How Delhi became the Lord of the Rings

With the operationalisation of a key stretch of the Delhi Metro's Pink Line, Delhi has become the first Indian city to have an orbital metro system. It's not the first circular transport loop in the capital, though. This is the story of Delhi's ring roads and a railway system that circle the city. This is what makes Delhi the Lord of the Rings.

In the world imagined by author JRR Tolkien, power is organised through rings. Tolkien's high fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, binds kingdoms, tempts rulers and ultimately shapes the fate of Middle-earth. In our reality, for India's capital, Delhi, rings have been far from anything mystical. It's real. The Indian capital has built rings of asphalt, steel tracks and metro corridors in and around it. Layer after layer of circular infrastructure now surround it. Each is designed to regulate how goods, services and people move in and around the capital.

The Lord of the Rings reference becomes more real for Delhi because its Ring Roads are known as Mudrika, which means ring in Hindi.

With the inauguration of a short but important remaining stretch of the Delhi Metro Pink Line by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Delhi now hosts India's first operational Ring Metro.

It's an orbital metro corridor. It's similar to some of the capital's prime roads too. Delhi already has the Inner Ring Road and the Outer Ring Road, two arterial road networks that circle large parts of the city. That was not the first. The first true loop was the city's urban rail network from the 1970s, which has been largely abandoned now. It's in bad shape.

With the Delhi Metro's Pink Line forming a full loop through many of Delhi's key neighbourhoods, the capital effectively now has four concentric transport rings. If you argue, it's five, that's true as well. The Eastern Peripheral Expressway and Western Peripheral Expressway together form a massive highway loop around the National Capital Region. They run through the outskirts, in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Not inside Delhi, but they are vital in taking pressure off the capital's roads. A map of Delhi Matro's Pink Line circular route. (Image: Soumen Mukherjee via X)

The Pink Line, built and operated by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), is one of its 10 lines. Being circular, the Pink Line is unlike any route on any other metro system in India.