What was the nature of urban planning during the early British period in India?

Urban historians recognize two types of city building process—organic and planned. The planned city is based on a predetermined grid imposed by a central planning authority. Organic cities were driven by rules of exigency of people’s lives. They are created vis-à-vis how people use space.

In India, the major port cities were established by the East India Company. In the formation of these cities one can see in the modern times the dominance of the sea route over land route which was made possible due to innovations in navigation technology. The underlying factor for building the port cities was commercial advantages in terms of overseas trade. The cities shared certain morphological features that reflected the conditions under which these cities were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The three port cities established by the British were:
Madras (1640),
Bombay (1664)
Calcutta (1690).

The cities were prior to the establishment of the empire in 1757. These cities are distinctive as they share similar morphological features. These are hybrid cities in certain sense, which were founded on the basis of the needs of commerce and industry.
In India planning ideals were to be found in the vastusastra. But they were rarely realized in practice. One example was the 18th century city of Jaipur. There is a road running east to west and two roads running north/south—dividing the city into nine parts. This was the system prescribed by the vastupurusha mandala. Mandala being the ground plan of sacred and secular building as well as city plan. The builder of Jaipur Majaraja Jaisingh II was also acquainted with European science. In short, scholarly opinion is divided as to which tradition was decisive in the conception of Jaipur.