Introduction
Until the mid-1960s, the land occupied today by the expansive Bokaro Steel City presented a coal-rich yet rural area in the Damodar River Valley of eastern India. The area, which had been comprised of 45 villages with a total population of about 37,000 people, underwent a remarkable transformation into a new township named after the nearby Bokaro River.Footnote 1 From its inception, the city was closely integrated with the nearby steel plant, whose construction had commenced just a few years earlier and had been technically and financially supported by the Soviet Union. Situated in the districts of Dhanbad and Hazaribagh in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand (part of the state of Bihar until 2000), the city’s construction was part of a regional development strategyFootnote 2 that promoted the creation of state-owned and state-operated industrial enterprises in remote areas – an exceptional case in the history of Indian urbanism. The planned industrial towns and other large-scale projects, such as steel plants, power stations and shipyards, were meant to constitute post-Independence India’s ‘temples of modernity’ – a term coined by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to describe the vision of development, which focused on advancement of public-sector scientific research institutes and heavy industries. The construction of Bokaro was part of an even larger urban development scheme that embraced the creation of administrative centres and state-driven industrial growth.Footnote 3
After the dissolution of British rule in 1947, which ended with the partition of the subcontinent into the two independent nations of India and Pakistan, India found itself, according to Prime Minister Nehru, in a ‘backward’ state, distanced from ‘modernity’ by centuries.Footnote 4 The Indian government launched an extensive new town programme, completing 118 new urban settlements between 1947 and 1981, which collectively housed approximately five million people, making it one of the largestFootnote 5 new town programmes in the world.Footnote 6 For comparison, according to various estimates, the Soviet Union constructed approximately 300 planned cities, while the United Kingdom – another leader in the global new town movement – built 32 new towns in the quarter-century following World War II. In addition to the iconic modernist city of Chandigarh, the aesthetics of ‘international style’ have been widely realized in the post-colonial Indian cityscape, including in the state capitals of Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar as well as in many new towns built in the first decades of Independence.Footnote 7 These planned cities were meant to provide a material foundation to assist the country’s rapid transformation from rural to a mostly urban nation and to provide living arrangements for cultivating a new social and moral character of their inhabitants. This material rebuilding of India was part of Nehru’s decolonization and emancipation efforts aimed at creating a technologically advanced and modern society.Footnote 8
Despite Nehru’s continuous efforts to disentangle the concept of modernity from the West, he and his followers were critiqued both by intellectuals and by the broader public for building India – in direct and metaphorical ways – upon what were seen as a Western model and its concepts of modernity, freedom and democracy.Footnote 9 Such criticisms persist to this day. Important figures in post-colonial studies, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have dismissed Indian modernism as a failed attempt at decolonization.Footnote 10 To challenge the rigid notion of modernism as exclusively a Western development, Indian art historian R. Siva Kumar has introduced the concept of ‘contextual modernism’,Footnote 11 underscoring the variety of modernism(s) based on the unique interplay between global modernist movements and traditional values, practices and norms. Seeing modernist works as contextualized by their various meaning-laden contexts allows us to acknowledge modernism not as a homogeneous movement, but as one inherently shaped by all of these contexts. The concept of contextual modernism thus advocates for a dynamic understanding of cultural interactions, challenging the idea of unilateral cultural exchange – from West to East or vice versa.
Bokaro’s urban plan reflected a commitment to modernist urban planning principles, characterized by significant state involvement, functionalist design and the belief that the built environment can shape nature, including human nature.Footnote 12 The Bokaro General Plan primarily catered to public-sector employees, including but not limited to those working at the Bokaro Steel Plant (hereafter BSL for Bokaro Steel Limited), which was – and still remains – the city’s main employer. This focus has sometimes led to the misconception that Bokaro was solely linked to industrial production and direct Soviet influence. However, the city’s design and development also reflected a broader vision that integrated local contexts and addressed social needs.
Taking inspiration from this conceptual framework of contextual modernism, I approach the urban design and planning of Bokaro Steel City (hereafter Bokaro) both as a product of the interplay between the modernist movement and local contexts and as an integral component of this same movement, thus shaped by and shaping modernism. In this article, I aim to shift the focus away from purely Western or Soviet influences on Bokaro’s design and instead examine the key factors that informed the planners’ decisions, particularly the social rationale that underpinned Bokaro’s conceived space.
In my analysis of Bokaro’s urban design, I focus on ‘conceived’ space through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space.Footnote 13 Lefebvre identifies three aspects of social space production: conceived (space as ‘representation’), perceived (space as ‘configuration’) and lived (space as ‘signification’). This article delves into the abstract representation of space, crafted by professionals such as geographers, planners, cartographers, architects and engineers. By examining Bokaro’s ‘conceived’ space, I approach urban space as the intentions and envisioned spatial arrangements of planners. This exploration reveals the ideological and functional aspirations underpinning Bokaro’s urban planning, offering insights into the vision that shaped this planned community.
