Municipal Corporation of Delhi

The mayor who was Delhi’s number one citizen

Before 2012, the mayor of Delhi carried a prestige few municipal leaders anywhere could match. “In unified era of the MCD, the mayor was the number one citizen of Delhi and a mayor received foreign dignitaries at airport and accorded civic receptions at Red Fort or Ramila Maidan,” a senior official recalled — and constitutional experts describing the old corporation called it “a very powerful body” with “a very powerful mayor.” That era ended when the corporation was split into three in 2012, each with its own diminished mayor; it returned only in 2022, when Delhi got a mayor for the whole city again after a ten-year gap.

The corporation itself was a post-independence creation. Envisaged by policymakers about a decade after 1947, it began its journey in April 1958 with just 80 councillors — modelled, per archival records and experts, on the Bombay Municipal Corporation set up by the British in the 19th century to administer the Bombay Presidency. It was built by amalgamating a crowded field of local authorities: the Municipal Committee of Delhi, notified area committees for Civil Station, Red Fort, Delhi-Shahdara, West Delhi, South Delhi, Mehrauli, Najafgarh and Narela, plus the District Board, the Delhi State Electricity Board, the Delhi Road Transport Authority and the Delhi Joint Water and Sewage Board. The Delhi Municipal Corporation Bill had passed both Houses of Parliament and received the President’s assent on December 28, 1957.

Its first home was the historic Town Hall in Chandni Chowk, a nearly 160-year-old building that had housed the earlier Delhi municipality; the MCD stayed there until the late 2000s before moving to the 28-storey Civic Centre in front of the New Delhi railway station. Lutyens’ Delhi (under the New Delhi Municipal Committee) and the Delhi Cantonment were kept outside its ambit. At its height the old corporation even ran the Delhi Transport Undertaking and the water board.

Split and reunified

Through successive delimitations the ward count grew from 80 to 134 and then to 272 in 2007. In 2011–12 the unified body was trifurcated into the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (104 wards), South Delhi Municipal Corporation (104) and East Delhi Municipal Corporation (64).

A decade later the Centre reversed course. The Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2022 — passed by Parliament (including the Lok Sabha) on April 5 and assented to on April 18 — unified the three bodies into a single entity and capped wards at 250, down from 272. The unified MCD formally came into effect on May 22, 2022, with Gyanesh Bharti as municipal commissioner and Ashwani Kumar as special officer. A three-member delimitation panel led by State Election Commissioner Vijay Dev redrew the wards, drawing over 1,700 suggestions and objections; 42 of the 250 seats were reserved for Scheduled Castes.

The December 4, 2022 polls — 1,349 candidates, 50.48 percent turnout — gave the Aam Aadmi Party 134 wards, ending the BJP’s 15-year rule in the civic body; the BJP took 104 and Congress nine in the 250-member House. Delhi’s mayoralty runs on five single-year terms on rotation — the first reserved for women, the second open, the third reserved, the last two open.

One quieter institution survived every split: the MCD’s Central Library, set up in 1958, holds rare books including an original copy of the Constitution of India, and moved into the Civic Centre in December 2022.

What this profile does not claim

• That the mayor’s pre-2012 ceremonial role carried executive power; the sources describe prestige and protocol, not authority.
• Any mayoral or political-control history after the December 2022 election; later developments were not verified from fully-read sources.
• Current ward-level or budget figures beyond the 250-ward delimitation stated here.