The Green Development Area did not survive

The Master Plan for Delhi 2047 was approved by the DDA on 12 August 2026 and notified in the Gazette of India on 20 August 2026, under section 11-A of the Delhi Development Act 1957. It replaces MPD-2021, which had been in force since 2007. MPD-2041, approved by the DDA in February 2023, was never notified and has now been overtaken.

The part that matters to anyone holding land on Delhi's periphery is what happened to the Green Development Area. The GDA was put out for objections by DDA public notice on 24 February 2021. As drafted it covered 88 villages, 65 in the peripheral green belt and 23 low density residential areas, names familiar to anyone in this market: Chattarpur, Bijwasan, Rajokri, Ghumanhera, Sultanpur. It set a minimum of 4,000 sq m for farmhouses, open markets and sports facilities, 600 sq m for agriculture and horticulture, and 10,000 sq m for institutions.

Reporting through the middle of August 2026, working from the DDA approved draft, described a live GDA covering 69 or 70 villages with higher FAR and regulated commercial activity. That reporting is now out of date. Business Standard, reporting on the day of notification, stated that the notified plan excludes the GDA. The term does not appear in the gazette text. What appears instead is a Low Density Area.

The notified Low Density Area covers roughly 150 sq km, defined as the depth of one peripheral village revenue boundary along the Delhi border together with the previous plan's low density residential area. Development there is to be primarily low density residential plots, with permitted activities keyed to plot size and the width of the abutting road. Internal roads 18 m, master trunk roads with a 45 m right of way. And the line that changes the arithmetic: a farmhouse cannot be built on a plot smaller than 2.5 acres.

Read that against the draft. The GDA would have allowed a farmhouse on 4,000 sq m, roughly one acre. The notified LDA requires 2.5 acres, about 10,117 sq m. That is a two and a half times tightening on the minimum unit of development, applied across the belt where most of Delhi's farmhouse stock sits. Anyone who bought a one acre parcel on the expectation that the GDA would be notified as drafted needs to look again at what is now buildable.

The rest of the plan is expansionary. Transit oriented development covers about 200 sq km, 500 m either side of Metro corridors and within 500 m of RRTS and rail stations. Land pooling covers about another 200 sq km. A high density corridor of about 20 sq km runs along the executed stretch of Urban Extension Road II, permitting residential, warehousing, logistics and commercial use together. The housing target is roughly 4 million additional dwelling units by 2047 against a projected population of 32 million, weighted towards 25 to 60 sq m carpet units. A uniform redevelopment policy now gives DDA two storey units on individual plots over fifty years old the same redevelopment rights as vacant residential plots, covering roughly 400,000 flats.

Two cautions. First, we have not been able to read the full development control table for the Low Density Area, which sits in Part III of the gazette. Any FAR or ground coverage number for the LDA circulating at the moment should be checked against that document and not against news coverage. Second, the DDA has scheduled more than twenty stakeholder meetings over three months on implementation, with the LDA specifically named. The position could move again.

Our reading: the periphery has become a game for larger parcels and patient capital, and considerably harder for the one acre buyer. If you hold land in the belt, the question to answer this quarter is not what it is worth. It is whether the notified plan lets you build anything on it.