The research is based on an analysis of archival materials and ethnographic fieldwork. I examined the General Plan of the City (n.d., c. 1969–70) and the Master Approach Plan (1974), accessed during my two-month fieldwork stay in Bokaro. These essential documents were provided by Dipankar Das, the former deputy general manager in the Architecture and City Planning Department at the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), with whom I conducted several semi-structured interviews to gain insights into the workings of Bokaro Steel City’s Architecture and City Planning Department. Das was employed as an architect at the department from 1980 to 2013, where he was involved in the design, planning and maintenance of the city according to the General Plan. From 2013 until his retirement in 2023, Das served as a consultant for the Township Administration on city development issues. Additionally, over the past decade, Das has operated his own private architectural office. Additional historical documents and books were sourced from the Human Resources Department of SAIL. I also used an online-published diary of a Soviet engineer who was part of a technical delegation overseeing the Bokaro Steel Plant from 1970 to 1973.
Multiple modernities: a view from the global new town movement
New towns constructed in the twentieth century have historically been viewed through the lens of ‘Western’ influences in their design. The term ‘new towns’ originated from English-language scholarship and refers to planned cities built on greenfield sites. Viewing new towns as products of ‘Western’ modernist urbanism is not rare in the historiography of colonial or post-colonial countries. Consequently, research on planned urbanism in post-colonial countries has frequently focused on how Western planners aimed to control colonial societies by creating new urban spaces driven by the imperatives of efficiency, science and standardization.Footnote 14 Numerous studies examine the ‘golden age’ of the global new towns movement, generally seen as spanning from 1945 to 1975, when planned new towns became a favoured solution across many continents for states to enhance social provision through urban planning.Footnote 15 The prevailing perception is that the concept of modernity – grounded in scientific planning and progress – is inherently Western, exported globally and that modernist urban forms were conceived by colonizers or were products of colonial imposition.
Over the past decade, this conventional narrative of the ‘Western’ roots of modernist urbanism has been increasingly challenged. Scholars have arguedFootnote 16 that socialist cities should be viewed as products of socialist modernity, with Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain Footnote 17 pioneering this comparative approach within the transnational history of modernist urbanism. Additionally, some have questioned the dominance of Western influences on modernist urbanism in the Global South during the Cold War. Examining large-scale projects in Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, Łukasz Stanek in Architecture in Global Socialism traces the collaboration of local consultancies with architects, planners and contractors from socialist states and challenges the notion that these modernist urban structures were merely products of ‘Westernization’ or Americanization, a dominant perspective solidified in the wake of capitalist triumphalism after 1989.Footnote 18 Similarly, other scholars emphasize how urban planning was instrumental to shaping ‘socialist worldmaking’ during the Cold War.Footnote 19 A history journal recently published a special issue on Second World urban history, critiquing the Western-centric historiography and periodization of new towns that often starts with post-World War II reconstruction and ignores planned ex novo cities that had emerged in the Soviet Union since the early 1930s.Footnote 20 These critical voices have led to a reconceptualization of modernism as an international phenomenon, highlighting global exchanges through both practical collaboration and knowledge sharing.Footnote 21
Now, an emerging perspective on modernist urbanism calls for decentring Western and Soviet influences alike, highlighting more diverse forms of modernity. Kimberly Zarecor, focusing on communal housing, challenges the notion that post-war Czechoslovakia’s architectural policies were solely dictated by Moscow.Footnote 22 Similarly, Virág Molnár highlights the significant role of local governments and architects in creating Hungary’s distinctive socialist housing architecture, as well as the effort these actors made to reshape everyday life and political systems, contrasting this with the strict Soviet directives in post-war Berlin.Footnote 23 Nikolay Erofeev and Łukasz Stanek offer a nuanced view of Ulaanbaatar’s planning, which stemmed from extensive exchanges among Mongolian, Soviet and other ComeconFootnote 24 actors during the Cold War.Footnote 25 These ethnographic works decentre Soviet influence in state socialist or allied projects and move beyond the notions of ‘export’ and ‘import’, arguably rooted in outmoded colonial or Cold War binaries of Western modernism or Soviet socialist modernity. This strand of literature highlights the complexities of transnational social and political realities as manifested in material foundations.
Also in the realm of Indian modernist architecture and urbanism, scholars have challenged the assumption of modernism as inherently ‘Western’ and urge for a shift away from Eurocentric historiography that positions Western Europe as the archetypal ‘modern’.Footnote 26 Early post-Independence urban development in India was recently revisited in the 2022 exhibition ‘The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985’, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition, examining the architecture and built environment in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, frames these urbanities as a tool for cultural emancipation, not only from the weight of political and cultural colonization but also from a rigid conception of modernism as uniquely developed by the West.Footnote 27
In sum, this body of work emphasizes Avijit Pathak’s call to acknowledge the existence of multiple modernities,Footnote 28 challenging the notion of a singular, linear perspective. By moving away from monolithic narratives of modernism, this approach acknowledges regional differences and helps to understand the dynamics between central and peripheral relationships.Footnote 29 Consequently, it cautions against assuming that urban modernity is seamlessly transposed across different locales or merely imposed by dominant powers.
