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Description: Home to 31 million residents, Delhi is India's capital and most populous city. Support TDC: tdc.video and unlock my Research Links Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation 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. Unfortunately for India, Nehru overlooked the dangers of the Soviet system, where a small group of men controlled all of its institutions and resources and used them to dominate the miserable masses. When Nehru became India’s first Prime Minister, he created his own version of a centrally-planned economy, convinced that only an all-powerful state could bring about development rapid enough to achieve his vision. “Nehru was a rational thinker and he wanted to apply science and technology to solve the great mass poverty that prevailed at the time of independence. But, while Nehru’s leadership brought about democracy and some industrialization, as the author Dasgupta put it, “the complexity of actual economic processes proved too great, and by the end of his time in power in the mid-1960s, many sectors of the economy had been choked by regulatory restrictions and lack of capital.” The government went into business in a big way and they decided to control whatever was there in the private sector also…the British Raj was gone. Now people were subjected to the permit Raj because everything needed a government permit. India became a byword for red tape and bureaucracy. Businessmen found it almost impossible to get things done. 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. This backfired, disincentivizing private-sector construction just when Delhi needed it most to keep pace with its explosive population growth. Since 1950, Delhi’s metro population has increased 21-fold, yet the DDA remains in control of its real estate sector. Every project has to meander through its inefficient bureaucracy.