Around 1327 Muhammad bin Tughluq, having extended Delhi Sultanate authority deep into the Deccan, ordered his capital moved to Daulatabad and required the population of Delhi to move with it. The march of more than a thousand kilometres, described by Ibn Battuta and by the court historian Barani, killed an unrecorded number on the road; within a few years the sultan reversed the policy and ordered a return, and Delhi took years to recover. The episode became the standard example of the sultan's reputation for grand schemes badly executed, a reputation established by hostile contemporaries. Britannica's account of the Tughluq reign describes the aim as settling Muslim nobles in the south and holding them under the sultan's control. Modern scholarship qualifies the picture further: the compulsion is not in doubt and is documented by an eyewitness, but historians read the transfer as directed at the court, administration, ulama and their dependants rather than at every inhabitant, and note that Daulatabad functioned as a genuine second capital and remained an important city afterwards.
The Delhi sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq ordered the transfer of his capital and its population from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, some 1,100 kilometres south, and reversed the decision within a few years
No count survives. Fourteenth-century Delhi was among the largest cities in the world, and modern urban-size reconstructions (Chandler's series and later revisions) put it in the range of 200,000-400,000 in this period. The chroniclers Barani and Ibn Battuta describe the city as emptied but give no numbers, and modern historians disagree over whether the whole population or only the court and administrative classes were ordered to move.
No figures. Ibn Battuta and Barani describe deaths on the march south and among those who returned, but give no numbers and are writing to condemn the policy rather than to count its cost.
India