While a lack of participation dominated critiques of urban planning in India for decades, in the past decade, critiques of participation have occupied a central concern for those who dismiss the Indian urban planning system as exclusivist, elitist, outmoded, technocratic, abstract and authoritarian, and who see it as civic or aesthetic governmentality. How do we understand the participatory process: who participates, how, and when? Does participation happen only during the making of key decisions that underlie ‘the plan’ or also in devising appropriate planning instruments? Or should it also happen during the implementation and enforcement process? Should the participants have a say in every planning applications in their neighbourhood and beyond- and also in devising the planning system and its governance?