As the Union Budget is expected to be placed before parliament on February 1, the familiar anticipations are once again in the air. Will the fiscal deficit glide path hold? Will capital expenditure rise? Will the middle class receive tax relief? These questions dominate television studios and policy briefings. Yet one question – arguably the most consequential for India’s future – remains stubbornly marginal: what does this budget really offer to India’s cities?For decades now, India has lived through an urban transition without an urban compact. Cities have expanded, densified, and absorbed economic shocks, migration waves, climate stress, and political neglect – all without a commensurate fiscal architecture. The result is visible everywhere: congested streets, fractured infrastructure, informal settlements on ecologically fragile land, and municipal governments struggling to perform even basic functions.As parliament prepares to debate numbers, India must confront a deeper absence. We still do not have a national urban fiscal imagination. Every budget season in India arrives with a familiar choreography. There are press conferences, glossy infographics, mission acronyms freshly minted, and headline numbers carefully chosen to sound ambitious. Yet beneath the arithmetic lies a stubborn truth: India still does not have an urban budget – only fragmented allocations for cities.Also read: Economic Survey 2026 Realises the World Has Changed, but Wants To Play by the Old RulesAs state budgets unfold across the country this year, one notices a pattern that is both revealing and alarming. Urban development continues to hover around Rs 1 lakh crore nationally – barely 0.25% of GDP – despite the fact that Indian cities generate over 60% of the country’s economic output and house the frontlines of climate risk, inequality, and democratic stress. This mismatch is no longer a technical oversight; it is a political failure of imagination.If India is serious about becoming a resilient and inclusive republic by mid-century, the first correction must be fiscal and moral: urban development outlays must be doubled to at least Rs 2 lakh crore – roughly 0.5% of GDP. Not as a one-time stimulus, but as a structural reorientation of public spending.This is not an argument for bigger government alone. It is an argument for government that understands where India now lives, works, and suffers.From arithmetic to ethics: Why Rs 2 lakh crore is not excessiveUrban budgets are often discussed as if they are discretionary add-ons – nice to have, but not essential. This is a dangerous illusion. Cities are where climate shocks materialise, where informal labour concentrates, where public health crises incubate, and where democratic trust erodes fastest.Doubling urban outlay is not fiscal adventurism; it is delayed realism. Spread across states, this investment would barely correct decades of underfunding in water systems, drainage, housing, public transport, waste management, and public spaces. More importantly, it would signal a shift from treating cities as revenue-generating machines to recognising them as human settlements requiring care, redundancy, and resilience.India’s urban future cannot be built on PPP brochures and credit ratings alone. It must be underwritten by public commitment.Climate-resilient infrastructure: Not an add-on, but the coreNowhere is this neglect more visible than in hill and coastal towns – settlements perched precariously between ecological fragility and administrative indifference.From Joshimath to Shimla, from Alappuzha to Kakinada, climate stress is no longer episodic. Landslides, subsidence, storm surges, coastal erosion, water scarcity – these are not “natural disasters” but predictable outcomes of poorly planned urbanisation layered onto fragile geographies.Yet budgets continue to treat climate resilience as a pilot project, a sub-component, or worse, a post-disaster relief item. This must change.India needs a dedicated budgetary window for climate-resilient urban infrastructure, especially for hill and coastal towns. This includes slope stabilisation, drainage redesign, decentralised water systems, climate-sensitive building codes, coastal buffers, and evacuation-ready public spaces. These investments do not produce ribbon-cutting moments – but they prevent funerals, displacement, and irreversible loss. Resilience is not an environmental luxury. It is the most basic form of urban justice.Breaking free from the straitjacket of missionsFor over a decade now, urban policy has been trapped in the grammar of “missions” – one-size-fits-all templates imposed across wildly different states and cities. While missions have helped scale funding, they have also flattened complexity. Sanitation here, housing there, mobility somewhere else – each siloed, each chasing targets rather than outcomes.What India urgently needs is a shift from supply-driven schemes to demand- and need-based urban budgeting. Every state already has a distinct urban reality, a planning history, and a development vision. Budgets must begin by asking: What does this city actually need to survive, adapt, and dignify life?Instead of multiple missions competing for attention, states should be encouraged to present integrated urban investment plans – linking sanitation with housing, mobility with livelihoods, water with land use. This is not decentralisation as rhetoric, but as fiscal architecture. Cities do not live in compartments. Neither should budgets.The poor, the marginalised, and the climate trapPerhaps the most profound omission in current urban budgeting is the absence of the urban poor – not as beneficiaries, but as central protagonists.Informal workers, slum dwellers, migrants, street vendors, waste pickers – they are the shock absorbers of India’s urban economy and the first casualties of climate-induced disasters. Floods wash away their homes. Heatwaves steal their wages. Evictions erase their social networks.Yet climate adaptation rarely appears as a separate, rights-based budget item focused on the poor. This must be corrected urgently.Budgets must explicitly link climate risk, informality, and poverty, allocating funds for in-situ upgradation, rental housing, heat shelters, social infrastructure, and livelihood protection during climate shocks. Adaptation cannot be reduced to infrastructure alone; it must include social security, tenure security, and institutional presence in informal settlements. A city that protects only its assets and not its people is not resilient – it is brittle.Beyond concrete: What else must changeAn alternate urban budget must also confront quieter failures.First, planning capacity. India has invested more in consultants than in planners. Without strengthening municipal planning departments, data systems, and local technical cadres, money will continue to chase paperwork rather than transformation.Second, municipal finance reform. Property tax, user charges, intergovernmental transfers – these remain politically avoided subjects. Without predictable, buoyant municipal revenues, cities will remain dependent and compromised.Third, democratic deepening. Ward committees, area sabhas, and participatory budgeting are still treated as optional. Yet without citizen voice, urban investments lose legitimacy and relevance.Finally, urban land. The most valuable and most misused resource in Indian cities remains outside democratic scrutiny. An honest budget must confront land as a public resource, not merely a real estate commodity.A budget as a moral documentBudgets are often described as financial statements. In reality, they are moral documents. They reveal who is seen, who is heard, and who is expected to adjust.For too long, Indian cities have been asked to grow without care, absorb without support, and endure without acknowledgment. The result is visible in cracked hillsides, flooded streets, exhausted commuters, and invisible workers.An alternate urban budget – one that invests 0.5% of GDP, prioritises climate resilience, abandons straitjacket schemes, centres the poor, and respects ecological limits – is not radical. It is overdue. The question is no longer whether India can afford such a budget. The question is whether it can afford not to have one.Tikender Singh Panwar was once directly elected deputy mayor of Shimla. He was linked with the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of three books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities and also a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.