No other city is like Gurugram—'so mismanaged, yet so highly spoken of'

The Print

29-07-2025

And now, this impressive exercise has resulted in the detention of a grand total of 10 people, alleged to be Bangladeshis. Ten people in a city of over two million. A city-wide operation which paralysed essential services and disrupted thousands of livelihoods, in service of a problem that barely exists outside of election years.
The crackdown itself hinges on absurd, manufactured hysteria. In recent days, over 250 suspected 'illegal immigrants' have been herded into holding areas for document verification. Bengali-speaking workers, even those with proper documentation like Aadhaar and PAN cards, are being harassed by police demanding more proof. In some cases, in the absence of the father's birth certificate, the authorities have demanded the grandfather's papers. The dragnet has terrorised an entire workforce into underground hiding or outright flight.
For days now, Gurugram's society WhatsApp groups and Reddit forums have buzzed with a slow-rising panic. The domestic workers have vanished. The cooks, the nannies, the food delivery executives, the sanitation workers—the invisible army that keeps Gurugram functioning—have fled in terror of the crackdown on 'illegal' Bangladeshi immigrants. As kitchen countertops remain dirty and impromptu garbage dumps appear on abandoned plots, the city's residents are discovering what their gleaming towers are actually worth, in the absence of the people who have summarily been branded as threats.
An impossible tenuousness defines working-class existence in Gurugram. Women who spend their days scrubbing marble floors in sprawling condominiums return to cramped hutments that could be vapourised overnight without warning. Often built on contested land, these 'unauthorised' settlements are tolerated only as long as they are convenient.
Anandita Kakkar, a leader for marketing, Asia and resident of Gurugram since the late 1990s, told me that several domestic workers complain about the system of exploitation in their quarters. Local landlords construct these structures, and then force tenants to buy their daily groceries at inflated prices from designated shops. Anyone who tries to question this system faces eviction. The safety of young girls and women is a source of persistent fear for local communities. Kakkar said that adolescent girls are often sent back to their villages, while older ones work punishing 12-hour shifts, in the belief that longer hours in employer homes might offer protection from the dangers lurking in their own neighbourhoods.
But here's the thing about Gurugram. The entire city lives in a state of precarity, just at different price points. Gurugram has a problem of structural abandonment, whether you're a domestic worker speaking an alien language, or the much-celebrated CEO of whatever hot startup is currently keeping the pink papers busy. Floodwaters and sanitation issues don't discriminate, whether your home is an unlit tenement in an unauthorised colony, or a Rs 100-crore apartment in India's toniest gated complex.
Also read: Gurugram or Kudagram? Elites are furious over the garbage emergency
Not ready for Disneyland
The city's news cycle follows a predictable seasonal calendar of crises: monsoon floods, festival traffic snarls, summer power cuts, winter pollution, year-round waste management failures. Yet real estate prices, spurred on by dangerous speculation (they have risen three times since 2021), continue their relentless climb in the face of complete civic breakdown. Meanwhile, as the Chief Minister announced plans for a Disneyland, eight people died in 24 hours during recent rains from electrocution, drowning, and accidents.
Writer and poet Manik Sharma moved to Gurugram only a year ago, and already fantasises about leaving the city. Sharma has lived in metros all around the country, but told me that he has yet to encounter a place that is 'so mismanaged, yet so highly spoken of'. In the last few weeks in Sector 56, where Sharma resides, sewage was overflowing everywhere. 'They used to say in my village that during an election, all broken roads get fixed. That does not hold true for Gurugram, where assembly and municipal elections have come and gone,' he said. 'You'd be hard pressed to find public hospitals and functioning public toilets. I can't understand how working women who don't own cars navigate the city.'
Sharma suggested that while plenty of Indian cities grapple with traffic, the condition of Gurugram's infrastructure is the absolute worst he has witnessed. All while the city's real estate lobby continues to sing a different tune. 'Gurugram's real estate PR does its own PR,' Sharma said, pointing to the giddy conversations around the prices and how that guides perceptions about the city. 'What anchors this city, other than the price of a DLF Camellias apartment, thekas at every corner, fancy cars, and a SonyLIV show? My respect for Noida has grown tenfold,' Sharma added.
Also read: What makes Gurugram's Camellias India's most exclusive pin code? It's not just about money
Built on wasteland narrative
This shared precarity is the inevitable outcome of a city designed around extraction—you only have to look at its foundational mythology to understand it. In the 1980s, KP Singh of DLF India pioneered the template for India's private city-making. In Planning the Millennium City: The Politics of Place-Making in Gurgaon, India (2019), Shoshana Ruth Goldstein writes: 'To assemble the roughly 3,500 acres he initially planned for his group housing projects, Singh and his associates dealt with nearly 700 families. His pitch involved harnessing the wasteland narrative, convincing farmers that their land was underproductive. If they sold to him, he would arrange for them to get a larger plot further out in the District or in Rajasthan with a better agricultural yield.' Singh, along with Sushil Ansal of Ansals, and Ramesh Chandra of Unitech—two of Gurugram's largest builders—lobbied for extensive changes to town planning laws.
In his memoir Whatever the Odds: The Incredible Story Behind DLF (2011), Singh wrote about convincing holders of small land parcels to sell their assets to DLF, and also become 'angel investors' in the company. 'I used to dress in a kurta pyjama, wrap a shawl around my shoulders, and wear a beret on my head. I would squat on the floor of their huts and drink the refreshment they offered. I even shared a few puffs of smoke from their hookahs as it would have been impolite to refuse,' he writes. Several of these deals would go on to sour, but that scarcely made a dent in DLF's profits.
The same logic that convinced farmers their fertile land was worthless, now convinces residents that paying Rs 100 crore for flood-prone apartments represents progress. Left in the lurch are upper-middle-class residents like Kakkar, who has witnessed the several facelifts that her city has undergone—from wheat fields to elevated metro lines, from abundant water supply to having to rely on water tankers full of worms. When her family first moved to then Gurgaon, the running joke was that one side of the highway, where the DLF properties were, was the 'gur' (sweetness) and the other side (Udyog Vihar's manufacturing units) was the 'gaon' (village). All that changed with the arrival of global firms, like Microsoft, Google, and the building of Cyber City.
Gurugram had plenty of opportunities to fashion itself in the image of, say, Chandigarh, but they've all flown by. Kakkar said the city suffers from a lack of vision.
'I wonder if it's because there are too many builders in the area, or that Gurugram's municipal authorities are just not bothered or cannot foresee the next crisis. The city is surviving on a wing and a prayer,' she told me.
Still, some of the optimism of the early days continues to abide. Kakkar said Gurugram offered millions of people from smaller towns in North India the chance to be upwardly mobile and to rewrite the course of their lives. 'People who moved here came with massive aspirations and Gurugram became the gateway to many other opportunities,' she said. 'Things have gotten worse, but they have also gotten better for so many. That too, is Gurugram.'
Perhaps that's one of the promises Gurugram has actually kept: That people will find ways to survive even systemic abandonment. If you can endure Gurugram's dysfunction, you can probably endure anything.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)