A Historical Picture of New Delhi (1911-Present)

Authors

Pavit Hooda, School of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Marielle Jackson, College of Science

PAST NEW DELHI

The history of New Delhi paints a remarkable picture of how a city with beginnings in the British Empire has evolved into one of the largest hubs of modern-day urbanization. Since 1911 the city has experienced massive growth in population and physical expansion. As of 2022, New Delhi is one of the most crowded cities on earth with a current population estimated at 32 million people. [1] The history of this city comprises layers of transitions across the twentieth and twenty-first century that have shaped New Delhi into what is seen today. New Delhi today is buzzing center of social, economic, and technological growth, but how did it get there? The city experienced massive changes including independence from the British Empire, multiple Master Plans to reestablish the city’s structure, massive growth, and huge technological advancements in recent years. The history of New Delhi tells a story of the interventions that have pushed the city into the modern era, as well as the challenges that have come with it.

New Delhi was commissioned by the British Empire in 1911 to facilitate the transfer of the British-India capital from Calcutta to Delhi. [2] It took 20 years of construction to form a new city that was supposed to embody the ideals of the British Empire. Its layout displayed a rational and functional landscape with linear streets, manicured lawns, and sterile government buildings and residential sectors-- slightly interrupted by the traditional fortified settlement to the north. This was the city of Shahjahanabad (also called Old Delhi), a walled city that had served as the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1648 to 1857. [3] When compared to New Delhi, “Old Delhi” was drastically different. Where New Delhi was sterile and new, Old Delhi was full of history and tradition. The city was full of congested, busy, twisting streets comprising a functioning urban community.

By the 1930s a major intervention was needed. Old Delhi suffered from severe overcrowding, which displayed adverse health effects in citizens. Many diseases such as tuberculosis were increasing exponentially in the city along with extremely high infant mortality rates. [4] Due to pressure from the public in 1935, the Government of (British) India commissioned A.P. Hume, an English civil servant residing in Delhi to prepare a report discussing tactics to relieve congestion. [5] His results were not pleasant to the government or the residents. He found many sections of the city lacking any filtered water supply or drainage, as well as a lack of housing for approximately 100,000 people. [6] His report recommended the institution of an Improvement Trust, as well as a plan to decrease congestion--this applied to the multiple jurisdictions that comprised Old Delhi. [7] These jurisdictions were comprised of what is today the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), which housed the Lutyens’s section of the imperial capital and included government buildings; and the Delhi Municipal Committee (DMC) where the majority of the rest of the city’s residents resided. [8] This meant that if the plan was to be successful it would need to be implemented on both government-owned land as well as privately owned. The Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT) was founded in 1937 to attempt to fix the issues that A.P. Hume had identified. [9] The DIT formulated goals centered around slum clearance, road widening, and settlement extension, as well as water drainage and sewage.

India underwent another massive change during World War II with the extensive expansion of the Central Government. India also played a major role in World War II; hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers were recruited for the Indian armies who heavily fought on all fronts of the war, from Burma to Indonesia and Libya to Iraq. [10] India also became a central base for supplying clothing, food, ammunition as well as other goods to allied armies comprised of British, American, and British dominions [11] In terms of expansion of the goals from the DIT in 1937, almost all of the work being conducted was paused to aid the Allies in the war effort. This resulted in a severe shortage of housing during that time because the new construction of housing was placed on pause while a significant increase in soldiers arrived in Delhi. [12] After the war, things did not get better. A result of the food rationing that occurred during the war caused Delhi to spiral into a severe food crisis in 1946, as well as labor strikes following soon after. [13]

Only two years after the end of World War II came The Partition of British India in 1947. This led to the creation of two independent states of India and Pakistan. The event was followed by one of the bloodiest and most violent migrations and ethnic cleansing in history. [14] India gained independence from Great Britain on August 15, 1947, when the Indian Independence Bill took effect. The event should have been celebratory as India was finally free from over a century of British colonial domination. Instead, approximately two million people lost their lives, and fourteen million refugees needed to migrate quickly. [15] The Partition of India in 1947 split the Indian subcontinent into independent Hindu-majority India and Muslimmajority Pakistan. As the Punjab and Bengal provinces separated, around seven million Hindus and Sikhs as well as seven million Muslims suddenly found themselves in the wrong country. [16] During the partition, a significant influx of Pakistan- displaced persons took refuge in Delhi, where there was already a shortage of housing.

