Ford Foundation leaves its Lodhi Estate house after six decades

The Ford Foundation is no longer at 55 Lodhi Estate. The American philanthropy occupied the Joseph Stein building from the 1960s until February 2026, when it moved after the Land and Development Office opened eviction proceedings on an expired lease. The Indian Express reported the change on 11 September. Officials at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said there was no forced removal. The foundation left. The file was closed.

On Monday the Directorate of Estates allotted the ground and first floors to two India-led bodies launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023: the International Big Cat Alliance and the Global Biofuels Alliance. IBCA has been working out of a house in Shanti Niketan. Both organisations now inherit a plot in the most watched institutional street in the capital.

The foundation updated its public address in March to Level 8, DLF Centre, Sansad Marg. It did not answer questions from the Indian Express. Ministry officials also declined comment.

How the house was built

Joseph Allen Stein designed the Lodhi Estate office as part of the cluster that Delhi still calls Steinabad. The same American architect gave the city the India International Centre, parts of the India Habitat Centre, the landscaping of Lodi Gardens and the Gandhi-King Plaza. The Ford building sat on a government plot granted after New Delhi invited the foundation in 1952. The working office at number 55 dates from the 1960s.

United Nations agencies still use other parts of the wider complex. The street is lined with cultural institutes, foreign offices and gardens. Losing the Ford nameplate does not empty Lodhi Estate. It does end a particular American presence that outlasted the Cold War, the Emergency, liberalisation and two decades of FCRA fights.

The lease and the politics around it

The Land and Development Office began recovery in 2025 once the lease ran out. A senior ministry official told The Tribune that the foundation did not contest the notice. The shift of staff and files was complete by late March.

Ford's India work has long drawn both praise and suspicion. It funded rural programmes, universities and civil-society groups. Critics on the right have accused it of paying for political work against the Indian state. Those arguments are not what the eviction file records. The file records an expired lease on central land and a decision to put two new intergovernmental projects in the rooms.

IBCA is a multi-country effort on tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, cheetah, jaguar and puma conservation. The Global Biofuels Alliance was unveiled during the 2023 New Delhi G20 summit and is meant to pool standards and supply for ethanol and other fuels. Both needed a Delhi address with more room than a borrowed bungalow.

The foundation still has an India programme. It now runs that programme from a commercial tower on Sansad Marg rather than from a Stein courtyard with a fountain. The building stays. The tenant changes. For a street that has housed the same names for half a century, that is the story.