The “failure of planning” has become a ubiquitous, longstanding, and commonsensical refrain in Indian cities. Decades apart, Ashis Nandy and Jai Sen both famously described Indian cities as “unintended” (Sen 1976; Nandy 1998). Meera Bapat’s description of the “failure, even irrelevance, of the dominant ideology of urban planning” (Bapat 1983) seemed to echo even two decades later as Gita Diwan Verma’s “chaos that is urban development” (Verma 2002). The planners’ desire to “effect a controlled and orderly manipulation of change” has been, argues Amita Baviskar, “continuously thwarted” by the “inherent unruliness of people and places” (Baviskar 2003: 92). Urban planning is considered, at best, “hopelessly inadequate” in terms of being able to tackle this chaos (Patel 1997) though inadequacy is the gentlest of the charges leveled against planning. Citing the twin jaundice and cholera epidemics in Delhi in 1955 and 1988, Dunu Roy argues that the worst aspect of the failure of planning was that, in fact, “planners did not even understand the implications of what they had done” (Roy 2004).