The planners of independent India’s new capital failed spectacularly in their attempt to create a poverty-free modernist utopia. Their legacy is a sprawling city awash with slums and hampered by bureaucracy

In the late hours of 14 August 1947, on the eve of Indian independence, Jawaharlal Nehru stood at the podium of the Constituent Assembly and delivered his vision for a new capital city. “We have to build a noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell,” said the country’s inaugural prime minister.

Just outside parliament, however, Nehru’s mansion was crumbling.

In Delhi’s old city, mobs of young men rioted through Muslim neighbourhoods with impunity. Families fled from their homes, stuffing themselves into train cars or marching from the city centre by foot. A few kilometres to the south, thousands more poured into Mughal ruins at Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb. Fleeing violence in their home states, these families found refuge in the makeshift colonies sprouting on Delhi’s periphery.

The city appeared, according to a report in the Daily Mirror, “like a battlefield with blazing houses, hordes of refugees, dead cattle and horses and the rattle of automatic weapons”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd on a train leaving New Delhi for Pakistan in September 1947. Photograph: AP

The departure of the British left a subcontinent divided. In the aftermath, 350,000 Muslims fled Delhi for Pakistan, while 500,000 non-Muslims arrived in the city in 1947 alone. It was labelled “history’s greatest migration”. It was also a scale of transformation for which the city was entirely unprepared. Services came to a standstill: trains, buses, hospitals, even phonelines. Without trains, the food supply dwindled to just two days’ worth of wheat.

The entire city is taken over as a public project. They want to create an imperial capital Partha Mukhopadhyay

Yet Nehru and his team of planners remained undeterred. Over the course of the coming decade, they would develop the most ambitious masterplan in India’s history: a capital city free of poverty and slums. “Delhi was to be Nehru’s ‘all-India’ city,” says Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science at Brown University. “It was to be the first city that belonged to the independent India.”

The ingredients of Delhi’s ambitious plan were, however, imported. Far away from the tumult of independence, eight British and American consultants from the Ford Foundation had gathered in Berkeley, California, to review maps, draw up plans, and mock up drafts of India’s new capital city. Albert Mayer, the head of the programme, was a prominent New York planner and architect. They called their project the “Delhi imperative” – their imperative being to bring the ideas of England’s garden city movement to bear on Delhi’s chaotic and sprawling urban form.

Of course, almost none of the committee members had worked in India before. The Berkeley meetings were, in many ways, briefings on Delhi and its centuries of disjointed urbanisation. Yet Delhi has a long history of outsourcing its vision to foreign planners.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Parliament House, New Delhi. Photograph: Alamy

A half-century earlier, when it became the capital of the British Raj, Edwin Lutyens arrived as chief architect of the Delhi town planning committee. Over the course of two months, he assessed the city on the back of his elephant, then withdrew, satisfied, to the mountains, to reshape Delhi in his image of a “proper European capital” – wide avenues, axial vistas, parks and roundabouts, just like his beloved Champs-Élysées. Lutyens’ portion of the city became known as New Delhi.

The Ford Foundation committee similarly sought to reconstruct the city anew. “Delhi was to become the model of development for India,” says AK Jain, a former commissioner of planning at the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). “The masterplan was Nehru’s showpiece.”

On paper, the masterplan is a high modernist dream. Six “ring towns” grow from Delhi’s periphery, each with its own “economic, social and cultural ties with the central city”.

Under the guidance of the newly founded DDA, each town should hit its targets for population, manufacturing and employment for each of the next 30 years of urban growth. And, of course, they would be beautiful – in the words of the plan, beauty “should pervade the design of all public and private buildings: modern industrial buildings in attractively landscaped grounds, pleasing shopping centres, simple and beautifully designed schools and homes.”

This was a social vision as much as an architectural one. “Tamils should be there, Telugus should be there, Assamese should be there,” Varshney explains. “The city was to incorporate all the languages and all the regions of India.” For Delhi’s planners, the key to implementing this vision was centralisation. Until then, they argued, Delhi had “evolved in a haphazard manner, more often that not without the benefit of planning development in the public interest. Private interests run rampant, overlooking or not being concerned with the efficiencies and facilities that are required.”

The DDA would take over the sole responsibility for directing Delhi’s growth. “As the development authority takes shape, two things happen,” says Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “First, there is a fair degree of land acquisition and eminent domain. Second, almost all private development in the city comes to a halt.” Delhi’s major developers, who had constructed colonies through the south of the city, were no longer allowed to build. Instead, the DDA amassed more than 50,000 acres of land for its various construction and redevelopment projects.

“The entire city is taken over as a public project,” Mukhopadhyay says. “Once the DDA starts growing, there is a much more intentional effort to reshape the city. They want to create an imperial capital.”

Grand overambition

Outside of the development authority, however, the masterplan remained a fantasy. “The promise was so seductive: a large land nationalisation, formal employment in the government, and the state building all levels of housing to construct a more equal and mixed city than a real-estate market would have,” says Gautam Bhan, professor at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore. “But many parts of it fell apart slowly.”

