Delhi's Migrant Millions: How India's Capital Stacks Up Against London and Dubai on Integration

Delhi added roughly 4.7 lakh new residents in 2025 alone, according to figures compiled by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, pushing the National Capital Territory's population past 34 million. They came from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Northeast India — and a smaller but significant number arrived from Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. The city has no single integration policy to receive them.

The timing matters. Across the world this week, questions of migration and belonging are sharpening. Tehran is burying Ayatollah Khamenei amid fractures that have driven millions of Iranians into diaspora communities from Toronto to Dubai. Peru just declared a new president after an election campaign dominated by migration anxiety along the Andean corridor. And Britain's Department for International Development quietly axed a two-year overseas education programme targeting women and girls — the kind of scheme that shapes whether migrants arrive with skills or without. Delhi sits at the intersection of all these pressures, domestic and global, and its responses are increasingly being benchmarked against cities that have been doing this longer.

What Delhi Does — and Doesn't — Provide

The Aam Aadmi Party government runs the Mukhyamantri Mahila Samman Yojana and a network of mohalla clinics — 519 are operational as of June 2026 — that serve migrant workers without demanding proof of Delhi domicile. In Seemapuri, a resettlement colony in East Delhi that has absorbed waves of Bangladeshi and UP migrants since the 1970s, three mohalla clinics processed over 12,000 patient visits in May alone, according to AAP ward councillor outreach data. The Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti, managed partly by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, offers a different model: heritage conservation funding cross-subsidises social services for roughly 22,000 residents, many of them migrants from Rajasthan and UP who arrived within the last decade.

Compare that to Dubai, which houses over 3.5 million migrants — nearly 88 percent of its total population — under a kafala sponsorship system that ties residency to employment contracts. Migrants there receive no path to permanent settlement. London, by contrast, operates the Greater London Authority's Migrant and Refugee Programme, funded at £6.2 million annually, offering English language classes, legal advice, and borough-level housing navigation. Delhi's per-migrant public expenditure is a fraction of London's, but the sheer scale of informal absorption — slum clusters along the Yamuna floodplain housing upwards of 300,000 seasonal workers at any given time — represents a form of de facto tolerance that neither city fully replicates.

The Gaps That Data Reveals

A 2025 study by the Centre for Policy Research, based at Dharam Marg in Chanakyapuri, found that 61 percent of interstate migrants living in Delhi's unauthorised colonies had no access to ration cards under the National Food Security Act, despite residing in the city for more than three years. The PM SVANidhi scheme, launched nationally in 2020, has disbursed over ₹58 crore in micro-loans to street vendors in Delhi — many of them migrants — but uptake in colonies like Bhalswa and Bawana has lagged because documentation requirements screen out the most recently arrived.

The Delhi Metro's Phase 4 expansion, currently under construction on the Janakpuri West to RK Ashram corridor, will connect several high-density migrant worker neighbourhoods to central employment zones by late 2027. Urban planners at the School of Planning and Architecture on IP Estate argue that infrastructure investment is a more durable integration tool than welfare programmes alone — the kind of argument London made when extending the Elizabeth line through Newham in 2022.

For migrants navigating Delhi right now, the practical calculus involves registering at a mohalla clinic as a first point of contact regardless of documentation status, checking SVANidhi eligibility through the PM Street Vendor's AtmaNirbhar Nidhi portal, and — for those from Nepal and Bhutan who hold rights under bilateral treaties — approaching the Delhi government's Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra near Chanakyapuri for residency guidance. The city will not resolve its integration deficit this year. But the infrastructure being laid, above ground and below it, will determine which way the numbers move by the end of the decade.