India's capital and most populous city is Delhi, home to 31 million residents.
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This is the most populous city, and the capital, of a country that will soon have more people than anywhere else on Earth. Home to more than 31 million residents, it’s a chaotic place with a complicated history. It has major problems in housing, inequality, and transportation, but if it can solve them, its residents will experience an enormous increase in prosperity. As India’s seat of power, what happens here impacts a billion people and reverberates around the world. This is Delhi: a fulcrum of the 21st century.

Nestled along a protective ridge that sends Himalayan snowmelt either west to the tributaries of the Indus river, or east to the Ganges, Delhi is the gateway to one of the most expansive, fertile agricultural plains on the planet, and a collection point for goods on their way to an extensive coastline for export.

This land has been the capital of empire after empire for thousands of years, but the defining moment in its modern history occurred 75 years ago when India declared its independence from the British Empire at Delhi’s Red Fort. This resulted in the partition of the Indian territory along religious lines into India, and West and East Pakistan, which eventually became independent Bangladesh.

This had massive consequences.

This flood of new arrivals overwhelmed the city as makeshift housing settlements sprouted and grew all over. This building wasn’t done to code and lacked basic plumbing and sewers. It’s a crisis that Delhi is still struggling to solve. Today, the percentage of its residents living in so-called unauthorized areas is as high as 40%. That’s a staggering 12 million people.

But to get a more complete picture of what Delhi is today, we must go back to events after Indian independence. In 1947 Indian per-capita income had not increased since 1757–that’s 190 years of British imperialists taking ownership of - and exporting away - vast quantities of India’s bountiful natural resources. Revolutionary Mahatma Gandhi and his hand-picked political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, knew the Indian people needed a far different system than what the British Empire had imposed.

What Nehru wanted was an idyllic ‘Total Society’ in which injustice and inequality would be defeated by the perfect nation-system. This dream was cemented during a short four-day visit to Moscow, where Nehru and his father were wined and dined by the Communist Party’s elite celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. With tightly managed visits to factories and theatres, it was an obvious attempt to impart a rosy picture of Soviet-style socialism onto visiting dignitaries, and it worked. Nehru was awed by the USSR’s achievements in industry, art, and bureaucracy.

Real estate and land development in the city of Delhi was tightly controlled. The Delhi Development Authority - or DDA - was created in 1957 and granted the exclusive responsibility of land development within the borders of the city. The DDA prevented individuals from owning more than a handful of acres and forced people to sell the agency their property at below-market prices.

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