Delhi may eventually turn into a vast over-populated slum, with pockets of affluence, due to abysmal planning
Two important developments pertaining to the capital's civic health must be noted. First, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs has questioned former lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna's authority to regularise unuthorised colonies in the city, with 895 settlements from the list of 1,639 unauthorised colonies, given provisional regularisation certificates by the Congress Government before the 2008 Assembly poll. It was a vote-garnering gambit since these colonies have an estimated 35 lakh residents. Most of these are unsanitary, overgrown villages and slums, often a hotbed for crime. They were cleared for regularisation in September last year. This immediately spurred a meteoric hike in land and property rates in these areas, though lacking basic municipal facilities or modicum of planning. Whether the decision owed to the vote-banks, concentrated in poorly-developed clusters, or pressures exerted by the real estate lobby, or both factors, the Ministry seems chary of legitimising the lt Governor's hastily taken decision.
In its defence, the Delhi Government claims that the regularisation process was initiated at the behest of the Urban Development Ministry. The move amounts to legalising the parallel real estate sector, thriving on land grab, environmental violations, colonisation of river precincts and the protected ridge and forest areas, and encroachments. The land mafia has virtually hijacked the role of official civic planners, development and municipal agencies. This has led to an alarming rise in urban garbage, ghettos and lawlessness. Second, in a related development, the National Green Tribunal had directed the Centre and Delhi Government to define forest and non-forest areas in the capital and settle forest rights of local people within three months. Unmonitored construction and non-forest activities in forest areas is cause for concern. The Tribunal wants a report on whether the forest areas have adequate protection. Shrinking green spaces suggest that they are not well guarded. It has also directed that all debris on the ridge be removed. The report is expected to be submitted by August 30.
The capital and its vicinity are casualties of uncurbed real estate growth and the colossal failure of administrators to rein in anarchic elements, bent on selling all the land that they can lay their hands upon. This has spurred civic mayhem. As television news channels relentlessly flash images of severe water-logging after every monsoon downpour, ensuing traffic jams and flood waters entering homes, the lie about the capital being a world-class city is exposed as clearly as the abysmal lack of planning. Delhi may eventually turn into a sprawling over-populated slum, with pockets of affluence, if this trend is not stymied.
The most glaring failure is the absence of a good enough drainage network. Incessant concretisation and laying out of roads without proper planning and foresight has covered up storm water drains, with disastrous consequences. Depositing masses of debris, resulting from construction and civic works, anywhere and everywhere, especially the Yamuna's precincts, has choked drainage channels. The Tribunal's order that anyone caught dumping debris on the river bed would be fined `5 lakh should be enforced with utmost sincerity.
Some pockets of privilege, concentrated in lutyens' zone and upmarket colonies, are undoubtedly world-class. Clean surroundings, sprawling bungalows, tree-lined avenues, exclusive shopping arcades, lush parks and general air of tranquility indicate a charmed world of wealth, power and influence. However, this may soon give way to the expanding urban jungle of soaring high-rises, if the Urban Development Ministry's proposal for vertical growth becomes Government policy, and ghetto-like unauthorised colonies if administrators continue to regularise them. Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has declared her resolve to oppose the ambitious plan that would make the capital indistinguishable from vertically mushrooming urban clusters throughout the world. On heritage, historical and aesthetic grounds at least, the city's unique character deserves to be protected.
There was a time, just over two decades ago, before the advent of economic liberalisation and influx of unlimited foreign funds into real estate, when Delhi was decried as a large urban village. The city's sedentary lifestyle and vast green spaces soon gave way to frenetic changes, with farmland and village environs being deployed for unplanned colonisation, and burgeoning work opportunities turning the capital into an El Dorado for lakhs of migrants from other parts. Sadly, expansion of civic amenities such as water and power supply, and sanitation, and infrastructure growth did not keep pace with the magnifying population and alarming rise in number of cars.
Satellite towns in the National Capital Region encompassing large swathes of western Uttar Pradesh, southern Haryana and Rajasthan, contiguous to Delhi, that were meant to absorb the huge migrant spillover, have failed to do so because of escalating rentals and property prices. An investors' paradise, propped up by FDI, global banks and ruthless speculators, they pose grave survival challenges for the plebeian work force, subsisting on low wages and emergency remittance of money from home. This certainly doesn’t qualify as India's great success story.