The limits of a Soviet imprint in a peripheral Indian city
Scholars advocating for greater recognition of Indian contributions to international modernism often challenge the notion of Indian modernism as merely a Western product. However, this narrative diverges for Bokaro, which, along with Bhilai – the first Indian city built with Soviet assistance in the 1950s – is sometimes associated with Soviet urban expertise. In this section, I explore the reasons for the persistence of such perceptions and identify the limits of Soviet influence on Bokaro.
Bokaro and three other planned towns, built in early post-Independence India, were developed near steel plants established with technological and financial assistance from various foreign governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This practice reflected India’s strategy, positioning itself with the Non-Aligned MovementFootnote 30 in order to leverage Cold War dynamics. Two of the four steel plants were built with fraternal collaboration from the Soviet Union, leading to the occasional mischaracterization of these towns as products of Soviet aid. Architectural historian Clayton Strange, in his insightful book Monotown: Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives, employs a transnational comparative approach to examine planned industrial cities in the Soviet Union, China and India.Footnote 31 He identifies a ‘Soviet town-framing’ phenomenon, suggesting the Soviet single-industry planned city model was transferred to Asia and Africa alongside Soviet industrial projects. Strange sees Bhilai and Bokaro as built according to Soviet town-framing practices. Similarly, anthropologist Jonathan Parry referred to the central Indian city of Bhilai as a ‘Soviet-built steel town’ in a 2008 paper,Footnote 32 but later corrected this in his influential book Classes of Labour, published 12 years later,Footnote 33 clarifying that the township’s design was carried out entirely by a renowned architectural firm from Mumbai, without Soviet involvement. The diverging interpretations about the design origins of these urban spaces stems from their proximity and political connection to steel plants. These planned cities, often termed ‘industrial towns’ or ‘steel towns’, are often viewed as extensions of the industrial complexes that employed their residents, thus undermining their status as independent urban settlements.Footnote 34
Planned industrial towns were pivotal to India’s state-led industrialization agenda.Footnote 35 Early independent India, primarily an agrarian country with a weak industrial base, embarked on a path to ‘catch up’ with the modernity of developed nations by prioritizing industrialization. This shift was particularly significant given that British colonialism had deindustrialized India in the nineteenth century, transforming the country from a world-leading exporter of processed goods to primarily exporting raw materials to Britain and importing British manufactured goods.Footnote 36 The national modernization agenda emphasized rapid industrialization and urbanization working in tandem – a strategy some scholars argue mirrored the early Soviet Union’s strategy.Footnote 37 This approach explains the proliferation of industrial new towns in post-colonial India.
To achieve rapid industrialization, India prioritized developing heavy industries as a quick solution to post-colonial economic challenges.Footnote 38 Its industrial strategy emphasized a producer-oriented steel industry that served smaller, often privately owned, businesses rather than large corporations or individual consumers, with the aim of stimulating long-term economic growth rather than short-term profit.Footnote 39 Significant investment in the steel industry was deemed necessary due to the limited benefits of small-scale steel production. Large plants like the Bokaro Steel Plant became crucial for supporting other industries reliant on steel, such as railway manufacturing,Footnote 40 and for fulfilling the country’s strategic needs. Bokaro Steel Plant, the fourth major steel plant in post-colonial India, was established as a public-sector enterprise.
The first three large steel plants had already been built with international aid: the Rourkela Steel Plant in Odisha was supported by West Germany, the Durgapur Steel Plant in West Bengal by Britain and the Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh (part of Madhya Pradesh until 2000) by the Soviet Union. Initially, for the Bokaro Steel Plant in Bihar, India sought collaboration with the United States, partly due to the prior involvement of the US-based Damodar Valley Corporation in local industrial projects.Footnote 41 However, US support waned in 1962 amid congressional opposition to a ‘socialist enterprise’ due to the Indian government’s insistence on keeping the plant’s ownership in the public sector. By May 1963, after US prospects closed, India invited tenders from other countries, leading to a 1965 agreement for Soviet financial and technical assistance for the Bokaro Steel Plant.Footnote 42
Its construction began in 1967, with Soviet specialists assisting and meticulously monitoring construction and operations. Soviet engineer Valentin Krzhivitsky, working in Bokaro from 1970 to 1973, details his experiences in his diaries, published in an online blog.Footnote 43 He noted with pride that the Soviet delegation saw the plant into production, describing the first blast furnace commission in October 1972. In his diaries, he also emphasizes how the Soviet specialists’ daily lives included a steady routine of supervisory and operational duties, which aligns with Jonathan Parry’s observation of Soviet management style of such projects as centralized.Footnote 44 Krzhivitsky writes:
In the morning I ran around the sites where the installation was going on. If the situation deserved it, I gave the people a little dressing down, otherwise I praised them for their work. I explained all the misunderstandings and, having made sure that there were no questions left, that everything was clear to the supervisors, foremen, and welders, I returned to the office of the complex and reported to my boss.Footnote 45
It is important to note that the steel plant operated under Indian control from the very beginning. The plant was envisioned in the 1950s as a public, Indian-owned project, and was managed by Hindustan Steel Limited (HSL) and later by the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL). From its conception, it was clear that HSL would own the plant, with the Soviet Union acting as a foreign sponsor to assist in this public initiative.
