[Reader-list] NYT: A Plan to Tame the Architectural Chaos of India's Capital

[Rana Dasgupta]

New Delhi Journal
A Plan to Tame the Architectural Chaos of India’s Capital


By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
Published: April 13, 2007


NEW DELHI, April 12 — It is late morning in the Pahar Ganj neighborhood, 
a stone’s throw from the New Delhi railway station at the heart of the 
capital, and the narrow lanes are alive with commerce. But the city 
authorities view this thronging, vibrant stretch of land as the 
embodiment of everything that is wrong with the city.

A new government vision for the capital, the Delhi Master Plan, proposes 
that the area be demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments to deal 
with the city’s spiraling and out-of-control growth.

By 2021 the city’s population is expected to rise to 23 million from 15 
million today. If Baron Haussmann’s plan for transforming Paris lay in 
replacing crowded lanes with wide, unbarricadable boulevards, India’s 
minister of state for urban development, Ajay Maken, dreams of creating 
space to house the exploding population by growing vertically.

His Master Plan 2021, which took effect in February, is a brave attempt 
to tackle an urgent problem: how do you transform a chaotic, 
traffic-choked, churning city into a “global metropolis” worthy of 
representing India’s ambitions to become the next Asian superpower? The 
answer boils down to three guiding principles: obliterating the slums, 
taming the traffic and importing a Manhattan-like skyline.

As it is, Delhi is a planner’s nightmare. Go beyond the carefully 
laid-out, green showpiece terrain of New Delhi — an area within the 
metropolis of Delhi that is home to the nation’s government, the city’s 
elite and the best hotels — and there is architectural anarchy.

The government estimates that 60 percent of the city’s inhabitants live 
in homes that are illegal — in slums, in unauthorized developments or in 
unplanned and unsafe buildings.

Because these areas do not officially exist, they have no safe water 
supply, no legal electricity system and no proper sewers. Resourceful 
residents have made do: artfully siphoning water from the mains, risking 
their lives to sling wires onto electricity pylons to steal power.

The city’s central water and power supplies are barely able to cope with 
this extra, invisible demand; most areas receive water for just a couple 
of hours a day, forcing residents to stock up with buckets when they 
can, while power failures occur daily.

Since these were unplanned settlements, no good roads were ever built 
for them. Now their inhabitants, who are growing richer with India’s 
economic boom, are trading in their bicycles for motorbikes, or 
upgrading their motorbikes for cars. Last year, car sales rose across 
India by 24 percent. Traffic in the capital is growing thicker and more 
perilous.

The new plan legalizes the houses of around three and a half million 
people, who have until now lived in fear of seeing their homes knocked 
down. Areas deemed dangerous will be redeveloped, and the city’s roughly 
two million slum dwellers will be rehoused, many of them in the new, 
tall, developments.

Since the 1950s, successive governments have restricted housing 
construction to one state body, the Delhi Development Authority. Mr. 
Maken has said that the state-backed system has proved disastrous, and 
the new plan (the third drawn up since 1962) allows private developers 
into the housing market for the first time.

To give these developers an incentive, the plan abolishes restrictions 
on tall construction, in all but a few historic areas. Building upward 
is a radical solution for a city where height restrictions keep most 
buildings at tree level. But since the government has been unable to 
stop the annual arrival of half a million migrants driven by rural 
poverty, it now says radical action is necessary.

Under the new plan, developers will be able to approach residents, who 
mostly live in three-story buildings, with a plan to provide them with 
an equal-size apartment in a 15-story block and a cash bonus of, say, 
2.5 million rupees, or $56,500. The plan stipulates that 35 percent of 
the housing be developed for poor residents, and that green space be 
left between the tall buildings.

Unsurprisingly, the plan is highly controversial. K. T. Ravindran, dean 
of the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, has warned that the 
slum demolition scheme risks following the discredited Paris model of 
urban planning, where poor communities were relocated into areas that 
fast became ghettoes.

The author of Delhi’s first Master Plan, Jagmohan, a retired politician 
who uses only one name, was also scathing, remarking that the proposal 
would turn Delhi into a world-class city only if one equated high-rise 
apartment blocks with sophistication. “And what message are you giving 
by legalizing illegal settlements?” he asked. “You’re saying that anyone 
who has infringed the law will now stand to gain.”

But Mr. Maken shrugs off these criticisms. “To be a world-class city we 
need to have good quality housing,” he said in an interview in his 
office in an upscale part of Delhi where power failures are rare and the 
water supply is good (although wild monkeys dance on the cars of 
officials outside, resistant to all campaigns to banish them).

Besides, he said, Delhi has no alternative. “There’s no way that we can 
remove these millions of people, living in illegal constructions, from 
Delhi,” he said. “And we shouldn’t do it. They are the people who are 
working as maids, building the metros, driving the rickshaws. They are 
essential service providers for the community.”

Serving tea from his pavement tea stall, Surjit Singh Bedi, 60, said he 
had no sentimental attachment to the streets of Pahar Ganj that had been 
his home for the past 55 years.

“What’s to like?” he asked, gesturing toward the tilting buildings, 
illegally and inexpertly extended and re-extended on their original 
base, and the cobweb of looping electricity wires stretching like a 
canopy above the street. “If there is electricity, there is no water. If 
there is water, there is no electricity. The power lines are so 
dangerous that houses keep catching fire. The traffic is so bad that the 
houses are burnt out before the fire engines can get here.

“I’ve never been in a tower block, but I’d be willing to sell up and move.”