional architects and landscape architects around the same time.
Site exigencies dictated the stratified pattern of housing on high ground on the ridge spurs on the north-west and western fringes of the steel plant to ensure protection from the factory dust carried by the prevailing western winds.
The colony was laid out in the grid-iron North American settlement pattern, with alphabetically named ‘roads’ running east-west and numbered ‘avenues’ running north-south. There is no evidence of a planned town centre or public park system.
expansion.
The company town designed for 10,000 residents with few public spaces and streets became the nucleus for later growth of Jamshedpur into the industrial city. Tata Steel profits from sales of steel plates and rivets in World War I spurred increased steel production.
It, therefore, began the Great Extensions Program in 1917 by building more blast furnaces, coke ovens, machine shops and foundries. The number of workers had increased to 18, 675 and the company acquired an additional 12, 215 acres for accommodating the growth.
Frederick Charles Temple, the Sanitary Engineer for Orissa and Bihar states was appointed as the Chief Engineer of Jamshedpur to plan the growing township. The Temple Plan was innovative, an exercise in ecological urbanism and sensitive to the lie of the land and the culture of indigenous communities.
Like the garden city of Letchworth and the model industrial village of New Earswick designed by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin in the UK, Temple’s Plan was adapted to the contours of the site but unlike them, it had to contend with the fact that township already existed around the steel plant.
Industry at the centre, not at the periphery, flanked by housing interspersed with squatter settlements (bustees) was the prevailing spatial pattern that could not be effaced. Temple’s close and insightful reading of how the earlier tribal settlements had utilized the topography in building their huts and cart-tracks influenced his proposal for extending the street system. Using the cart-tracks on the ridgeline as the basis, he designed an inner circle that connected the already developed core to areas on the north, east and west through ‘loops’.
To protect the riverfront from industrial pollution and town waste and to preserve its scenic quality, he designed a low-level outer circle road with an intercepting sewer, connected to the inner circle road by ‘links’. The street and drainage systems, along the ridges and gullies, resulted in an open space system of parks and parkways distributed throughout the town.
Dry weather flow was carried in the surface drains along the contours while the overflow stormwater irrigated the parkways in swales. The water-borne sewerage system was introduced and sewage, instead of emptying into the rivers, was collected from underground gravity sewers and pumped into the purification plant with the manure used as fertilizer in a sewage farm.
Temple’s plan was largely implemented. It expanded the town considerably by constructing 62 miles of roads, 2,315 dwellings, improving markets in Bistupur, Dhatkidih and Sakchi, along with a functioning waterworks and sewer system.
Two villages for Adivasis were laid out in Sonari and Kasidih. Other industries associated with TISCO (Tinplate, Indian Cable Company, Indian Steel Wires Products Ltd.) were given land and the street system was extended eastward on ridges parallel to the central ridge, with bungalows built on the crest and workers’ quarters on the slopes. Temple’s planning principles such as the gravitational sewerage system, a street system adapted to the contours, and the parkway system in natural drains was sound and have withstood the passage of time, lending the older parts of Jamshedpur a spacious feel.
The 1930s saw yet another phase of expansion of the steel plant. Now it was the largest producer of steel in the British Empire meeting three-quarters of India’s demand. Meanwhile, the population had increased to 83, 738 calling for rapid construction of housing. Major P.G.W. Stokes, a military engineer who was responsible for reconstructing Quetta after the 1934 earthquake, was entrusted with the task. Stokes’ plan was an attempt to understand the logic of growth of an expanding industrial city and impose a spatial pattern on it drawn from the North American metropolis.
While Stokes had little to suggest beyond Temple’s layout of the street and open space system, he did reiterate the efficacy of parkways in valleys with adjoining roads, advocated the separation of sewer and stormwater drainage systems, and emphasized that bustees pose a health hazard and should not be regarded as a real or permanent solution to Jamshedpur’s housing problem. He recommended that Tata Steel acquire land within 2-3 miles radius of the Factory to control speculation and develop the area for housing (figure 5). Although workers’ housing was built in Burma Mines within one mile south-east of the steel plant as per his recommendation, it exposed the residents to the air pollution created by the factory smoke and coal dust. In accordance with Stokes’ Plan, bungalows were built in Northern Town and along the main E-W Straight Mile Road, and workers’ quarters were built in the north in Sakchi and towards the west in Kadma. Jamshedpur’s housing stock was increasing yet it fell far short of the actual requirement.