After independence, the first goal of the Indian government was to create housing for them. The Central Public Works Department undertook these issues and began a program that consisted of building thousands of single or double-story houses to be tenements and living spaces for displaced persons as well as low-income groups. [17] During this time private developers along with cooperative societies began to develop large areas of land to sell as housing to middle and high-income groups. [18] By 1950 the Government of India accounted for 300,000 refugees that had been placed under quota for Delhi, but many still remained as “squatters” who lived on government land as well as land belonging to the DIT that had not been developed yet. [19] In 1955 large numbers of non-refugee migrants also began arriving in Delhi during the large-scale construction of the Nehruvian capital. At this point, it became apparent that changes needed to be made to the city. New Delhi no longer had British authorities residing in the government buildings and sectors, and the population had been steadily increasing due to the large influx of migrants and refugees. The city was overcrowded and in need of an official plan to reevaluate the city’s function and layout. This paved the way for The First Master Plan in New Delhi which introduced the beginnings of the current hub of modern-day urbanization.

The plan began in the late 1950s with a group of Indian architects and town planners who were working with a newly established Town and Country Planning Organization (TCPO). They received approval from the Central Government as well as the Delhi Administration in 1961. [20] The plan covered a 20-year period that would stretch from 1961 to 1981 and was composed of four principal plans. The first principle was known as functional balance; where the new city would be laid out to accommodate residential and community areas in close proximity to employment centers. [21] The second principle attempted to decongest Old Delhi by separating the sections of overcrowded residential areas that were interwoven with industries. The third principle included attempting to preserve Delhi’s role of being a major center of public employment, which would be gained with the limiting of industrialization occurring. [22] Lastly, the fourth principle was the development of neighboring areas, which included the building of seven ‘ring towns’ around the urban center of Delhi in hopes of relieving the city strain from the influx of immigrants. [23] Of the four principals, most were not completed within the 20-year goal due to a multitude of reasons that included deviations from the plan at the insistence of the Central Government as well as the Delhi Administration. [24] The one success was the component of land use, specifically the implementation of separating residential areas away from interwoven industries. The lack of success with the first Master Plan led to the second attempt in 1981.

The second Master Plan consisted of another 20-year stretch from 1981 to 2001 where new principles were formed. [25] These included revised goals from the previous master plan, as well as increased infrastructure in housing areas to account for the significant population growth. The other main topics of the plan were to continue to strengthen the spacial aspects of the city. [26] This was attempted through dispersing of economic activities at the city and regional levels to try to enforce a pattern of land use. The final goal of the plan was to project the image of the city of New Delhi as the national capital. At this time the city lacked the visual impact that other main capitals around the world had. This plan pushed New Delhi into the twenty-first century where the perspective of the city changes and New Delhi can now be viewed through a lens of modern-day urbanization.

PRESENT NEW DELHI

When considering all the major cities in the history of human civilization, New Delhi is unique in its recent and vast expansion as a city. Being the capital of one of the most populated countries on the planet, New Delhi is a hotspot for societal and economic activity. And following the trend towards urbanization throughout the world, New Delhi’s resilience to the consequences of high population density environments is becoming ever so more important. With the high levels of activity present in New Delhi, efforts such as environmental protection and the metro transportation system need to keep up with the growth of the city. These programs need to be elevated into focus for the city to pursue a healthier future for its residents and local environment.

From around the year 1985 to the present day, New Delhi has shown unprecedented growth as a city. By the year 2050, the United Nations “projects India will add 400 million urban dwellers, which would be the largest urban migration in the world for the thirty-two-year period”. [27] Taken by the Earth observatory satellites from NASA, Figures 1 and 2 show the land region of New Delhi in the year 1989 and 2018 respectively. [28] The figures display how most of the expansion is on the borders of the city. This is due to how urbanization transitioned the rural areas that were scattered around the city. From the years 1991 to 2011, the number of urban households in this region almost doubled while the rural settlements have been cut in half. [29] This high degree of urbanization in and around New Delhi is due to the heightened amounts of economic activity that comes with higher population densities and more technologically advanced infrastructure. There has been a global shift towards focusing economic activity on technological advancements in the service and information technology sectors–-away from agricultural goods or farming. [30] This shift is evident in the current economic climate of New Delhi and the direction the industries in the city are going in.

