City Finance Dialogues

City
Finance
Dialogues

Quarterly public conversations on how India’s cities are financed, governed, and managed.

Every road, bus route, drainage project, and neighbourhood park begins with a financial decision. Yet conversations about how cities raise, allocate, and spend public money rarely happen outside government and policy circles.

City Finance Dialogues is Janaagraha’s quarterly public conversation series that brings together government leaders, practitioners, researchers, journalists, and citizens to unpack the financial decisions shaping India’s cities.

Each edition starts with a real urban challenge and traces it back to the systems, institutions, and incentives behind it—making urban public finance more accessible, understandable, and open to public dialogue.

Edition 1

2pm, 23 July 2026 Watch the recording below

Why do Indian cities
keep paying for the
same infrastructure?

Amarjeet Sinha

Senior Fellow, CSEP; and former Secretary, Dept. of Rural Development, Govt. of India
Beena Philip

Former Mayor, Kozhikode Municipal Corporation
Shivani Singh

Editor, Urban Affairs, Hindustan Times
Ganesh Kamath

Civil Engineer and Contractor, Swayam Prabha Constructions
Prabhat Kumar

Director, Public Finance Management, Janaagraha
Moderator

The next edition is scheduled for end-September

Want to know when registrations open for future editions?

The conversation we’re trying to have India is urbanising faster than almost any country in history. More than 520 million people already live in its cities. Within 25 years, that number will grow by roughly the population of every ASEAN country combined.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of crores have been committed to urban development through Finance Commission grants, national missions, and new financing instruments. But the surge in India’s urban population is placing unprecedented pressure on infrastructure, services, and local governments.

Despite record spending, liveability in many cities is getting worse, not better. Commutes are longer. Air quality is falling. Housing is less affordable than it was five years ago. The investment is real but the improvement that should follow does not show up.

Closing that gap means asking harder questions, like:

How does money move through a city?
Who is actually accountable for it?
What incentives shape those decisions?
How can citizens better understand and engage with them?

These are questions that almost never get asked in public. City Finance Dialogues creates space for these conversations—bringing diverse perspectives together in a way that is more accessible to everyone, not just specialists.

How it works It’s quarterly and focused on one urban finance question at a time. We pick a Thursday afternoon for this 90-minute moderated discussion with audience Q&A. It is free and open to all.

There are 4 to 5 panellists from government, academia, civil society, industry, and media.

All recorded sessions available to watch after each event.

Be a part of it The best conversations happen when different perspectives meet. If you work on cities—or are simply curious about how they’re financed and governed—we invite you to be part of City Finance Dialogues.

Join us as a participant, nominate a topic, recommend a speaker, or express interest in joining a future panel.

Whether you work in government,
research cities, report on urban issues,
or are simply curious about how your city
functions, City Finance Dialogues is designed
to make these conversations more
accessible and relevant.

Urban public finance shapes how cities work, yet rarely enters public conversation. We want to talk about that.