Why did Auto Expo move from Delhi to Greater Noida and back?

Auto Expo left Pragati Maidan in Delhi for the India Expo Mart in Greater Noida in 2014, after years of crowd chaos and traffic jams at the old venue peaked at the 2012 show. It stayed in Greater Noida for five editions, through 2023, before new convention centres in Delhi brought it back home in 2024 under a new name, Bharat Mobility Global Expo.

The chaos that sent it packing

Auto Expo began in 1986 at Pragati Maidan, a nine day show from 3 to 11 January inaugurated by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, according to Wikipedia's Auto Expo page. It grew into one of the world's biggest motor shows. The 2008 edition alone drew 1.8 million visitors and 2,000 exhibitors, per the same page.

That scale became the problem. At the 11th edition in January 2012, still at Pragati Maidan, crowds and traffic jams around the venue grew bad enough that Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Satyendra Garg told reporters, "Maybe Pragati Maidan is not the place to hold an event like the Auto Expo," while also admitting "there can be no excuses for traffic congestion, it was a bad show on our part," Exhibition News reported at the time. The same report says 100 international exhibitors were turned away from that edition for lack of space. Autocar Professional later described the venue's "crumbling infrastructure, combined with extraordinarily poor housekeeping" as a reason organisers started looking elsewhere.

Ten years off the Noida expressway

The fix was to move the Motor Show component out of the city. The 12th edition, in February 2014, ran at the India Expo Mart in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, according to the Bharat Mobility Global Expo page on Wikipedia, which lists every edition with its venue and dates. Four more editions followed there, in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2023, each a biennial show held through the depths of a Delhi winter, away from the city's roads and its NOC headaches. Components and components makers, represented by ACMA, kept showing in Delhi through this period, which split the event in two for a decade.

Industry voices used that gap to ask for more change. Autocar Professional's "Reinventing the Auto Expo" piece argued for a standalone two wheeler show, pointing out that India's two wheeler industry is the largest in the world by volume and deserved its own stage rather than a corner of a car show.

Back to Delhi, with a new name

Delhi got two new venues built for exactly this kind of scale, Bharat Mandapam at Pragati Maidan and Yashobhoomi in Dwarka. Auto Expo used them to come home. In 2024 the show was renamed Bharat Mobility Global Expo and held at Bharat Mandapam from 1 to 3 February, on what organisers initially set as an annual schedule, Wikipedia's Bharat Mobility page says. A second edition followed at Bharat Mandapam from 17 to 22 January 2025. According to the organisers' own history page for Auto Expo, The Motor Show, that 2025 edition drew 8.44 lakh visitors with 34 OEMs participating and more than 90 vehicle launches.

Annual proved hard to sustain. In October 2025 organisers reverted to a biennial calendar, with the third edition of Bharat Mobility Global Expo now set for 4 to 9 February 2027, again at Bharat Mandapam, with the Components Show at Yashobhoomi, per the same Wikipedia page and the official Auto Expo site.

So the short answer to why Auto Expo moved and moved back: a 2012 crowd crush pushed it out of Delhi because Pragati Maidan could not handle it, and it only returned once Delhi built venues that could.

Sources

• Auto Expo, Wikipedia
• Bharat Mobility Global Expo, Wikipedia
• Pragati Maidan under fire following Auto Expo congestion, Exhibition News
• Reinventing the Auto Expo, Autocar Professional
• About Us, Auto Expo, The Motor Show