DDA's new MPD-2047 FAQ confirms Delhi will build a dedicated portal to trade Transferable Development Rights, letting heritage and slum-rehab property owners sell unused floor space to buyers elsewhere in the city.
If you own a heritage property in Delhi, or land inside the walled city, or land involved in a slum rehabilitation project, MPD-2047 is about to hand you something genuinely valuable that has nothing to do with what you can actually build on your own plot. It's called Transferable Development Rights, TDR, and DDA has just confirmed, in newly published official FAQs on the master plan, that it will build a dedicated single-window portal specifically to let this right be bought and sold.
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Every plot in Delhi has a maximum permissible FAR, the total floor area you're legally allowed to build. If you don't use all of it, that unused capacity doesn't just disappear under MPD-2047, it becomes an asset you can sell to someone else who wants to build more than their own plot normally allows. DDA's FAQ defines this precisely: the plot where the unused right originates is the "Generating Site," and wherever that right eventually gets used is the "Receiving Site." You're not selling land. You're selling a legal entitlement to build square footage, detached entirely from the physical plot it came from.
This isn't available to every property owner in Delhi. Under MPD-2047, TDR can specifically be generated from three categories: conservation or preservation of heritage buildings, regeneration of buildings within the walled city, and in-situ slum rehabilitation projects. That's a deliberately narrow list, and it tells you what DDA is actually trying to incentivize.
If you own a protected heritage structure, you're typically restricted from redeveloping it to modern FAR levels, TDR is the compensation mechanism, letting you monetize the development potential you're legally prevented from using on-site, by selling it to someone building elsewhere.
On the other side of the transaction, TDR can only be utilised in specific "Receiving Areas" that DDA identifies and updates over time, not anywhere in the city a buyer chooses. That restriction matters practically: before you'd consider buying TDR to boost a project's buildable area, you'd need to confirm your specific site actually qualifies as an eligible receiving zone under DDA's current designation, since the value of TDR you're purchasing is entirely dependent on where you're legally allowed to use it.
Plenty of Indian cities have TDR provisions on paper that go largely unused because there's no efficient, transparent way to actually match sellers with buyers. DDA's commitment to building a single-window portal specifically for TDR trading is the detail that could determine whether this mechanism actually functions at scale in Delhi, or remains a theoretical entitlement most heritage property owners never successfully monetize. A functioning trading platform means price discovery, documented transactions, and a genuine secondary market, rather than each TDR sale being individually negotiated and hard to value.
If you own a heritage-designated building or property inside the walled city that you've assumed has limited redevelopment value because of preservation restrictions, this TDR mechanism is worth taking seriously as an actual monetization path, not just a regulatory footnote. The practical next step is confirming your property genuinely qualifies as a TDR generating site under MPD-2047's specific categories, and tracking when DDA's trading portal actually goes live.
