Travel to Northern India: Gurgaon

Gurgaon, a town on the southwest fringe of Delhi, was modestly famous in the 1920s, when a British civil servant named Brayne developed a rural-development program known as the Gurgaon Experiment. It failed. Now, however, Gurgaon is booming, though this has nothing to do with rural development. The town is on the far side of Delhi's airport and has become an industrial and corporate center.

For much more on Brayne and the aftermath of his work, see Village Development.

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The agent of change is probably the Delhi Land and Finance Company, controlled primarily by K.P. Singh and known simply as DLF.  Here's its Gateway Tower.

Here's its less-than-deftly-named Square Tower.  Lessees, however, are plenty deft: they include Nestle, Lucent, IBM, Deutsche Bank, and Citibank.

Here's Plaza Tower; lessees include British Air, EDS, GlaxoSmithKline, IMB, Dupont, and McKinsey.

Highrise apartments have moved to Gurgaon, too.  DLF has built some, but this group is Essel Towers, a project of the phenomenally successful Zee TV.

Here's a low-rise apartment project built by Unitech; it's called Heritage City, although "heritage" here means as little as it does in the patter of promoters anywhere.

There are single-family houses, too.

Consumer demand is strong and attracts the usual players.

This is DLF's Central Arcade--not up to global standards but glitzy by national ones.

On the periphery, Gurgaon has developments with a more typically Indian--which in this context is to say chaotic--look.

Construction methods meanwhile remain fiercely traditional.

Scaffolding is strictly old-fashioned.

Still, such methods don't stop progress.  Stop by and see us!