The Delhi Improvement Trust was set up in 1937 to relieve congestion in the old walled city and to develop planned residential and resettlement colonies as New Delhi grew alongside Shahjahanabad. It laid out new colonies, cleared and rehoused parts of the congested old city, and managed land on the capital's expanding fringe. Its work was widely judged inadequate to the scale of Delhi's growth, especially after the refugee influx of 1947. The Trust was superseded by the Delhi Development Authority in 1957.
It was the immediate institutional precursor to the Delhi Development Authority and the bridge between improvement-trust and master-plan governance in the capital.
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