NEW DELHI, Oct 17 (Reuters) - It was, by his own account, a chance encounter with a scion of the Gandhi political dynasty that turned former soldier Kushal Pal Singh into the man who built a city from nothing and made billions in the process.

Singh was toppled from his spot as India's richest property developer this week, when his company DLF Ltd was hit with an unprecedented three-year ban from capital markets, accused by the regulator of failing to disclose key information at the time of its record-breaking 2007 market listing.
Investors wiped more than $1.3 billion off the indebted company's market value after the decision.

Village boy turned visionary developer, Singh may be largely unknown outside India. But as the man who built "boom city" Gurgaon and fostered the outsourcing industry - with a little help, he says, from ex-General Electric boss Jack Welch - he has been among the most influential Indian names of recent decades.

His political links, to the Gandhi family in particular, have also placed him among the more controversial.

To its cheerleaders, Gurgaon, the city he imagined and built 15 miles outside India's capital Delhi, is a prototype of where young, upwardly mobile Indians want to live and work. The outsourcing boom has made the city India's third-richest.

"It is India's first smart city," said Rajeev Talwar, executive director at DLF. "Its infrastructure may be creaking ... but there is a new part which supports a new kind of life."

To its detractors, though, Gurgaon is the epitome of the fervid real estate speculation and dysfunctional urban sprawl that threaten India's cities as populations boom. Water and power are unreliable, social problems abound and private contractors have had to step in where the police have failed.