The Aakhya Weekly #175 | The Unfinished Guide to Delhi
In Focus: Fixing the Gaps in India’s Capital Experience
Delhi is beginning to glow under its much-talked-about winter sun, even though the AQI has stayed stubbornly in the red. Yet, as always, the city returns to its favourite habit, of being out and about. Crowds spill into melas, heritage walks, winter carnivals, year-end concerts, and Christmas pop-ups. From the SARAS food festival at Sunder Nursery to Comic Con, Pet Fed, Jashn-e-Rekhta, and a half-dozen other events, December in Delhi feels like a reminder that the city comes alive long before it breathes clean air.
Despite its apparent problems, the capital remains India’s most visible gateway. Capitals are highly visited due to their unique concentration of power, cultural assets, and national identity, and they serve as the primary symbolic, political, and economic hubs of their nations. In 2023, Delhi Airport accounted for 30.3% of India’s total Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs), the highest share in the country. This translated to 1.83 million foreign visitors and 39 million domestic tourists to the city. However, Delhi’s tourism identity is oddly split. On the one hand, it hosts some of the world’s most recognisable heritage sites, such as the Red Fort, Qutub Minar, and Humayun’s Tomb, and lies on the Golden Triangle circuit with Agra and Jaipur. On the other hand, foreign tourists spend the shortest time here. According to research, the average length of stay in 2022 was 4.8 days in Dubai, 3.9 days in Singapore, 3.6 days in Thailand, 3.5 days in London, and 3.3 days in Rome. In Delhi, it is just 1.6 days.
This means Delhi functions as the entry point to India, but most visitors spend little time here. This gap between arrival and meaningful engagement highlights the importance of targeted tourism policy. Recently, the Delhi Government announced that it is drafting a new tourism policy to transform the capital into a global cultural hub by streamlining licensing procedures and encouraging large-scale cultural events.
How Delhi Built Its Tourism Playbook
If we observe Delhi’s tourism journey, it has been long and uneven. The institutional foundation was established in 1975, when the Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTTDC) was established. It was the first attempt to establish a dedicated agency to manage tourism infrastructure, events, visitor services, and cultural promotion. Back then, tourism wasn’t even its own department; until 1999, it sat under the Transport Department. It became an independent department only at the turn of the century, with a more explicit mandate to build infrastructure, support festivals, register homestays, and compile tourism data for the Centre.
Some of Delhi’s most iconic public spaces emerged from the experimentation of the 1990s and 2000s. Dilli Haat opened in 1994, offering visitors a curated mix of crafts and regional cuisines long before “experience economy” became a buzzword. The Garden of Five Senses, which opened in 2003, expanded Delhi’s tourism palette beyond monuments to include leisure spaces accessible to residents. The next significant shift came with the 2010 Commonwealth Games, when Delhi entered an unprecedented construction sprint. The city even launched HOHO buses around this time, its own hop-on-hop-off sightseeing fleet, following a model successfully used worldwide in cities like London, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Dubai. The Games did boost infrastructure, but the expected tourism windfall never quite materialised. Subsequent academic work and audits noted that while physical upgrades helped, Delhi struggled to translate these assets into sustained tourism gains. HOHO bus ridership also declined sharply over the years and did not gain traction.
Over the years, the city had seen growth, but like everywhere, the pandemic brought Delhi tourism to a near halt, with foreign visitors dropping to just over 100,000 in 2021 and domestic visits plunging sharply. In 2023–24, Delhi’s monuments experienced a marked rebound following the pandemic. Across all monitored monuments, Delhi recorded a 56.9% increase in foreign visitors in just one year. Since 2023, Delhi has been nudging its tourism sector towards something more experience-driven. For instance, the city introduced six curated heritage walk circuits that stitch together Old Delhi, the Qutub-Mehrauli belt, Hauz Khas, and the major museum clusters.
The G20 summit further added visibility and urgency, and the new state BJP government has tried to build on that momentum. Its manifesto placed tourism near the top of the urban priorities list, with a push to upgrade public spaces, restore key sites, and run campaigns aimed at both domestic and international travellers. This has been followed by another round of announcements, from single-window clearances for events and early eco-tourism pilots to refreshed visitor buses, night-time economy proposals, and a larger push to position Delhi as a capital for festivals, culture, and large-scale events. The intent has long existed, but the execution is finally catching up.