At the root of the issue was the fact that the Delhi government – like city governments around the country – was close to bankruptcy. “They just didn’t have the resources,” says Mukhopadhyay. “The pressure on the city is growing. But the DDA is overwhelmed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Men rest on a construction site for residential apartments that was halted, unfinished, in 2011. Photograph: Adnan1 Abidi/Reuters

The total revolving fund at the height of its masterplanning was no more than 50 million rupees – or roughly $1million: “Not enough to build more than a few metres of metro railway,” says Mukhopadhyay.

The result was that, over the course of the coming decade, the DDA consistently fell short. It promised to develop 30,000 acres for residential use, but delivered only 13,000. Where it did succeed in developing housing stock, it was rarely for Delhi’s poorest. A mere 10% of the DDA’s housing plots were designated for its low-income group between 1960 and 1970.

Where the poor would live, what facilities would be made for them – it never featured. The plan was purely fictional Ashutosh Varshney

Without support from the state, the refugee crisis that had spurred Nehru to action at Independence intensified. “The pressure on the city – the attractiveness of the city as a destination – is growing, and the DDA is aggressively planning to stop the bleeding,” says Mukhopadhyay. “But given India’s politics … it just can’t stop people from coming in.”

Each year, more than 200,000 new migrants arrived in Delhi from the surrounding countryside. Tent cities that first appeared in the early days of independence grew into larger neighbourhoods, as residents built up from kutcha houses of mud and wood to pukka houses of brick and stone. Relatives joined their families, built new rooms, and Delhi’s periphery steadily urbanised outward. It had become a “partition city”, and its migrants had become residents. But the DDA refused to recognise them. Under its public ownership of the city, informal settlements were illegal, and their residents were invaders. In many cases, the authority moved to evict and relocate these illegal occupants to make way for its new projects. In others, Delhi’s slum-dwellers were left unacknowledged.

They could apply for legal titles to the land, known as “regularisation”. But moving through the bureaucracy would take them years, if not decades. The DDA trapped them in a double bind: it outlawed informal construction, but failed to provide formal accommodation to replace it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guards stand in the Mughal gardens of the Indian Presidential Palace. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

According to Ashutosh Varshney, providing for the urban poor was never part of the DDA’s vision. “Where the poor were to be located, what kind of facilities were to be made for them – I don’t think those questions were discussed, or featured in that imagination.”. Furthermore, Delhi’s planners never adapted to the new reality. “At independence, the ideal of this planned, modern city makes some sense,” says Mukhopadhyay. “But that ideal has been continuously confronted with a different reality. A lot of the DDA’s planning is purely fictional.”

Yet the city’s planners buried their heads in the original masterplan, and continued to pursue their original targets. “The biggest failure was that it took 30 years for the next plan to come,” says Bhan. “So the essence of planning – review, course correction, adjustment – vanished. There is no plan that can shape a city for 30 years, no matter how good.”

‘We are building the world-class city’

Even five decades after its first masterplan, the DDA was waxing poetical about its accomplishments in its 2006/07 annual report: “In the 50 years of its relentless efforts to maintain the pace of development and match steps with the best cities of the present era, DDA has crossed one milestone after another. Emperors have come and emperors have gone, history has been written and rewritten, but Delhi has continued to grow in glory and spread its warmth.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labourers work at a construction project in Delhi. Photograph: Gurinder Osan/AP

Even to the most casual observer, that report is a masterpiece of magical thinking. Much as it was on the eve of independence, Delhi today is the site of frenzied urbanisation. Skyscrapers, malls and gated communities sprout from farmland on the city’s eastern edge. Trucks flow from highways into factories along its north. Throughout, new informal settlements continue to crop up, housing roughly half of Delhi’s 18 million residents.

Yet the DDA remains largely blind to these changes. At Vikas Sadan, where its headquarters are located, Nehru’s urban planning apparatus remains intact, a fossil of a different era. Bureaucrats shuffle through long, dark hallways. Stacks of rotting files line hallways and closets; triplicate traces of decades-old applications. In one office, four engineers sit cross-legged behind their desks, drinking chai and examining new plans for a housing development. “With this, we are building the world-class city,” one tells me. He pulls out a copy of the masterplan 2021, which promises to “make Delhi a global metropolis”: a centre of IT innovation, green parks and new high-rise housing.

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Outside, lines of housing applicants snake around the block, holding thick folders of forms, bills and photocopies. Their joke is always the same: if you apply for a house from the DDA, your great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter will live to inhabit it.

Modern Delhi was born of this contrast – great vision, and little implementation. From the outset, Delhi’s planners have imagined a vibrant capital city with ordered growth and universal housing. Yet in doing so, they planned for a city that did not exist, and they left the city’s actual residents without a plan.

According to Mukhopadhyay, this is the “original sin” of Delhi’s urban conception. “You can imagine going wrong for five, 10 or even 30 years. But at which point do you start recognising reality?”

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