Delhi was the first Indian city to get a statutory master plan. MPD-1962 was drawn up with a twenty-year perspective running to 1981. Its successor, MPD-2001, was promulgated on 1 August 1990 after extensive modifications made under Section 11-A of the Delhi Development Act. MPD-2021 - the plan still legally in force - was notified on 7 February 2007 and organised the city into 15 planning divisions. The pattern in each case is the same: a plan arrives years after the period it was meant to guide has begun. That is the context for MPD-2041, which the DDA cleared as a draft in February 2023 and which then sat unnotified through repeated central deadlines until the DDA abandoned it in favour of a plan pegged to 2047.

Two of the approved changes carry real consequences beyond planning paperwork. Permitting commercial construction in 70 peripheral villages formalises a process that has been happening informally at Delhi's edges for decades, where urban villages absorbed migration and commercial activity without the plan acknowledging it - recognition brings such areas within building norms and taxation, but also locks in densities that were never planned for. The second is the relaxation of protections on part of the Yamuna floodplain. The floodplain is the river's own space: it absorbs high flows, recharges groundwater and is the reason Delhi's water table has any resilience left. Every metre built on it converts a sponge into a surface that sheds water downstream, and Delhi's recent flood years have already tested those limits. The land pooling change is the most likely to actually move: by dropping the 70 per cent consortium requirement it removes the single biggest reason the 2019 policy delivered so little. And the redevelopment policy for ageing two-storey DDA housing addresses a stock of homes built in the 1960s and 1970s that is now past its structural life, by treating those plots as if they were vacant.