ABSTRACT
In Gurgaon, the major condition of possibility for its growing urban economy was the rapid and large-scale conversion of land owned collectively or individually by rural villagers and agriculturalists into 'urban' land available for industrial and commercial development. This chapter focuses on how this spatial transformation, at once abstract and geological, took place. Historically, the colonial British and postcolonial Indian governments placed relatively strict regulations on large-scale exchanges of land in Gurgaon, first with the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 and then with subsequent legislation under the Haryana state government. Delhi Land and Finance (DLF), as it was originally known, was founded by Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh in 1946. De-regulation in Gurgaon's land market was coupled with anti-market monopolization by powerful 'far order' institutions, namely Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) itself, which has acquired most of Gurgaon's remaining urbanizable land.
