National Capital Region (India)

The National Capital Region (NCR; Rāṣṭrīya Rājadhānī Kṣetra) is a region centred on the city of Delhi, a special union territory of India that hosts the country's capital city New Delhi. It encompasses the entirety of Delhi and a number of adjacent districts from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The NCR and the associated National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) were created in 1985 to plan the development of the region and to evolve "harmonized policies for the control of land-uses and development of infrastructure" in the region. Prominent cities of the NCR are Delhi, New Delhi, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and Meerut.

The NCR is a mixed, rural-urban region, with a population of over 46,069,000 and an urbanisation of 62.6 percent. The ve aalso reas like the Aravalli ridge, forests, wildlife and bird sanctuaries. The Delhi Extended Urban Agglomeration, the inner part of the NCR, had an estimated GDP of $370 billion (measured in terms of GDP PPP) in 2015–16. Despite being a part of the NCR, the Government of India's think tank, NITI Aayog, listed the Nuh district of Haryana as the most underdeveloped across India's 739 districts.

The National Capital Region (NCR) and its planning board were created under the National Capital Region Planning Board Act of 1985. That 1985 Act defined the NCR as being the whole of Delhi; the Haryana districts of Gurgaon (then including the Nuh district), Faridabad and Sonipat, Rohtak (then including Jhajjar tehsil) and the Rewari tehsil then in Mahendragarh district; and the Uttar Pradesh districts of Bulandshahr, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut (then including Baghpat tehsil), and Ghaziabad (then including Hapur tehsil), and some part of the Rajasthan district of Alwar. The 1985 boundary of the NCR covered an area of 34,144 square kilometres (13,183 sq mi).

Prior to the creation of the NCR, an area described as the Delhi Metropolitan Area (DMA) was described in the 1962 Master Plan for Delhi. That plan defined the DMA as comprising the National Capital Territory and the ring towns of Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Ballabhgarh, Gurgaon, Bahadurgarh and Loni, also certain rural areas, which had a population of the somewhat less than 2.1 million in 1951. The following "Master Plan for Delhi", approved in August 1990, added Noida, Bahadurgarh and the then-proposed township of Kundli to the DMA, which consequently covered an area of 3,182 km².

Gautam Budh Nagar district was created in 1997 out of the existing NCR districts of Ghaziabad and Bulandshahr. The city of Noida was the location of the new district's headquarters. Also in 1997 Baghpat district was created from Baghpat tehsil of Meerut district.

In July 2013, the NCR was expanded to include three more districts, Bhiwani, and Mahendragarh in the state of Haryana, as well as Bharatpur in the state of Rajasthan. This brought the number of districts in the NCR to 19 (outside Delhi NCT), with the total NCR area increasing 34% to 45,887 km². Subsequently, Charkhi Dadri district was separated from Bhiwani district in 2016.

On 9 June 2015, the Government of India approved the inclusion of three more districts in NCR – Jind, Panipat, Karnal in the state of Haryana and Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh. covering a total area of 50,566 km². Shamli district of U.P. was added to the NCR in December 2017. As of 2021, there are a total of 24 districts in the NCR, excluding the 11 districts of Delhi.

On 9 January 2018, the government of Uttar Pradesh formally proposed the extension of the NCR to cover the districts Aligarh, Bijnor, Hathras and Mathura.