India, Dec. 19 -- The National Green Tribunal's interim stay on Punjab's Green Habitat farmhouse policy until February 4 has turned a planning measure into a wider test of governance. Supporters see the policy as an attempt to bring order to a long-messy landscape; critics fear it could become a gateway to regularising elite sprawl in an eco-fragile belt. The truth sits uncomfortably in between, which is precisely why the issue has become a dilemma for the Punjab government.

Punjab's difficulty is not new: It has never successfully policed the periphery of Chandigarh through democratic policy alone. The Nayagaon-Kansal-Karoran belt remains a reminder of what happens when development mushrooms without an overarching plan, virtually at the...