Reflecting on the collaborative efforts in the development of the steel plant, Krzhivitsky notes that Indian workers took charge of the surrounding infrastructure projects independently:
On the 24 January 1964, a public-sector limited liability company was established – Bokaro Steel Limited (BSL). It was our employer, we helped it, we worked for it. Their first premises were the houses of the new city of Bokaro, namely Sector III and Camps I and II, to receive the first arrivals to the construction site. Sectors II, IX, IV, and so on were built without any breaks. The Indians carried out these works themselves, without our help. Soviet specialists were engaged only in the plant [emphasis added].Footnote 46
This diary entry, dated around the mid-1970s, emphasizes that Soviet specialists were exclusively involved with the plant, an understanding echoed by Bokaro’s residents during my fieldwork. After the plant’s launch, according to my personal exchange and interviews with local residents, a smaller number of Soviet specialists stayed in Bokaro until the early 1990s. Although no official data exist on the exact numbers of Soviet citizens residing in Bokaro, the residents I spoke with estimate that, at its peak, the total number of Soviet specialists and their family members living there was around 3,000.Footnote 47 Their long-term engagement meant Soviet engineers and their families often lived in Bokaro for several years in a distinct area known as the ‘Russian Colony’, which featured two- and three-storey houses (see Figure 1), a primary school, a club, a shopping centre and a small playground. It constituted a typical neighbourhood but required a special pass to enter it.Footnote 48 While this extended presence was crucial for the plant’s successful operation, it had little direct influence on the city’s development. Nevertheless, the long-term presence of the Soviet experts may have left a cultural and social imprint on the local community; these aspects warrant separate research.
Russian Colony, photograph c. 1970s. Courtesy of the Facebook group ‘Bokaro Lovers’.
Cultivating cohesion: social reproduction as Bokaro’s core strength
The important role of public-sector companies in Nehru’s vision for post-colonial Indian development has been extensively explored in scholarly literature. However, the distinct urban planning and social fabric of individual steel towns have generally been overlooked.Footnote 49 The Indian new town programme, central to Nehru’s vision for modernist development, had ambitious social goals. First, this programme sought to reshape national spatial politics to promote regionally balanced urbanization.Footnote 50 New towns were strategically located in predominantly rural areas of eastern and central India to integrate these regions into the emerging nation-state,Footnote 51 and to ensure an even distribution of the population between larger and smaller cities, as well as between peripheral and centrally located regions.
Second, it aimed to facilitate social transformation of a predominantly rural Indian society into a modern and secular urban nation.Footnote 52 The demographic makeup of planned cities, developed on greenfield sites, was unique as it attracted workers from across India, preventing any single regional group from dominating. In these planned townships built by migrants from across India, the segregation of space and services based on ethnicity, caste and religion was strictly prohibited by the Indian government.Footnote 53 Since ‘traditional’ identities such as caste vary regionally, they could not be straightforwardly transplanted into new towns, nor could hierarchies among unfamiliar groups be easily established or legitimized. Challenging the essentialization of inequality and cultivating a cosmopolitan atmosphere, this social ‘blending’ strategy aimed to foster new social relationsFootnote 54 and unify new residents as belonging to a single nation.Footnote 55 This cosmopolitanism played a crucial role in the partial dismantling of entrenched social divides. Implementing Nehru’s vision on the ground was primarily the responsibility of governmental bodies, professional architects and engineers, who leveraged modernist urban design to achieve these goals. The government recognized architecture and urban design as powerful tools for facilitating social transformation, aligning with what labour geographer Andrew Herod describes as ‘social engineering through spatial engineering’.Footnote 56
In Bokaro, the Architecture and City Planning Department, led by senior planner B.K. Gupta and chief architect-planner B. Mehta, was responsible for implementing the ambitious social objectives of the new town programme. Bokaro was a city of considerable political significance, serving as a model settlement in India’s new town programme. Moreover, it also held the distinction of being the last planned city built around a major steel plant in independent India, allowing it to accumulate valuable experience and knowledge from earlier projects.
Once the government decided to establish the next steel plant in Bokaro, the department, formed in 1962, conducted preliminary studies to create an initial plan sketch. These studies aimed ‘to evolve the basic concept for the General Plan’.Footnote 57 In 1964, an All-India Panel of four Town Planners, after a site visit, reviewed the plan and its concepts and provided feedback and suggestions.Footnote 58 In March 1966, the comprehensive plan was finalized, outlining both short- and long-term development in line with the state-led vision.Footnote 59 The plan was revised in 1974 and again in 1982–84, when new roads and sectors were added, along with other amendments.Footnote 60
By 1980, the Architecture and City Planning Department in Bokaro had grown to about 50 members, reflecting its substantial capacity and importance. Among its distinguished staff was Dipankar Das, an architect who joined the department in 1980 already with extensive experience. Das previously worked at a private architectural firm and held educational credentials from prestigious institutions – holding a degree in architecture from Baroda (now Vadodara) and a town planning degree from IIT Kharagpur, one of India’s leading engineering universities. In an interview, he stated he was drawn to the project by its scale and competitive salary; he was impressed by the department’s considerable size and the high qualifications of the team: ‘When I came to the department, I was shocked because it was a very big department. It was a huge department! There were about 28 executives [architects and planners], and 29 non-executives like draftsmen and others’ (8 March 2023, Bokaro). Das mentioned with fascination the department’s management of a vast archive, its production of over 30,000 manual drawings and its maintenance of design integrity throughout the new town. In his view, the department’s organized efforts and significant influence on the city’s development, together with the political importance of the city, were very attractive to qualified staff all across India. Das was pleasantly surprised to find his former classmate from IIT Kharagpur also hired by the department, highlighting the fact that Bokaro was attracting talent from prestigious institutions in the country.
