More than four years ago, the Capital’s biggest land-owning agency, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), enforced a policy document called the Master Plan Delhi 2021 (MPD) to rapidly upgrade the city’s infrastructure. The policy, which was to regulate Delhi’s infrastructure development between 2001 and 2021, was notified seven years late, in 2007. The DDA has largely failed to keep its policy promise of freeing land from red tape and roping in private players in development, the two main tools introduced to fast-track large scale urban upgrade. To make the plan work, the DDA should have facilitated development of at least 2,000 hectares of new urban settlements every year, said A K Jain, a key architect of the MPD. By that calculation, townships spread over at least 8,000 hectares, or nearly one-and-a-half times the size of Dwarka, should have come up between 2007 and 2010. “But, so far, no new urban extension has been developed. As a result, at least three to four lakh new dwelling units and accompanying spaces that should also have come up by now haven’t been created. It rings alarm bells,” said Jain who retired as Commissioner (Planning) from the DDA. Delhi has nearly 17 million residents, according to official estimates. The MPD projects the population will swell to nearly 23 million by 2021, and estimates at least 24 lakh more dwelling units will be required by then. Nearly 14 lakh of these new units are to come up in five new zones called urban extensions, created in fringe areas under the MPD — near Najafgarh in southwest Delhi, Chattarpur in south, Kanjhawala beyond Rohini in northwest, near Nangloi and to east of Narela along the Yamuna in North Delhi. To facilitate development here, the MPD, for the first time, allows farmers to join small land tracts they own and form a bigger plot, a concept called land pooling. Private developers can then construct multi-storey group housing societies on these big plots, a trade-off in which the developer pays back farmers with modern living facilities , and possibly even money. But this massive urban upgrade is not yet off the block as the DDA is still debating over the basic rules that will govern land pooling. Approval of draft rules put up before the DDA board earlier this year was deferred, said a senior DDA official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Rules governing involvement of private developers too that were also proposed are yet to be finalised, the official said. Senior legislator Harshvardhan, who is a member and policymaker of the DDA and sits in all board meetings, said red tape has led to a delay in finalising these guidelines. “When the DDA begins reviewing its progress on the Master Plan next year, it will realise hardly anything has been done on nearly all fronts,” said Harshvardhan. He claimed that these delays in the agency’s board meetings this year. Even if the DDA were to have 14 lakh dwelling units and townships constructed in urban extensions despite this initial delay, at least 10 lakh more houses will be required by 2021, according to the MPD. Policy planners expect these to come up by way of vertical development in existing rural and urban hubs, through freer construction norms and involvement of private developers. Despite liberal rules, like increased floor area coverage ratio and permitting small plot owners to pool land, not much redevelopment has happened in this area too, own planner Kuldeep Singh said. “The policy looks good theoretically. But the reality is, the rules are ambiguous. There is no surety for private developers that their investments will be safe,” said Singh, who has worked with the DDA earlier on key infrastructure projects. The MPD allows even small plot owners in existing hubs to assimilate land and rope in a private developer to construct group housing, A K Jain said. “The problem is that people are not aware of this policy. The DDA should publicise the new provisions aggressively to make the policy work on the ground,” Jain said. The MPD also opened up land within 500 metres on either side of Mass Rapid Transit Corridors across Delhi for massive redevelopment, by allowing land pooling and increasing coverage permit to promote multi-storey housing complexes. But no redevelopment has begun because, in this case too, the DDA hasn’t yet finalised rules that will regulate this process, said a senior official of the Urban Development Ministry. “The DDA has just loosely rehashed the Master Plan proposal in this regard and sent it to us,” the official said.