What Delhi Needs to Build Next
Delhi’s lived reality often undercuts its ambitions. Traffic that crawls, shaky last-mile links, and the familiar haze all shape how visitors read the city long before they step into a monument or museum. The recent push toward curated walks and festival-led tourism is a welcome shift, but the broader ecosystem still appears fragmented. Key institutions such as ASI and DDA focus on heritage and public spaces, while most major museums fall under the Ministry of Culture, operating independently amid divided attention. Municipal bodies manage a separate set of assets altogether. As a result, initiatives stay siloed rather than feeding into a single, data-driven system that can guide a traveller from their arrival at the airport to actual discovery. Even the research base is thin, as Delhi’s tourism policy has far fewer comparative studies than those of other global capitals, leaving little clarity on what has worked elsewhere and what a city of Delhi’s scale should prioritise.
Cities that rank high on tourism metrics do not just build attractions; instead, they design integrated experiences that work across transport, culture, and commerce. Vienna’s city card, for example, combines mobility, museum access, and curated discounts into a single pass according to the duration you want to stay in the city. Models like these succeed because public agencies and private partners work in tandem rather than in parallel. For Delhi, the next step is a unified digital layer that links transport, ticketing, events, and neighbourhood-level experiences. When paired with structured partnerships across restaurants, museums, markets, and tour operators, this one-stop interface can turn routine food and heritage walks into coherent offerings.
UPI payments and QR codes are used ubiquitously; however, the experience is scattered and uneven. Folding these existing systems into a single, reliable visitor interface can make everything from booking a guided walk to paying at a market stall feel seamless. Nevertheless, building something this comprehensive also requires academics, private-sector players, urban designers, and industry bodies to collectively study the ecosystem and map out a realistic long-term plan.
Stronger coordination across tourism, heritage, transport, and municipal departments is equally important. Only then can the city move from upgrading amenities in isolation to building an integrated ecosystem that visitors can navigate easily and enjoy more holistically. Delhi is a city that overwhelms, fascinates, frustrates and delights, often in the same day. It is chaotic, stubborn, beautiful, old, modern, layered and occasionally impossible. But that is also why it remains unforgettable. Tourism policy cannot alter the core nature of Delhi, nor should it try to. What it can do is make the city easier to explore and easier to stay in for more than 1.6 days.
Top Stories of the Week
Atal Innovation Mission and Hindustan Unilever Join Forces to Propel Circular Economy Innovation
In a landmark public-private collaboration, NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) have launched a strategic nationwide start-up acceleration programme to advance India’s transition towards a circular economy. Under HUL’s flagship initiative Project Circular Bharat, the programme aims to identify and support 50 high-potential start-ups over the next three years that are developing innovative solutions in plastic recycling, reuse/refill systems, and next-generation sustainable packaging. It will also extend support to ventures addressing material recovery in other waste streams, including textiles and e-waste.
Selected start-ups will benefit from curated mentorship from industry leaders, policy experts, and investors, as well as potential grant funding and pilot opportunities to validate market readiness. The partnership leverages AIM’s policy and innovation expertise, HUL’s industry network, and strategic advisory from Xynteo to accelerate scalable, impact-driven solutions. Executives from both organisations highlighted the collaboration’s role in empowering sustainability-focused entrepreneurship and bolstering India’s commitment to resource efficiency and waste reduction.
DPIIT Releases Working Paper on AI Copyright Framework
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has released the first part of its working paper on addressing copyright challenges posed by generative AI. Prepared by an eight-member committee, the paper examines global models such as blanket AI training exemptions, text-and-data-mining exceptions, voluntary licensing, and extended collective licensing.
The committee found that none of these fully meet India’s needs and rejected a “zero-price licence,” warning it would erode incentives for human creativity. Instead, it proposes a hybrid licensing model that grants AI developers a blanket licence to use any lawfully accessed content for training, while requiring royalties only at commercial launch. Royalty rates would be set by a government-appointed committee and subject to judicial review, with a centralised mechanism for royalty collection and distribution. With Part 1 now released, DPIIT has invited public feedback over the next 30 days to help shape India’s long-term AI copyright policy.
A Few Good Reads
Brigadier Anil Raman (Retd) analyses the US-led push to reshape the G20 under Trump, arguing that India must engage pragmatically while safeguarding its own economic interests through strategic coalition-building.
Anushka Saxena breaks down the Trump–Xi call: China pushes stability, redraws a firm Taiwan red line tied to the post-WWII order, and signals selective cooperation on Ukraine, all while Washington focuses on trade wins.
Konstantin von Hammerstein’s sharp piece captures Germany’s growing Merkel nostalgia– a country disillusioned with Merz’s missteps and longing for Merkel’s calm, unifying tone, even as she herself stays focused on legacy, not politics.
Happymon Jacob distils India–Russia ties to a blunt reality: deep historical warmth endures, but China’s shadow and Western sanctions now limit real progress.
Archana Vaidya delivers a sharp defence of Himachal’s Section 118, arguing that protecting scarce farmland and small farmers outweighs calls for liberalisation.