According to Managing Director Mr K.M. George, who signed the General Plan’s Foreword, life satisfaction was crucial for good working conditions, especially in a remote setting where many residents had migrated from elsewhere. As noted in the housing section of the plan, life satisfaction is part of the general working life of a person, and housing is described as ‘one of the basic requirements where a person can feel at home before and after his working hours’.Footnote 61 The City Plan thus aimed to establish a robust material foundation for the town’s social development to ensure a healthy social environment in the long term: ‘Long range planning…besides being economical, also helps towards the growth of [a] healthy environment where the people would derive maximum contentment from “work” as well as “home”.’Footnote 62
The department’s work was structured around the provision of basic yet high-quality social amenities for the township’s residents, adhering to the principle of even distribution of facilities across the city, ensuring all sectors were equipped with modern civic amenities such as electricity and running water.Footnote 63 According to Das, this approach was inspired by the comprehensive urban planning strategies seen in Chandigarh’s development. Scholars similarly note that the construction of Chandigarh in Punjab, along with other India state capitals such as Gandhinagar in Gujarat and Bhubaneswar in Odisha, served as crucial training grounds for Indian planners in the post-Independence period. These projects not only provided planners with invaluable hands-on experience but also contributed to the broader body of architectural and urban planning knowledge, becoming instrumental in training new generations of architects, engineers and planners and intended to provide them with valuable experience to be later deployed in other urban centres across India, thus fostering urban development.Footnote 64
The department’s work was centred around what became known as the ‘primary school concept’, a key element outlined in the General Plan as the ‘Primary and Secondary School District Concept’. This approach described a hierarchical organization of self-contained functional units at three levels: city, sector and neighbourhood. Each neighbourhood comprised 100 to 150 dwelling units, with each unit consisting of four or more apartments. Several neighbourhoods together formed a sector. In Bokaro, 10 out of 12 sectors were residential, and formed a city. As alluded to in the name of the concept, central to the city’s spatial organization was the placement of schools. A primary school served as the nucleus of each neighbourhood, and secondary schools anchored the sector level. Planning incorporated precise calculations of distance to ensure accessibility: a primary school with a capacity of 490 students, all living within 0.6 km of the facility, and a secondary school with a capacity of 600 students, all within 1.6 km.Footnote 65 This strong emphasis on schooling illustrates the importance of social reproduction in the township’s design.
The neighbourhood unit concept was instrumental in the three-tier system of the urban design’s hierarchies, well-defined transportation network and community organization around schools. Architectural historian William Glover argues that ‘village-like’ neighbourhoods, centred around a green zone with a primary school and local shops (see Figure 2), were designed to facilitate villagers’ transition to an urban lifestyle while encouraging community engagements.Footnote 66
The scheme of social facilities included in the neighbourhood unit in Bokaro. Source: BSL, ‘General Plan: Bokaro Steel City’ (Bokaro, n.d., c. 1969–70), 19. Courtesy of Dipankar Das.
Each sector included two secondary schools as well as essential facilities such as health centres, post offices, religious and cultural institutions, police stations and sports playgrounds (see Figure 3), thus functioning as a self-contained unit. This self-containment was vital as Bokaro’s construction unfolded in two phases. Phase one, which ran until 1981, targeted the completion of 17,850 apartments and associated facilities. Phase two, from 1982 to 1988, aimed to construct 17,183 additional homes. Together, they achieved a total of approximately 30,000 completed apartments.Footnote 67 As outlined in the General Plan, self-contained sectors also ensured community life during construction phases of the city.Footnote 68 Facilities such as public institutions, bus terminals, hospitals, highways, parks and a college were tied to the city level in this three-tier system.
The scheme of social facilities included in each sector unit in Bokaro: health centre, community hall, sector shopping, secondary school 600 places (x 2), police out-post, institutional, post/tele[phone?] office. Source: BSL, ‘General Plan: Bokaro Steel City’ (Bokaro, n.d., c. 1969–70), 19. Courtesy of Dipankar Das.
