A township by design

A township, drawn on paper first

Dilshad Garden did not grow the way old bazaars grow. It was laid out by the Delhi Development Authority in the late 1970s and 1980s and filled in through the 1990s, a planned suburb rather than an accident of the map.

The plan is legible the moment you walk it. The colony is combed into blocks lettered A through R and a further run of pockets, each one a self-contained cell with its own row of shops and, crucially, its own patch of green. Most homes are DDA flats, built to a handful of repeating types, which is why one lane rhymes with the next. The people who moved in were the salaried middle of East Delhi, government staff, teachers, small traders, students walking to the medical college up the road.