Delhi City News Archives

First, look east. In the fading light of a inter evening, dung first spread a darkening pall across the river. Amid the smoke, you can see whole neighbourhoods of tarpaulin houses – black plastic stretched over roofs of twigs and bicycle tyres. Around them, people tread through purple rivulets of sewage snaking at their feet. Down below, the screech of the traffic, the insistent wail of a siren mixed bird sounds in the evening air. And beyond the riverbank rise gray apartment blocks. From this high vantage on the Humanyn’s Tomb, it is a charged theatrical spectacle of the place, perpetually smoking, smouldering and choking. It seems like a stage of incomplete structures, as if the day’s battle is over; people retreating to their make-shift encampments in Mayur Vihar, Noida, Greater Noida, Khichidipur, or Indirapuram – a Delhi on the permanent move to the horizon. In such a setting, it is not easy to sense the heightened aspirations of a city that is always acutely self-conscious of its second-class status.

The other side of the same parapet above the Tomb gives a different sensation: a long stretch of a roadway and low tree cover dotted with cupolas and domes rising out the shrubbery. The first and last of the great Mughal tombs – Humayun and Safdarjung – splayed along the sretch, nearby, the historic quarter of Nizamuddin, and the remains of the Lodi dynasty – a place benign and neglected, a testament to a history of some significance. It takes little imagination or archaeological background to guess that the area is of great historic value.

A new decision to connect East Delhi to this historic backwater has now been mooted under the guise of the Commonwealth Games. The need to provide direct access between the proposed Games Village at Akshardham and Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium, has made it necessary for the delhi Government to propose a tunnel that would carry vehicles from the Nizammuddin Bridge, directly towards Lodi Road, the city’s most venerated neighbourhood.

The idea of sanctioning an expensive project as the tunnel underpass – estimated at Rs. 800 crore – for the duration of a 15-day event seems not just financially misplaced in a city without basic infrastructure, but attests to the easy license available to government agencies to promote untested urban ideas. Does the availability of tunneling technology and finance give anyone the right to alter this 800-year old historic domain? Would not an efficient helicopter service serve the athletes better? Moreover, allowing vehicles to spill out into Lodi Colony raises other questions about the environmental side-effects of the heavy traffic entering an essentially residential zone. Not to mention more highways in central Delhi of its further distribution into the road system.

If the tunnel is being seen as a long-term solution to the traffic problems in the city, as is being justified, then a serious archaeological, technical and traffic assessment needs o be done and examined before it is sanctioned. Merely to rush through clearances when the larger good o the city remains in doubt would be disastrous in a proposal of such scale.

No city of any self-worth has allowed its historic center to be invaded by uncontrolled commerce, roads, or extra vehicular activity. The notion that the city is matter of convenience is a uniquely Indian idea. And among Indian cities, no other place regrets inconvenience more often than Delhi. Its futue is linked to increased accommodation, more wealth, so more banks, more travel, so more travel agents; more babies so more maternity hospitals. Every public act of construction is an acknowledgement of increasing numbers. More leisure, so fancier restaurants, more cares, so wider roads; and hence more apologies, more inconvenience regretted, more often. But to what purpose? Where and when will it end? Will the city ever be an entity, a complete place in itself?

IT may be pointed out that the very reason for the construction of the Ring Road in Delhi was to screen out the disastrous consequences of overloading suburban traffic on the center of town – to keep vehicular congestion, environmental pollution, parking problems, etc. at bay. Throughout the world, some of the more enlightened cities – London, Copenhagen and Singapore, among others – place severe restrictions in the movement of motorized vehicles in the heritage or older quarters of town. This allows easier pedestrian movement, encourages the use of bicycles, promotes street commerce and creates an environment more egalitarian and democratic, because it caters to all.

Source: Hindustan Times