Business Standard ·
Gurugram's transformation: From tehsil town to thriving business hub
Gurugram's rapid rise after liberalisation shows the power of private development, but also highlights the need for better urban planning and public infrastructure
10 min read Last Updated : Sep 17 2026 | 10:42 PM IST
Anyone who’s been to Gurgaon in the 1990s, before it became India’s ‘Millennium City’ and then Gurugram from 2016, will share a few common memories: A dusty wasteland, long stretches that are simply unremarkable and sparsely populated.
Saurabh Srivastava, an 80-year-old venture-capital veteran who has made several trips to the Gurgaon of yore, remembers those dirt tracks cutting across the highway from Delhi into Gurgaon. “At one level, it does feel surreal. I still remember the area when it had dirt roads and mustard fields stretching across the landscape. I had even considered buying a farm there,” the co-founder of the Indian Angel Network quips.
Aakash Ohri, chief business officer at DLF Ltd and managing director of DLF Home Developers, dates his first memory of the place to 1992, three years before he formally joined the company. “I had been visiting Gurgaon since 1992 because we had friends in the Garden Estate (amongst the first gated communities in the area)… I remember that when we went out for dinner, we were advised to finish by 9 pm and leave the area,” he remembers.
DLF is India’s largest real estate developer by market capitalisation and has substantial land holdings in Gurugram, having acquired them in the 1970s and ’80s. It undertook the majority of the urban development of Gurugram.
Cut to 2026, and the city is unrecognisable now. The old Maruti Udyog (it became Maruti Suzuki later) plant started in 1981, which was the flagbearer of Gurugram’s industry, is now one of dozens of industrial plants spanning automotive, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), consumer electronics, engineering and technology firms based in the Gurugram-Manesar area.
American multinational General Electric’s (GE’s) first captive back-end office came up in 1997, which became Genpact, and triggered the rise of India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) and information technology-enabled services (ITES) industry in North India. It ultimately helped India become the back office of the world during the decade of the 2000s, and Gurugram became the hub of many large corporate headquarters for the emerging sector.
Residential development aside, the city today bears a distinguished skyline as a hub of commercial activity. As of June, Gurugram housed North India’s largest office space, with 100 million square feet built and counting. The who’s who of global MNCs — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon — have a presence here, if not their India headquarters.
Thirty five years after the July 1991 Budget that unleashed economic reforms, this changed landscape is the most-cited case study in India of what happens when the government simply steps back, says Rahul Ahluwalia, Founder and Director at Delhi-based think tank Foundation for Economic Development.
“Gurugram, which is now among the largest centres of job and value creation in the country, was all just flat land with a highway passing through. This is the power of economic freedom… This is what the famous urban planner Alain Bertaud’s book Order without Design talks about.”
Haryana’s land acquisition policies contributed majorly towards changing Gurugram’s DNA in terms of demographics, population, per capita income and even the state’s own domestic production and contribution to India GDP (Photo: DLF archives’s)
The 1991 reforms attracted global capital and businesses and over the next two decades Gurugram, driven by massive private sector participation, transformed into one of the most prominent business hubs of the country. “All throughout this journey, the rise of the technology sector, global capability centres (GCCs) and multinational corporations accelerated real estate development across asset classes, transforming the city from a satellite town into a dominant economic hub,” says Vimal Nadar, national director & head, Research at Colliers India.
Haryana state’s decision to allow private developers to acquire land and develop townships was crucial in enabling the change, says Santhosh Kumar, vice chairman of research group Anarock. “Haryana’s liberal land laws and the January 1991 controlled-area notifications enabled private planning, and companies were attracted by the state’s FDI (foreign direct investment) and central liberalisation policies. It was a win-all situation,” he says.
Srivastava of IAN says this is the reason Gurugram has an edge over its rival across the state border. “One thing Haryana did well was to bring in large private developers to build the residential ecosystem. Uttar Pradesh did not do the same in Noida, and that’s where it fell short.”
Kumar adds a second ingredient: Gurugram, unlike Delhi, had no strong local government to slow things down. That absence of friction, combined with cheap land, proximity to Delhi, and the connectivity that National Highway 8 promised under the 1990 Delhi Master Plan, made large-scale private townships possible in a way that Delhi couldn’t, he says.
In the early-to-mid 1990s, Ohri reveals, DLF was still gauging if Gurugram could accommodate the wave of MNCs that liberalisation was expected to bring to India. “Within five to 10 years, it was clear that companies from across the world would need office space,” he says. And no city other than Mumbai offered a location for companies to work, live and socialise.
DLF recognised that early. Its Chairman Emeritus K P Singh envisioned the growth possibilities, while Chairman Rajiv Singh led the design and execution of what would become the commercial hub called Cyber City, the Manhattan-like walk-to-work corporate district designed by renowned architect Hafeez Contractor.
