A building falls in Said-ul-Ajaib. A bed-and-breakfast catches fire in Hauz Rani. In public memory, both incidents may remain attached to larger neighbourhood names — Saket and Malviya Nagar — but the precise geography matters. These are not ordinary colonies. They are Delhi’s urban villages, where old settlement patterns now carry the weight of a city that has outgrown its planned existence.

The tragedy does not begin on the day of the collapse or the fire. It begins in the long, quiet years when extra floors become acceptable, commercial use enters residential lanes, electricity loads multiply, staircases narrow, and every civic authority chooses to look the other way.

Delhi’s urban villages sit inside a peculiar history. At first, the core of the old villages remains distinct from the agricultural land around them. As Delhi expands after Independence, farmland enters planned acquisition, while Lal Dora (‘red line’) areas — dating back to 1908 when the British demarcated village residential areas from agricultural land — remain in a different legal and administrative category.

Over the decades, a family home on a small plot becomes rental housing; by the 1990s, a guest house, a café, a clinic and/or a shop. A lane that was earlier used for residents, cattle and carts now becomes the only available........

© National Herald