Delhi's draft Master Plan 2047 proposes FAR and transit-oriented development changes that experts say could shift property valuations from current prices toward future development rights and infrastructure access.
Buying property in Delhi has always come down to a fairly simple question, what's this worth today. The draft Master Plan for Delhi 2047 is set to complicate that question in a genuinely useful way. Santhosh Kumar, Vice-Chairman at Anarock, told Business Standard, "The focus will increasingly shift from current property prices to future development rights, infrastructure readiness, redevelopment feasibility and access to public transport." That's a real shift in how a Delhi property's value gets calculated, not just what it's worth as-is, but what it could become.
Two technical terms sit at the centre of this. Floor Area Ratio, or FAR, is the zoning tool that decides how much you're allowed to build on a plot, calculated as total constructed floor area across all levels divided by the plot's own area. The new Transit-Oriented Development policy promotes dense, mixed-use construction within 500 metres of metro corridors and within a 500-metre radius of RRTS and railway stations. Under the older policy, maximum FAR only kicked in on plots of at least 4 hectares sitting on a 30-metre road, a threshold most individual Delhi plots could never realistically hit. The new rules bring that down dramatically, plots as small as 2,000 sq. metres next to an 18-metre road can now access a maximum FAR of 5 under the TOD provision.
Not everyone's calling this transformational. Rahul Ahluwalia, Founder and Director at the Foundation for Economic Development, told Business Standard the FAR cap of 5, with charges kicking in from FAR 4, still reads as cautious. "Hyderabad's Growth Corridor permits unlimited FAR, while comparable areas in Tokyo, New York and Melbourne allow FARs of around 13-30," he said. That comparison is worth sitting with, Delhi's proposed ceiling is a fraction of what genuinely high-density global cities allow, even as the policy gets framed as a major unlocking of capacity.
The report specifically flags Narela and the Rithala-Kundli Metro alignment as corridors likely to see the strongest early demand, exactly where higher development potential and improving connectivity are expected to overlap. That's a notable callback to something worth tracking, DDA's own recent housing sales data already showed Narela accounting for close to 90% of the authority's total flats sold this year, and this draft policy suggests that momentum has real regulatory tailwind behind it now, not just buyer appetite alone.
Beyond FAR and TOD, the plan proposes tweaking floor area ratios across 70 villages in Outer Delhi and, separately, a uniform redevelopment policy for old DDA-built two-storey units on individual plots. Nikhil Hawellia, Secretary at CREDAI-NCR, told Business Standard the opening of Green Development Areas across those 70 villages for commercial and institutional use, paired with higher FAR and TOD, "could improve utilisation of Delhi's land resources," giving developers "greater opportunities to invest in redevelopment, premium and mid-income housing." Ankur Jalan, CEO of Golden Growth Fund, added that this could also ease some pressure off neighbouring NCR markets by creating more supply within Delhi itself, rather than pushing all growth outward.
The numbers behind the urgency are stark. According to Anarock, the share of newly launched affordable homes priced below Rs 40 lakh in Delhi fell from 62% in 2020 to just 11% last year. Most housing growth has been happening outside Delhi entirely, because the capital's own regulations haven't historically supported high-density construction. Amit Goyal, Managing Director of India Sotheby's International Realty, told Business Standard that the nearly four-year bureaucratic delay since the 2021 Master Plan expired contributed directly to unauthorised colonies expanding and unregulated farmhouse development spreading, while pushing developers toward Gurugram and Noida instead.
Kumar's closing point is worth taking seriously: "Market participants should distinguish between proposals and enforceable rights until the plan and related rules are formally notified." The draft still has to clear the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs before any of this becomes actionable, and as we've flagged before with MPD-2041's own stalled history, that step has taken years in the past.
If you’re weighing Delhi against Gurugram or Noida right now, this draft is a genuine reason to hold off on assuming the usual outward-migration pattern continues unchanged, regulatory tailwinds like FAR and TOD easing are exactly the kind of detail that can turn a buyer-driven trend into a sustained one. Worth checking how this plays out against our currently listed projects in Delhi, since a genuine shift in development rights at this scale could reshape both pricing and buyer interest well before the policy is formally notified.
