Team One Architects Director Aditya B. Yamsanwar was quoted in CNBC-TV18 on India's urban infrastructure priorities — speaking to the resilience of Indian cities, the transformation of SEZs into services-led ecosystems, and what Budget 2026–27 needs to do to sustain that momentum.

What the Coverage Is About

CNBC-TV18's pre-budget feature brought together industry voices on the built environment, urban planning, and infrastructure priorities ahead of Union Budget 2026–27. Aditya Yamsanwar spoke to the structural shift underway in Indian cities — where SEZ reforms and infrastructure investment have moved urban centres into a new phase of absorption capacity, with non-traditional business districts beginning to compete meaningfully with established Grade-A corridors.

On the budget specifically, Yamsanwar noted that the opportunity lies in compounding what is already working — deepening capital investment in city-scale planning, prioritising transit-led business corridors, and enabling integrated development frameworks that allow Tier-2 markets to evolve into GCC-style innovation hubs.

SEZs, Grade-A Absorption, and the New Business District

India's Special Economic Zone framework, long associated with export-led manufacturing, has undergone a quiet but significant transformation. The shift toward services-led tenancy — driven by IT, GCC, and knowledge-economy occupiers — has repositioned many SEZ districts as de facto urban business hubs, with the infrastructure backbone to support Grade-A occupancy at scale.

For architects and workplace designers, this creates a genuinely different kind of brief. The projects emerging from these districts — GCC campuses, innovation headquarters, and high-performance corporate interiors — demand a level of strategic thinking about place, connectivity, and long-term workability that goes well beyond the building envelope itself.