Although New Delhi’s growth comes with great advancements to the city and the whole nation of India, this rapid urban development has come with its own growing pains. One consequence is the high regional average temperature of urban areas. Referred to as the urban heat island effect, man-made structures absorb heat and radiate it during the night, increasing the average temperature of the local atmosphere and surface by up to 9 degrees Celsius. [31] Warmer temperatures interfere with the natural processes that occur in the local ecology of cities such as New Delhi. And this can ultimately affect local wildlife and the agricultural output of the surrounding areas of the city.

In addition to this temperature increase, New Delhi suffers from intense air pollution due to the increased human activity in and around the city. In recent years, “cars, coal-fired power plants, and cookstoves keep New Delhi reliably near the top of the list of the world’s most polluted cities”. [32] To make matters worse, there is a period in late September when the rice farmers of the local rural regions burn their fields to clear them to grow wheat, their next crop. Smoke from this crop burning enters the atmosphere of the city and creates harmful smog that affects the health of the residents and the urban ecology of New Delhi. However, according to the local government, farmers burning their fields made up only 4 percent of the annual air pollution of New Delhi, and the rest is actually due to local factors such as vehicles, coal plants, and other industries. [33] And from such causes, an analysis of the Air Quality Life Index has shown a “72 percent increase in pollution from 1998 to 2016 in that [New Delhi] region, which is home to about 40 percent of India’s population”. [34] The current levels of air pollution in the city have a detrimental effect on its residents. Therefore, drastic efforts from New Delhi’s municipality and residents are an urgent necessity to protect its air quality from these concerning trends.

One area the city has taken action in is the transportation sector. Vehicles used to transport people and goods are one of the major causes of these environmental problems. Therefore, New Delhi has advanced its transportation system in the city to make it sufficiently robust enough to handle these high degrees of activity. This system is called the Delhi Metro, and it is a mass rapid transit (MRT) system that connects New Delhi’s activity hotspots. It provides a means of transportation for those coming or going to New Delhi’s numerous satellite cities. “The metro is a public transportation system that can transport great amounts of people between their destinations, it has a total of 286 stations”. [35] This mitigates the need for private vehicles that produce carbon emissions and transport fewer people. In fact, in 2021 alone, “the metro saved 269 million hours of travel time”. [36] In addition to the hours of travel time saved for the residents of New Delhi and its neighboring cities, the infrastructure of the metro was designed to be environmentally friendly. These ‘green buildings’ have “reduced CO2 emissions by [450,000] tons”. [37] These advancements in the metro system have been a step forward in the right direction toward a cleaner atmosphere for New Delhi. However, a lot more development needs to be made in the metro system for it to accommodate the ever-growing demands and the worsening conditions of its air quality.

New Delhi’s urban ecology is a subject of high importance as the city continues to grow into one of the world’s most populous hotspots of societal and economic activity. As shown by Figures 1 and 2, Delhi’s rapid urban expansion is visibly evident in the past thirty years, and this trend continues to this day. These interventions have been a success but with challenges that have surfaced. This influx of population and activity comes with a huge cost to the local environment, and this is evident in the unsafe air quality of the city and the increased temperatures of the local region. Efforts such as a robust metro system have been put in place to combat such consequences to the local environment and economy; however, a lot more needs to be put into action for New Delhi to truly live up to its great potential as a powerhouse for cultural and economic growth in India. The history of New Delhi has told a remarkable story of many interventions that have occurred throughout the past century, as well as the challenges that have emerged. These events have shaped the city of New Delhi into its current mold, one of the largest centers of modern-day urbanization. The narrative of the city is not finished yet, but history pauses here. The future holds the next vital steps for one of the world's largest mega-cities.

REFERENCES

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