New Delhi vs. Delhi: what the city node actually maps

"Delhi" and "New Delhi" get used interchangeably in ordinary speech and mean genuinely different things underneath. Delhi is the vast National Capital Territory — a metropolitan area encompassing Old Delhi, dozens of districts, and a population in the tens of millions. New Delhi is a much smaller, specifically planned district within it: the administrative capital the British built in the early twentieth century, laid out around Lutyens' broad avenues and government buildings, and still, formally, the seat of India's national government.

A capital built inside a city, not instead of one

The distinction exists because New Delhi was never meant to replace Delhi — it was meant to sit alongside the older Mughal-era city as a purpose-built seat of colonial, and later national, administration. That's a different origin story from most capital cities, which either grew organically around a seat of power or were built from scratch on empty land. New Delhi is neither: a planned administrative district grafted onto a city that had already existed, in some form, for close to a thousand years before the first stone of Lutyens' Delhi was laid.

Why the graph needs both entities

That history is exactly why treating "Delhi" and "New Delhi" as the same entity would flatten something real. Old Delhi's density, its markets, its Mughal-era street pattern have almost nothing in common physically with New Delhi's wide avenues and government compounds a few kilometres away — they read, on the ground, like two different eras of city-building sitting next to each other rather than one continuous urban fabric. A search for "New Delhi" is very often a search for the administrative capital specifically — ministries, embassies, Parliament — while "Delhi" more often means the metropolitan area as a whole, including the parts that predate the administrative capital by centuries.

What actually maps to what

So the honest resolution isn't to pick a winner. New Delhi is the planned capital district; Delhi is the metropolitan territory that contains it, along with far more history than the planned district alone can account for. Getting that right is less a technicality than the difference between describing a government and describing a city.