India's Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) mandated “participation” while sponsoring the development plans for 63 select cities. Whom did the planners identify and engage as “stakeholders” in so many different places responding to the same national goals and requirements? We evaluate the reports and accounts of participation within the plan documents in order to compare variations in India's plan-making practice. We classify the plan-making efforts by interpreting the variation in relation to evidence about who the planners involved and using which methods, and to what extent. Grounding the investigation in the literature of post-independence spatial planning uncovers meaningful variations from the elite driven centralized planning model, including the emergent involvement of local actors. The paper concludes with an exploration of the future implications associated with this type of transformation for practice-oriented research in urban India and other developing contexts.