One of the main obstacles to effective urban planning in India is a lack of up-to-date, comprehensive and sufficiently detailed information about urban areas. This lack of information is a major reason behind the failure of urban municipalities to include informal settlements (known as slums) in city-wide planning and urban development. In the metropolitan cities, large proportions of the urban population live in slums, but major urban projects tend to skirt around the informal city. In the absence of information and understanding of slums, these settlements are typically considered to be chaotic masses rather than coherent urban areas. They are easily ignored or else are planned for through programmes aimed specifically at slums and not as an integral part of the city.

To address this, Shelter Associates/Baandhani has been working over the last few years to develop the use of slum surveys and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for collating information about slums for inclusive urban planning. Since early 2000, Shelter Associates/Baandhani have worked on projects in Pune and Sangli and Khuldabad which aim to introduce slum surveys and GIS as tools for integrating low-income settlements into urban planning and development.