Union Territories & Panchayats
(1) Every Metropolitan area must have a Metropolitan Planning Committee to prepare a draft development plan for the whole metropolitan area. (2) State law governs composition (at least two-thirds of members elected by and from the area's Municipality/Panchayat elected representatives, proportional to population) and includes Union/State government and relevant organisation representation. (3) The Committee considers local body plans, common rural-urban interests, government priorities, likely investments, and available resources, consulting specified institutions. (4) The Committee forwards its plan to the State Government.
For India's largest urban agglomerations (population 10 lakh / one million or more, potentially spanning multiple municipal bodies), this creates a dedicated coordinating body to produce one integrated metropolitan-wide development plan, rather than leaving each individual Municipality or Panchayat within that metro area to plan in isolation.
A major metropolitan area spanning a core city plus several surrounding municipalities and semi-rural Panchayats would have a Metropolitan Planning Committee specifically tasked with coordinating a coherent development plan across all of them, addressing issues like shared water resources and integrated transport infrastructure.