Article Abstract

The National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi constitutes one of the most analytically consequential laboratories for studying migration-driven urbanisation in the contemporary Global South. This article advances a central argument: that internal migration is not a background variable in Delhi\'s urban growth but a structural force that has architecturally remade the city\'s spatial form, labour markets, housing system, and governance apparatus — producing a metropolitan economy functionally dependent on migrant labour while systematically excluding that labour from formal planning frameworks. Drawing on Census of India data (2001, 2011), the Economic Survey of Delhi (2022–23 to 2025–26), the Draft Master Plan for Delhi 2041, and an integrated theoretical framework combining the extended Harris-Todaro model, Kundu\'s exclusionary urbanisation paradigm, and New Economic Geography, the analysis establishes three principal empirical findings. First, migration has definitively surpassed natural increase as the primary demographic driver of Delhi\'s expansion, contributing approximately 74 per cent of annual population growth by 2021. Second, built-up area expanded from approximately 31 per cent of NCT\'s total area in 1990 to over 73 per cent by 2020, driven overwhelmingly by unregulated informal construction rather than planned DDA delivery. Third, the urban informal sector functions as the permanent — not transitional — structural destination for the vast majority of migrant workers, rendering classical human capital assimilation models empirically untenable. The article identifies the Lal Dora urban village system and the proliferation of Census Towns as the primary spatial expressions of this paradox: governance structures that produce affordable but hazardous housing as an unintended by-product of the state\'s constitutional inability to provide formal housing for its own workforce. Policy recommendations span regional development, inclusive housing, labour formalisation, and metropolitan governance reform, arguing that sustainable urban futures for Delhi require simultaneous structural reduction of migration-producing inequalities and formalisation of the migrant-built city.
Keywords: Internal migration; NCT Delhi; exclusionary urbanisation; informal settlements; Lal Dora; Harris-Todaro model; Census Towns; peri-urban transformation; metropolitan governance; labour informality