After a delay of nearly five years, the National Capital Region’s development plan was cleared for approval on Tuesday, setting the direction for how 55,000sqkm of area across Delhi and three states will grow, get connected, and be governed over the next two decades.
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The Regional Plan 2041 was cleared at a meeting of the National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) in New Delhi, chaired by Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Manohar Lal Khattar. Chief ministers and ministers from Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan attended the meeting.
A sub-committee of senior officials from the Union government and NCR state governments has been constituted to submit a final report by August 15. The plan will then go to the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) for approval before it is implemented.
What is Regional Plan 2041?
The Regional Plan 2041 is a long-term blueprint governing land use, infrastructure, housing, transport and environmental protection across NCR. It is not a plan for Delhi alone — it covers a sprawling, multi-state region whose growth is to be dictated by a unified policy.
The plan determines where cities and towns may expand, where housing and industry can come up, how transport networks must be built, and which ecologically sensitive areas must be protected. Under the NCRPB Act, 1985, no development in NCR can take place in violation of the Regional Plan. The Act also specifies that its provisions override other non-conforming legislation where there is a conflict.
The previous Regional Plan 2021 remains in effect until the 2041 plan is formally notified. Tuesday’s clearance is the first key step towards that.
The region it covers
NCR now spans 55,083 sqkm, and has nearly doubled in size since the first Regional Plan was notified in 1989, when it covered 30,242 sqkm. The region currently includes the National Capital Territory of Delhi and 32 districts across three adjoining states: 14 in Haryana, eight in UP, and two in Rajasthan.
The tricky part is that NCR is not a single administrative unit. It is a patchwork of cities, towns, and rural areas at varying stages of development, bound together by the fact that they share Delhi as their economic and geographic core.
According to the 2011 Census, NCR had a population of 5.81 crore. The draft RP-2041 projections see that count rising to about 7 crore by 2031 and 11 crore by 2041, with urban residents accounting for 67% of the population by then.
Speaking at Tuesday’s meeting, Khattar put the figure higher. “Today, the NCR population is around seven crore and it is expected to reach nearly 15 crore in the next 15 years,” he said.
KT Ravindran, professor and head of urban design at the School of Planning and Architecture, said this scale of population makes regional planning indispensable. “Today, you cannot look at Delhi as an isolated island. It should be seen as an interconnected set of developments with Gurugram, Noida, Faridabad and other surrounding towns,” he said.
Ravindran added that a regional plan was the only instrument capable of addressing the social and economic complexity of developing this large an urban region.
Key decisions under RP-2041
No boundary change, but new zones for pollution rules
One of the key disputes heading into Tuesday’s meeting was whether the NCR’s boundaries would be altered. Haryana had in the past pushed for several of its districts — including Karnal, Jind, Mahendragarh, Bhiwani and Charkhi Dadri — to be removed from NCR. The state argued that winter construction bans, mandated under Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) guidelines to cut pollution levels, penalised districts far from Delhi without proportionate benefit.
Khattar said the area under NCR would remain the same. “The entire area that was previously fixed will remain as it is. There will be no change,” Khattar, a former Haryana chief minister, said.
But there’s a catch. The board approved dividing NCR into three zones for implementing environmental regulations.
Under this framework, the core area will be defined by the Kundli-Ghaziabad-Palwal and Kundli-Manesar-Palwal expressway networks. The remaining districts will fall into two additional categories, with restrictions calibrated to their distance from the core. “This has been done so that districts located farther away do not face the same difficulties as those closer to the core NCR area,” Khattar said.
Which specific restrictions would be relaxed, and at which locations, had not been made public as of Tuesday.
Four new ‘Namo’ cities along RRTS
The plan proposes four greenfield cities, at least one in each NCR state, to be developed along Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) corridors to absorb future population growth and reduce pressure on existing urban centres.
Officials aware of the discussions told HT that Jewar and Dadri in UP were under examination given the emerging activity around Noida International Airport, along with Bharatpur in Rajasthan and Kundli in Haryana.
The cities, like the rapid rail corridors, could get the pre-fix ‘Namo’ before their names, officials indicated.
Under discussion was also a plan to earmark ₹5,000 crore over the next five years for these cities and environmental initiatives.
Transport, water and vehicles
Two new regional expressways were proposed: one linking Panipat, Meerut, Hapur, Rewari, and Rohtak; and another connecting Karnal, Muzaffarnagar, Aligarh, Mathura, and Alwar. An orbital railway in Uttar Pradesh, modelled on one already approved in Haryana, is also expected to receive approval.
On vehicle emissions, which Khattar said account for nearly 40% of NCR’s pollution, the board reviewed a scheme called Parivartan, aimed at replacing older vehicles with BS-VI-compliant ones. On water, the board discussed recycling wastewater and recharging groundwater. “It should not run out; it should be processed and reused,” Khattar said.
The Aravalli question
Conservation of the Aravallis hills – the only natural barrier that stops the Thar desert from expanding towards northwest India – has been one of the controversial elements of NCR regional plans.
In 2022, for instance, a draft regional plan replaced the term ‘Natural Conservation Zone’ with ‘Natural Zone’. This change, environmentalists had warned, would weaken protections for the Aravalli forests and water bodies across NCR.
After Tuesday’s meeting, Khattar said there will be “no change of any kind” in decisions already given by the NGT, Supreme Court, high courts or the Union environment ministry.
But he acknowledged that ground verification of what is forest land remained incomplete. “Sometimes, it is not clear from satellite imagery whether this green cover is forest or merely appears green. Ground proofing has to be done to establish the factual position on the ground,” he said.
Experts said the assurance left important gaps. Prakriti Srivastava, a retired Indian Forest Service officer who had served as deputy inspector general of forests (wildlife) in the Union environment ministry, told HT the absence of direct, plan-level protection for the Aravallis placed the onus on a Supreme Court-appointed five-member committee. The Supreme Court had constituted the committee to come up with a uniform definition of the Aravallis and submit a conservation report.
Without explicit protections written into the plan itself, she said, scope remained for further encroachments and mining.
