Introduction Transit Oriented Development (TOD) has been the buzzword in planning circles internationally since the nineties. Calthorpe (Calthorpe 1993) and Cervero (Cervero and Kockelman 1997) were able to capture American policymakers’ attention through their writings and advocated the adoption along transit of a model of development that was already prevalent in the inner cities. In the Indian context, some of our cities already had the features which came to be associated with TOD at a later stage. It is only much later in the early 2000s when cities started investing in big budget projects like metro-rail that TOD started to be imposed on cities demanding transit. While progress has been patchy, efforts have involved adopting TOD concepts and replicating them in the Indian context. In 2017, as the Delhi Metro completes fifteen years of operations and other cities like Bengaluru have one or more phases of their metro-rail commencing operations, there is a need to address the attempts made by Indian cities at achieving TOD. International literature presents several critiques of TODs in American, European and Australian contexts, harping on how in the absence of enabling circumstances, these have turned into Transit Adjacent Development (TAD).