How Delhi Became a City of Arrivals: The Long Road to Its Migration Crisis

Delhi's population crossed 33 million sometime around 2024, according to urban planning estimates used by the Delhi Development Authority, making it the most populous metropolitan area on earth by most credible counts. That number did not happen by accident. It is the product of 75 years of deliberate policy choices, violent upheavals elsewhere in the subcontinent, and a chronic failure to build the housing, transit, and services that so many arrivals actually needed.

The reason this history matters right now: the Arvind Kejriwal government is facing renewed pressure from the BJP-led central administration over a proposed migrant registration scheme that would require non-domicile residents in unauthorised colonies to register with their ward offices by September 30, 2026. The scheme, which critics say is designed to produce a voter list rather than a welfare database, has ripped open old arguments about who belongs in Delhi and who does not.

Partition, Refugees, and the First Wave

The story begins in August 1947. The Partition of British India sent somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees streaming into Delhi within months, according to records held at the National Archives of India on Janpath. The government of the time built resettlement colonies — Lajpat Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Punjabi Bagh — essentially overnight. Those colonies remain among the most densely populated and politically active neighbourhoods in the city today. Lajpat Nagar's Central Market, now famous for wedding textiles, started life as a refugee rehabilitation bazaar.

Then came the Bangladeshi migration crisis of 1971. The war that created Bangladesh pushed millions across the border into India; a significant fraction filtered into Delhi, settling in areas like Seemapuri in the northeast, which to this day is classified as an unauthorised colony and houses a population the city has never formally counted with precision. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) maintains a registration office in New Delhi — currently on Aurangzeb Road — that has processed claims from Afghans, Rohingya, Somalis, and others in the decades since. As of late 2025, the UNHCR India caseload stood at roughly 47,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers, though civil society groups put the real number of undocumented migrants in Delhi alone at several times that figure.

Economic migration from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha has been the largest driver of population growth since the 1980s. The construction boom that followed the 1982 Asian Games — and accelerated again ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games — pulled hundreds of thousands of seasonal and permanent workers into camps and slums along the Yamuna floodplain and in areas like Bhalswa and Tughlakabad. Many never left.

Infrastructure That Never Kept Pace

Delhi Metro Phase 4, whose first section between Janakpuri West and Krishna Park Extension opened in 2023, was supposed to ease pressure on the city's most overcrowded western corridors. But the migrants who most need affordable transit tend to live in northeast and southeast Delhi — Mustafabad, Badarpur, Sangam Vihar — areas that Phase 4 does not reach. The DDA's Draft Master Plan 2041, published in February 2023, acknowledged for the first time in an official document that nearly 40 percent of Delhi's residents live in settlements that do not appear on any approved land use map.

That gap between official Delhi and actual Delhi is what makes the current registration scheme so combustible. Residents of Sangam Vihar, reportedly home to over one million people and technically still an unauthorised colony, have no municipal addresses to submit to ward offices. Without an address, registration is impossible. Without registration, the proposed scheme would classify them as ineligible for ration card renewals under the Public Distribution System — a consequence that welfare organisations like the Delhi-based Shahri Adhikar Manch have been warning about since April.

Ward-level public hearings on the registration rules are scheduled to begin in late July across all 272 wards. Residents in affected colonies should contact their local ward office or the Delhi government's Revenue Department helpline before July 20, which is the last date to submit written objections to the draft notification. The fight over who gets to count as a Delhiite is old. The paperwork deadline is new.