3 ideas
The Punjabi refugees who flooded Delhi after 1947 lost land, homes and status overnight, and passed to their children a conviction that nothing unowned or unguarded is safe. That inherited insecurity shows up as relentless accumulation, display of wealth, and distrust of public institutions. The post-1991 boom supplied the money, but the hunger was already there.
Wealthy Delhiites buy their own electricity (generators), water (borewells, tankers), security guards, schools and healthcare, so public systems no longer touch their lives. With no personal stake in shared services, they have no reason to press for their repair. The state decays for everyone else, and the gap between the gated and the ungated hardens.
Delhi is usually read as a developing city catching up with Western models. It is better read as a place where global capitalism runs with few old institutional buffers, such as welfare states, entrenched civic norms or stable middle classes. Seen this way, its extremes of speculative wealth, private enclaves and public collapse show the direction other societies may also be heading.