The built environment was designed to eliminate concerns over basic needs, fostering conditions for residents to enjoy stable daily routines. The city’s design emphasizes the state’s responsibility for providing a comprehensive and holistic social welfare system for public-sector employees, offering free healthcare, education and leisure. As articulated in the Foreword of the General Plan, achieving a high level of satisfaction for the city’s community, both in the workplace and in life as a whole, was a central objective of the township’s design:
When located on an isolated and virgin site, it [Bokaro Steel Plant] creates demands for housing, recreation, shopping, education, medical and similar other requirements of the employees and their dependants. For harmonious working conditions, an integrated steel plant requires an integrated community life for its employees. To achieve this, a new town with all facilities has been designed for the employees of Bokaro Steel Limited so that they have not only job satisfaction but also full life satisfaction.Footnote 69
To conclude, the township design paid a great deal of attention to ensuring access to social amenities for its residents, distributed evenly across sectors. By strategically positioning primary schools at the core of each neighbourhood, the plan ensured the safety and accessibility of educational services for all local families and fostered community engagement. This nested hierarchy of social facilities – from neighbourhood units to sectors and up to the city level, demonstrates a social-oriented model for urban development, fostering a sense of community through the provision of well-equipped shared public spaces. Centred on the distribution of infrastructures of social reproduction, Bokaro’s strategic organization reflects a state-led urban approach that positions these facilities as pivotal instruments for reshaping the relationship between the state and its citizens.
The original plan, conceived in 1969–70, underwent continuous revisions. The General Plan version that I had access to had in its appendix two revisions, made in 1974 and 1982. These revisions pertained to the plans for constructing a commercial airport, alterations in certain road layouts and the decision to develop Sector XII in the south of the city instead of Sector VII in the north due to unforeseen land issues. According to Das, such revisions were regularly integrated into the plan to adapt to evolving circumstances. While Bokaro’s construction largely followed its original General Plan, informal housing had been emerging in and around the planned township, occupying some of the previously uninhabited spaces: the newly urbanized space with all its built infrastructure was attractive. However, this aspect lies beyond the scope of this article, which focuses on the conceived city and the latent and manifest ideologies of Bokaro’s design. The original layout is clearly visible even today, characterized by key housing stock – which we examine in the next section – and infrastructures of social reproduction.
The social rationale of the housing scheme
In the context of steel towns such as Bokaro, the relationship between the state and its citizens is not straightforward, as it is intricately mediated – and perhaps facilitated – by an industrial company. The state delegated the task of social provision to public companies like BSL, positioning these industries as both components of economic development and patrons of welfare services. A crucial aspect of the state/public company/citizen framework was the ‘urban’ element, which served as an instrument to provide welfare, as may be seen in the emphasis on social reproduction in the city’s design. The triangular relationship between the state, industry and urban planning was essential for establishing welfare provision.
In the 1960s, land for Bokaro, requisitioned from local peasants, was subleased by the central government to the state of Jharkhand (then Bihar) and subsequently to SAIL. SAIL was given the responsibility of overseeing the development of the city’s township and facilities, including educational, healthcare and industrial infrastructure.Footnote 70 However, what makes Bokaro different from a typical company town is that SAIL played a supporting role in fulfilling the government’s social and urban agenda, rather than merely serving corporate interests. In a history of SAIL authored by high-level managers and a former CEO, the authors noted that before the 1991 economic reforms, the steel industry was one of the country’s most controlled sectors and was regarded by the state as a ‘national benefactor’.Footnote 71 This interplay ensured that the state retained primary authority over Bokaro’s development, aligning its urban growth with the state’s broader socio-political vision.
To facilitate the social transformation of a predominantly rural society into a modern, urban and secular nation, the Indian government sought not only to mitigate traditional village identities based on ethnicity, religion and caste – as discussed in the previous section – but also to promote social blending at a class level. There was a clear understanding regarding who the city was designed for: the public-sector workforce, specifically the employees of BSL. This category encompassed not just the plant’s workers but also the employees of schools, hospitals and other facilities, establishing that all BSL employees – who made up the majority of the township’s residents – were central to social provision and politics, effectively rendering them ‘producer patriots’.Footnote 72 Conversely, workers in the informal sector and those employed by private companies were, to some extent, excluded from this ‘social transformation’ plan. From the outset, the plan envisaged the development of private industries around the public-sector steel plant and acknowledged the potential presence of BSL contract workers. Moreover, the potential presence of workers who were not regular BSL employees is acknowledged in the General Plan: a dedicated area was to be leased out for private developers to provide residential buildings for ‘floating and construction population’.Footnote 73 This distinction in the workforce was therefore built into the plan, implying that a significant portion of the local population would be excluded from the township, including from its housing, infrastructure and social amenities. This underscores the crucial role the company played in this development vision.
Another key aspect of class politics was focused on reducing disparities between the officers and manual workers of BSL. Bokaro’s urban government deliberately designed a social arrangement through housing distribution rather than allowing market forces to segregate areas by affordability. This strategy aimed to prevent affluent individuals from monopolizing particular residential areas. To tackle social hierarchies and segregation, Bokaro’s housing scheme promoted social mixing by offering diverse housing categories within a single sector (see Figure 4). These categories were tailored to different occupational groups, conforming to national standards set by the Bureau of Public Enterprises in the 1960s.
City Plan of Bokaro Steel City. In this plan, the township is located to the right side of the plant, of which we only see a small part. The capital letters attached to the orange sections indicate the housing categories, and the Roman numerals represent the sector number. Chas is not part of the planned township but, as a nearby settlement, is noted on the map. Courtesy of Dipankar Das.
