Yesterday, there was some news that Guwahati city was near the bottom of the list of cleanest cities. Chandigarh, Chennai and Kolkata were on the top of the list.
While reading some of the blogs on the subject there were a number of reasons cited. Some cited the "Indian attitude", while others suggested corruption, considering state property (street lights, drains etc)_ as belonging to no one - and thus could be destroyed at will. There was even one suggestion that Pre-Independence British penchant for clealiness was somehow construed as "anti-Indian". It seems when destroying public property, some Indians took it as destruction of British property. This makeover plan for New Delhi is brave indeed. Whoever wants to tackle this has to fight attitudes, cultures, lack of basic civic sense among many and lack of accountability from the babus who man PWDs and infrastructural development in cities. Here is the article. --Ram ___________________ ------------------------------ April 13, 2007 New Delhi Journal A Plan to Tame the Architectural Chaos of India's Capital By AMELIA GENTLEMAN 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, 2.5million 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."
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