World War II further spurred steel production, causing a larger work force to be employed and the ensuing surge in population to 150, 000. Otto Koenigsberger, Chief Architect of the Princely State of Mysore was asked to prepare a Development Plan.
"Koenigsberger’s Master Plan will ensure the harmonious development of Jamshedpur in a manner which will satisfy the manifold needs, functional and aesthetic of this beautiful Garden City."
A close look at the Development Plan reveals Koenigsberger’s effort to use the garden city precepts and the neighbourhood unit was only partially successful thwarted by the fact that the city had grown substantially around the steel plant with interstitial pockets and peripheral existence of tribal villages transformed into bustees. Planning in the Jamshedpur Notified Area had ensured plentiful greenery and low density but contrary to popular belief neither core nor periphery suggested the idealized layout of a garden city. The prototype, however, was firmly entrenched as the optimal solution to problems of congestion and ill-health in settlements. Koenigsberger was loathe to give it up and endeavoured wherever space permitted to plan areas in accordance with the garden city precepts. Only later in his writings did the ideas on tropical planning crystallize as unique responses to local climate and social and economic conditions.
Koenigsberger designated the industrial and residential areas of the city as two primary zones of development in accordance with his ‘band town’ planning concept.
The ‘band’ form was suited to the desirable segregation of housing and industry in two separate but parallel zones minimizing distances to the open country.
Linear bands of city and countryside ensured access to greenery and fresh air within reasonable walking distance of the place of residence. In Jamshedpur, this meant that residential areas to the north and west could grow indefinitely towards the east and have access to his proposed green belt along the two riverfronts.
beyond the industry.
Although Tata Steel remained the largest employer and the physical core of Jamshedpur, new industries and their settlements were built first towards the east and later after independence in 1947 across the river Kharkai on the west. The earlier eastern suburbs were built around the factories and consisted of officer bungalows and worker quarters, similar to the pattern at the core. A multinucleated pattern emerged with industries as the nuclei of settlement growth that minimized the distance between residence and workplace.
Some of these industries were established by the Tatas, others were acquired and became subsidiaries, sharing the supply of power and raw materials delivered on railway tracks extending from the main branch.
Industrial growth began in the 1920s with the establishment of Tinplate, Cable, Steel and Wire Industries who built their housing in a gridiron pattern on a ridge parallel to the main NW-SE ridge. The tribal villages that had deteriorated into bustees were now transformed into planned housing colonies.
The Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (TELCO) built housing for its employees in the village Jojobera, Golmuri was developed by Tinplate Company, Sidhgora by Indian Oxygen and Tata Steel, and Baridih by Tube Company. These are mini-company towns, their land leased from Tata Steel and municipal functions self-managed.
The satellite township of Adityapur came up in the 1960s across the river Kharkhai as a result of state government (then Bihar now Jharkhand) initiative in planning an industrial complex.
The perception ‘that city and industry remain—and will, for the foreseeable future, continue to remain—inextricably linked’ is firmly entrenched.
As a company town that grew into an industrial city, Jamshedpur represented a new spatial and social order for the region.
A socio-economic survey in 1959 revealed that more than half of the migrants attracted to job opportunities in Jamshedpur were from outside the state. This social mix coupled with the educated background of the highly skilled workforce brought a degree of cosmopolitanism in social life as well as belief in meritocracy.
The planning of Jamshedpur with the neighbourhood as the basic social unit created housing patterns very different from the dense and organically evolved caste- and kinship oriented neighbourhoods of pre-industrial cities.
The idea of garden city is closely linked with salubrious effects of greenery that is not a private luxury as in older settlements but a public good.
grateful to the paper
Jamshedpur: Planning an Ideal Steel City in India
by
Amita Sinha & Jatinder Singh
for the contents of this section.