Housing categories, classified by income levels, varied in size and amenities (see Table 1). Executives, earning higher incomes, received spacious villas (Type A), while senior officers shared bungalows (Type B) due to density regulations. Officers were allocated smaller units (Type C), and workers were housed in more modest dwellings (Types D, E and F; see Figure 5), each tailored to specific income brackets. Despite variations, all accommodations provided a notably high standard of living compared to typical workers’ conditions. Each unit featured electricity, running water, indoor toilets and kitchens, offering a quality of housing considered superior by Indian working-class standards.
Housing categories in Bokaro Steel City.
Source: ‘General Plan: Bokaro Steel City’ (Bokaro, n.d., c. 1969–70), 24. The number of units represents only the first phase of the township’s construction. For income comparison: the average annual income per capita in Bihar (the region Bokaro belonged to at that time) in the 1960s was 332 rupees.
Housing category D. BSL, ‘General Plan: Bokaro Steel City’ (Bokaro, n.d., c. 1969–70), 19. Courtesy of Dipankar Das
The design of residential spaces in Bokaro aimed not only at providing high-quality housing with a strong emphasis on an infrastructure of social reproduction but also at facilitating daily interactions among public workers across different job hierarchies by having them live together. The township included six housing categories, with Type A being the most commodious (193 sq. m) and Type F the smallest (34 sq. m). These categories co-existed within each sector, promoting social mixing by requiring residents of privileged categories A, B and C to share public spaces with others. While the majority of residents in any given sector belonged to categories D, E and F, privileged housing categories were deliberately not segregated into separate sectors.
Non-executive workers and executives had to live together within the same sector, ‘to mix them up’, as noted by Dipankar Das. According to Das, the Architecture and City Planning Department received numerous complaints from high-level officers. He noted: ‘Since different social groups were not allowed to live and exist separately, high-ranking and mid-level professionals had to share spaces with lower-ranking workers. This did not always work well.’ These challenges highlight the efficacy of the town-planning objectives. While it may not have been easy, the enforced contact between individuals from diverse backgrounds within a shared residential space encouraged social interaction. The integration of different levels of employees within a single residential setting inevitably generated tensions, especially considering that workplace hierarchies remained unchanged.
The articulated ideology of mixing housing categories in the design was only superficially addressed in the General Plan, which briefly stated that an ‘attempt has been made to mix…categories…to blend the city with a socially acceptable environment’.Footnote 75 This nod towards social experimentation was overshadowed by a greater emphasis on aesthetic considerations, such as how the category-based variation in housing designs created an ‘interesting street picture’.Footnote 76 Additionally, a functional rationale was offered by positioning lower-income housing closer to the plant, based on the presumed lack of car transport among residentsFootnote 77 – although this was not entirely true, since many of the larger villas and upper-class housing were indeed placed in sectors near the plant.
The General Plan does not detail how housing categories were specifically mixed, discussing only the stages of housing construction.Footnote 78 However, in The History of Bokaro, published in 1988, N.R. Srinivasan provides a table with category-based and sector-based data.Footnote 79 This table, as of 31 March 1988 (see Figure 6), demonstrates the integrated approach, showing categories A, B and C mixed with D, E and F. This arrangement indicates an intentional blend of different residential categories within the township. Through this combination, the layout promoted a class-diverse residential environment. The predominance of categories D, E and F in all sectors highlighted a commitment to providing affordable and accessible housing for a broad range of residents. This distribution also ensured that the most affluent employees did not occupy exclusive residential areas. Instead, they lived alongside individuals from various socio-economic backgrounds, and this generated shared communal spaces and daily interactions.
House allotment as of 31 March 1988. Source: N.R. Srinivasan, The History of Bokaro (Bokaro, 1988), 24.
Bokaro’s housing policy presents a unique case that both mirrors and diverges from the typical approaches found in post-war planned industrial cities in the Soviet Union. In many respects, Bokaro’s urban planning aligns with principles of socialist modernity. First, enhancing social provision through urban planning, where the state supplies services while a public company distributes them on the ground, reflects an ideological integration of urban planning, welfare provision and industry, rooted in the belief that the built environment can drive social change, similar to the power dynamics in socialist cities.Footnote 80 Secondly, the emphasis on social reproduction facilities is parallel in vision with socialist cities, reflecting a commitment by the state to participate in social transformations and share responsibilities with families regarding educational, medical and recreational development.Footnote 81 Moreover, the concept of individual land plots – a remnant of capitalist land development – was not used in the plans. Thirdly, the state vision, executed through urban planning, resulted in central planning – a defining characteristic of both socialist cities and Bokaro.
However, what sets Bokaro apart from socialist cities such as Mezhdurechensk in south-western Siberia, whose urban policies I analysed in another article,Footnote 82 is its approach to housing categories within the urban plan. While socialist cities typically featured standardized housing developed by the state, varying primarily by the era of construction (e.g. differing styles from the Stalin to Khrushchev periods), Bokaro’s strategy intentionally integrated different housing categories so that they spatially co-existed in the same sectors. By mixing categories A to C with categories D to F, Bokaro ensured that affluent employees did not have exclusive domains. However, the existence of these housing categories in itself illustrates that inequality was not entirely eradicated in favour of an egalitarian society. Rather, the goal was to balance class inequalities through mixed-class township neighbourhoods, albeit with tensions, but toward a more socially balanced society. Furthermore, according to the 1988 data, these A to C categories are located only in four sectors, which are the city-centre sectors and those closest to the plant. This indicates that affluent employees did receive privileged locations, but not on an exclusive basis. This arrangement of housing distribution reflects an intention to advance modest social-democratic ideals rather than a pursuit of a classless society, setting Bokaro apart from the traditional models of socialist cities.