Haryana’s land acquisition policies also contributed majorly towards changing the DNA of the city in terms of demographics, population, per capita income and even the state’s own domestic production and contribution to the country’s GDP. Farmers became millionaires overnight when the state government decided to adopt a market-linked floor compensation on a per acre and per year basis and rehabilitation policy in 2005 and 2013, along with an annuity component for 33 years.
The state also raised the floor rates in subsequent years, bringing in higher bonuses for ensuring land does not get locked in litigation, while it transitioned to the central government’s Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act. Presently, it follows a land pooling policy that promotes development partnerships rather than cash acquisition, where land owners get back part of the fully developed plots depending on land use, and annual financial assistance from the government.
“Because Gurugram created quality residential infrastructure, professionals and technocrats were willing to move there,” reminisces Srivastava.
Gurugram is amongst Haryana’s most populous cities and districts. On a district level, Gurugram’s population was 1.1 million according to the 1991 Census, of the state’s total 16.4 million, which rose to 1.5 million as per the 2011 Census, which pegged the state’s total population at 25.3 million. These numbers are believed to have gone up since as the city drew in people from across the country as well as expats.
Perhaps the sharpest indicator of post-liberalisation growth is the change in the per capita income, albeit for the state. As per data from Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Mospi) and Economic Survey of Haryana for FY26, Haryana’s per capita income has risen to ₹3.9 lakh in FY26 from ₹8,775 in FY92. Haryana’s gross state domestic product (GSDP) also rose, pretty much on similar lines — from ₹16,339 crore in FY92 to ₹1.36 trillion in FY26. The state’s contribution to India’s GDP has also seen an uptick to 3.83 per cent in FY26 from 2.47 per cent in FY96.
Alongside, the data shows that Gurugram’s share in Haryana’s employment in the organised sector has risen from 17.35 per cent in FY06 to 67.62 per cent in FY24, meaning that roughly two in every three organised-sector jobs in Haryana sat inside this one district. It is a clear indicator of the city’s development into the hub of commercial and industrial development.
Gurugram made up 1.2 per cent of the total number of shops and commercial establishments in Haryana in 2006, which ballooned to 13.51 per cent in 2024. It also made up 67 per cent of the people employed in these sectors in 2024, versus about 26 per cent in 2006.
But the growth here was not exactly even, and, by some accounts, even unplanned. “While the city has transformed dramatically, navigating Gurugram has become difficult. I still end up taking the wrong turns. The pace of development has been extraordinary, but it has also made the city far more complex,” Srivastava says.
Anarock’s Kumar describes the city as New Gurugram, west of NH-8, built by private developers from the 1990s onward, with its skyscrapers and wide roads. Private developers even invested in building the roads and the Rapid Metro within the city.
east of the highway, developed by the government and still crowded and underserved. Urban villages such as Dundahera and Sushant Lok now hold five to six times the population they were originally built for, and a third of residents still lack adequate sewage, he adds.
“Chandigarh, Navi Mumbai or Noida… these cities had master plans and specialised development authorities from the very outset. While Gurugram has been in the Delhi Master Plan zone since the 1960s, it lacked an interstate or state-level urban body to administer its growth. It got its first municipal corporation only in 2008,” Kumar notes.
Collier’s Nadar attributes the gap to demand-driven growth outrunning coordinated planning, even as it let corridors like Cyber City and Golf Course Road develop faster than anywhere else in northern India. “In fact, Gurugram is often cited as both a success story of economic dynamism and a lesson in the importance of coordinated urban planning,” he said.
Liberalisation did lead to development, but alongside came a plethora of problems including traffic congestion, rising air pollution and now seemingly always-inadequate infrastructure that becomes starker during monsoons due to water logging.
With the government planning Namo Cities to bring some solutions to the issues, and the Delhi Master Plan 2047 taking shape alongside it, can it take some lessons from Gurugram? Some, for sure, say experts, like the private sector’s ability to build townships and attract multinational anchors. But it must be accompanied by a master plan and drainage system first.
“They should not rely too much on private developers to build public infrastructure. To avoid Gurugram’s problems, Namo Cities must have statutory development authorities in place, as well as integrated transport like RRTS routes, adequate green buffer zones, and a balance between public and private infrastructure deployment,” Kumar adds.
Avoiding fragmented growth by ensuring that transport, utilities, social infrastructure, and housing are developed in tandem with real estate projects, is one suggestion that Collier’s Nadar feels should be adhered to.
Ohri suggests a rather radical solution: A dedicated special purpose vehicle focused solely on urban infrastructure for the region. “Gurugram and Noida were initially expected to support Delhi,” he says. “Today, Delhi also needs to support these cities.”
Planning must account for the next 30 to 50 years, not the next five, every community should have sewage-treatment facilities, water-harvesting systems and effective drainage, laws that, he notes, already exist on paper but are weakly implemented.
Public-private partnerships, he says, have proven they can deliver major projects, and that model needs to go further ensuring better connectivity, green spaces and sustainable development for the future.
“The broader vision should be to shape cities that seamlessly com-bine economic vitality, quality of life, and future-focused development,” Nadar adds.