Planning and design disasters dot what was once a beautiful city. Sheila Dikshit is a lady of refined taste. And yet, the blame must rest with her Government for not caring to inspect the mushrooming monstrosities
lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna’s advice to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit against holding an Asian athletics event slated in July 2013 in the capital of the emerging superpower because the monsoon, an annual natural occurrence, may show up infrastructure in a bad light, is ludicrous but sadly accurate.
Mr Khanna has his eye, not on the betterment of civic facilities for taxpayers but on the forthcoming Delhi Assembly election, of course.
But in a country obsessed with Soviet-style pomp and circumstance ranging from military parades to ‘big ticket’ sporting events like the Commonwealth Games (rendered even more absurd by the irrelevance of the near-defunct Commonwealth itself), Mr Khanna’s fear is timely. The last thing this battered capital — afflicted with a shortage of power and an excess of corruption — needs, is yet another sports jamboree.
Since the CWG were held in 2010 amidst bridges collapsing, bits of roof falling onto surprised athletes and workers spitting paan in every available corner of luxury apartments built for the athletes, the entire sprawl of CWG grotesqueness across the city angers and upsets every Delhiwallah a thousand times a day in passing. So why should it need rainfall to expose the tackiness of what Delhi’s civic and sports authorities built at a fraction of the official cost of Rs 16,560 crore, while allegedly pocketing the rest of taxpayers’ money for their hard workIJ
Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium’s giant, tent-like structure dominates central Delhi’s skyline. From afar and especially when lit up by a gazillion watts, (while the rest of Delhi sweats it out during yet another massive outage), it does have, what the French would call, un certain je ne sais quoi (a certain “I-don’t-know-what”).
But it takes only a drive past the stadium to know it all.
Mountains of garbage fringe the walls of the JNS. Its neighbouring structure, the erstwhile boxing stadium, looks like a failed souffle of rotting, greying cheese. Several of the aluminum plates nailed hastily on the boxing venue’s roof dangle down, or have gone missing altogether. Über-designed booths marked ‘SANDWICH’ and ‘POlICE’ — but devoid of heroes, both grilled and uniformed — line the JNS’s peripheral roads. Tall watchtowers painted silly pink and unwelcoming steel fences wrapped in barbed wire encircle the stadium, depressingly reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp. Two entirely meaningless arches flank the nullah under the Seva Nagar flyover. They are not bridges for the slum population living under them to cross over, but embellishments, silly! Once painted — kindergarten-style — in the colours of the rainbow, the paint has long peeled, the ‘arches’ continue to annoy. The JNS is mostly closed, at least to athletes who desperately need the facilities.
But it is always open to ‘events’ sponsored by private companies who hang their banners across the entrance, pour undoubtedly huge amounts into the cavernous pockets of the city administration and celebrate everything and anything trivial — from used car bazaars to sari exhibitions to ‘trade fairs’ — inside a venue built for sportspersons. The members of the Uttarakhand swimming team had to once practice their strokes for the national games on straw mats on the floor, since they were refused permission to use the ‘world-class’ pools built for the CWG.
Forget sports. During Delhi’s freezing winter in 2012 and while all the city’s available night shelters for homeless people were bursting at the seams, nobody lording it over these gigantic stadia thought of putting them to better use. Makeshift tented cities could have sprung up inside them, soup kitchens (with Kalmadi ladling out the stuff as civic punishment for his misdeeds) could have been set up. When the annual Urs moves to Nizamuddin in the heart of the town and thousands of poor people literally eat, cook and sleep on the pavements because Nizamuddin Basti’s crumbling infrastructure can’t handle the onslaught, would anyone think of accommodating them in the nearby Nehru stadium and run those glitzy low-floor buses parked on lodi Road (in a ‘public’ parking lot usurped by the DTC and offbounds to the public) as shuttles between the dargah and the stadiumIJ Of course not.
In any country in the world, authorities think out-of-the box. Ours think only of what they can get ‘into-the-box’ by renting installations that are public property at a profit but never for a good cause.
A Delhi administration official once shook his head vehemently at these suggestions. “Madam, woh log ganda kar denge”, he said virtuously. “Aur phir, tarrorism te skority da swal hai”.
It is not just the JNS. Planning and design disasters dot what was once a beautiful city. Ms Dikshit is a lady of refined and sober taste herself. And yet, the blame must rest with her Government for not caring to once inspect — as I am sure she does her own immaculate home — the monstrosities mushrooming around the Capital. Gleaming, steel bus-stops with slopes for the disabled are fine. But leaving them without a single coat of polish for three years after the event is not. let’s not hear the excuse that there is no dedicated staff to keep them gleaming. No need for rocket scientists: Even according to the Delhi Government’s own report, there are 2.27 lakh unemployed persons in Delhi. (But recently and even years after the CWG scam came to light, one jobless woman told this reporter that her ‘number’ for an MCD job as sweeper had been called, but only if she produced a ‘sifarish’ letter or ‘paid up’ would she get the job.)
Ms Dikshit’s gaze did not rest on the embarrassing ‘MCD toilet-cum-coffee-bar complexes’ around the city either: Astounding structures made of everything — steel, concrete, sandstone, blue, green bathroom tiles, murals of birds, footballers, flames, red dots to signify ‘Indianness’ — and blinding combinations of bad taste and bewildering lunacy. What the ‘designer’ had in mind and why anyone would want to sip coffee next to someone taking a leak, remain nighmarish mysteries.
The Horticulture Department too, has done its bit to ‘beautify’ Delhi by mutilating perfectly healthy shrubs and trees into animal-shapes, which, in the interim and because the authorities thankfully lost interest, have grown back into their original forms.
Mr Khanna’s letter expressing his fear for the rain in July is to be welcomed. If nothing else and for the first time, election round the corner will prompt this city not to overkill and overdo, but to do nothing.
Readers in other metros need feel no smugness. Delhi was considered only because Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has imperiously ‘banned’ the Asian athletics event from being held in Chennai. Fear of precipitationIJ Yes. But by the presence of Sri lankan players, not a downpour.
What a society we have indeed become.