Cultivating a technical elite in an industrial working-class city
Bokaro was conceived and constructed as an exceptional city in India, meant to embody the nation’s future. It was equipped with high-level infrastructure to attract well-qualified professionals and engineers essential for industrial growth. However, it also attracted other labourers who saw Bokaro as an ideal place to build their lives and the lives of their children. This design served as a strong base from which to build a city where engineers and other technical elite critical for the future of India would be nurtured. In this article, I have argued that Bokaro’s urban arrangement of close-knit residential zones and many shared spaces was deliberately designed to foster daily interactions among residents from diverse economic backgrounds.
In Bokaro, no affluent group was permitted to territorially dominate a sector, and this design supported the aim of cultivating a technical elite of industrial workers. By ensuring that families of manual workers as well as some service workers would live together with those in administrative and managerial positions, the urban layout prompted residents from all economic backgrounds to live in proximity to each other, allowing their children to grow up together, learn in the same schools and participate in community activities. This mingling across different professional tiers aimed to contribute to the development of a cohesive community where social barriers were minimized and the distinctions between the professional-managerial class and blue-collar workers residing in the township were blurred.
The focus on primary and secondary schools was crucial to this effort. The design mandated that children of all resident workers, whether manual labourers or executives, attend the same schools, sharing educational resources and wearing standard uniforms provided by the schools. The layout was structured so that residents would participate in community centres, frequent markets and playgrounds together. Such interactions would grant access to shared resources and social capital, facilitating informal learning and exposure to diverse perspectives. This tacit learning, embedded in the design, was based on daily interactions and aimed to increase the likelihood of different groups’ children accessing high-ranking technical – often industrial – positions in Bokaro.
By establishing urban spaces where families from varied economic backgrounds co-existed with ample public facilities, Bokaro’s design was centred around fostering the next generation of professional ‘producer patriots’, reflecting a nation-building strategy driven by state-led urban planning. Similar to post-Independence state capitals that served to ‘produce’ architects, engineers and planners, Bokaro, I argue, was envisioned as a training ground for engineers and the technical-industrial elite.
The presence of income-based housing categories points to the social-democratic nature of the city’s design scheme, unlike in the planned industrial cities of the post-war Soviet context, which arguably aimed for a classless society. Bokaro’s design was not intended to be universally egalitarian; rather, it modelled another type of citizenry where residents shared urban privileges and social responsibilities with the state. This arrangement supported Bokaro’s role as a training ground for nurturing a technical elite.
Conclusion
By examining the Bokaro General Plan through Lefebvre’s theoretical lens, I uncovered the intentions and spatial arrangements as a ‘conceived’ space, along with how both the middle and working classes were envisioned to inhabit it. The design of Bokaro represents a remarkable instance of modernist urban planning that intricately weaves together local socio-political aspirations with broader transnational influences.
By adopting R. Siva Kumar’s concept of contextualized modernism, we gain insight into how Bokaro’s design emerged as a product not only of its time but also of its specific location in post-colonial India. The Indian industrial township has been analysed in this research not as a mere replication of Western or socialist modernities but as an adaptation of urban social objectives and functions. Bokaro’s design, while influenced by the international modernist new town movement, was heavily informed by local contextual factors, reflecting a modernist vision uniquely suited to India’s post-colonial context.
Central to my argument was highlighting the distinct ways in which inequalities among the workforce of the public company were mapped out in Bokaro’s plan. In this model town, post-Independence India’s planners sought not only to develop residential zones for public-sector workers but also to cultivate a socially inclusive environment, integral to nation-building agendas and radical social transformations, two critical themes for many countries during the second half of the twentieth century. By incorporating and blending diverse income-based housing categories within sectors, the plan sought not only to blur ethnic, regional and religious lines but also to dissolve class barriers. In doing so, it sought to cultivate a technical elite, essential for a new nation striving to narrow the industrial gap with ‘developed’ industrialized countries and forge its own form of modernity.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express deepest gratitude to the people who significantly contributed to the fieldwork conducted in Bokaro Steel City, making this article possible. Without the private archive of Dipankar Das, and his sharing of unique perspectives held by architects of that time, which allowed me to see their point of view, this work could not exist. Sejal Vasant offered invaluable research support during my fieldwork trips. Aboli Margineli provided indispensable assistance upon my first arrival at Bokaro. My heartfelt thanks also go to those whose insightful comments on various versions of this article greatly contributed to its final form. Furthermore, I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their valuable feedback and the editor of this special issue, Victoria Fomina, for her interest in the research. All shortcomings of the article, of course, are my own.
Funding statement
The writing of this article has been enabled by funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – GRK2725 – Projektnummer 445103843.
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