The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, incorporated in 1995 as a joint venture of the Government of India and the Government of the NCT of Delhi, opened its first 8.2 km section between Shahdara and Tis Hazari on 24 December 2002, with commercial service from the following day. Phase I's 65 km were completed in 2005, ahead of schedule and budget, under E. Sreedharan, financed largely by Japanese soft loans and delivered through a wholly state-owned special purpose vehicle. The network has since grown beyond 350 km and has carried Delhi's expansion into Noida, Gurugram, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. Its success made the metro SPV the default instrument of Indian urban transport.
Delhi Metro broke the assumption that Indian cities could neither build nor run modern rail, and it reset urban political priorities toward mass transit - leading to metros in more than fifteen cities, the National Urban Transport Policy 2006 and the Metro Rail Policy 2017. It also prompted India's first serious experiments in transit-oriented development, station-area planning and land-value capture.
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