Formed in 1955, the Delhi Development Authority’s remit was to create order out of urban chaos and build housing for the capital’s growing army of civil servants. Clusters of DDA flats, modelled on apartment complexes in the Soviet bloc, sprang up on vacant land. The DDA was also the sole developer of agricultural land needed for the city’s expansion, earning it huge profits. In one instance, four farming brothers were paid one rupee per square metre of land; the same land was later sold to a commercial developer for Rs 200,000 per square metre. After a 14-year court battle, the brothers were awarded compensation of 2 million rupees.
The mid-1970s would witness a convergence of two egos that exposed the huge gap between the wealthy and the powerful and those living on the margins of society. Indira’s son Sanjay, the leader of the Congress Party’s youth wing and, as Rana Dasgupta writes, “the first of Delhi’s [many] political bad boys”, had embraced the cause of the city’s beautification – in other words, the demolition of slums and the relocation of their residents to resettlement camps on the other side of the Yamuna River, where conditions were often inhumane. He found an...
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