The planners of independent India’s new capital failed spectacularly in their attempt to create a poverty-free modernist utopia.

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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.

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Hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd on a train leaving New Delhi for Pakistan in September 1947
Hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd on a train leaving New Delhi for Pakistan in September 1947 © AP

‘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.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.

Delhi today, six decades after it was originally envisaged as one centrepoint orbited by six ‘ring towns’.
Delhi today, six decades after it was originally envisaged as one centrepoint orbited by six ‘ring towns’. - 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. © Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images