Demolition derby in Delhi

My friend Cedric Labourdette, a film-maker based in Paris, is very disturbed. He has captured on camera the destruction of two malls on the Mehrauli Gurgaon road, a major retail centre in the southernmost part of Delhi. Named One MG Road and MG Two, the malls housed slick retail outlets for the city’s growing tribe of fashion designers. Cedric couldn’t get over the fact that a municipal agency destroyed the malls. “Why would they destroy successful commercial ventures,” he asked me. I had no answer except to say that the malls were victims of poverty: of vision, of imagination, of the mind.

Thus in Delhi, planners made no allowances for the growth of commerce. In their static perspective, the city would remain a quiet bureaucratic backwater in which all commercial activity was banished to the servants’ quarters. The small and dirty markets that sprang up were for the servants, who flocked there to stock up for the sahib and the memsahib.  It is this poverty of vision that is at the root of the crisis in Delhi.

The city’s master plan dates back to the 1950s and is crying out for amendment. Since 1991, the capital has seen a huge surge of business and commercial activity. The lack of adequate commercial real estate resulted in a strange paradox: Delhi offered its scarce and shoddy commercial space at prices that were among the highest in Asia. With economic liberalisation, Delhi came under pressure. Commercial establishments sprouted willy-nilly across the city, without let or hindrance as long as civic agency officials were paid off.

Then last month, a Supreme Court ruling directed the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to deal with the issue of unauthorised commercial activity in the capital’s various neighbourhoods or face disbandment. The MCD is a strange child of the privilegentsia in that it is run by a duly-elected council that reports in part to the state government and in part to the Centre. Spooked by the court’s threat to disband it, the agency went berserk with its bulldozers. Its destruction of high profile commercial establishments has spread panic and tension in the city. And the privilegentsia simply does not know how to deal with it.

That’s because members of the privilegentsia have long championed Soviet-style central planning as the key to development. However, their plans were long on rhetoric but very thin on concepts. Each five-year plan saw a restatement of the government’s commitment to abolish poverty, illiteracy and disease; with each plan, the poor grew in numbers as well as percentages. This charade continued until early 1990s when finally, the government went bankrupt and with it, the chains with which the privilegentsia had bound ordinary citizens came loose. In the 15 years that followed, India was rocked by an up-surge of creativity and upward mobility.

In the early stages of liberalisation, newly-empowered citizens in Delhi indulged in a consumer fantasy long denied to them. They bought refrigerators, air-conditioners, washing machines for their homes and cars, motorcycles and scooters for transport. As this consumer carnival attained critical mass, citizens once again ran up against the privilegentsia. To run their appliances, they needed power; to use their vehicles, they needed roads, traffic management and parking garages. As demands grew for more power, roads and other public goods, the privilegentsia failed to respond initially and then later reacted in its customary ad hoc manner.

In Delhi, there have been some spectacular successes in civic governance led by a reformist chief minister; among them: flyovers and interchanges, the metro and privatisation of power distribution. To deal with the current crisis, the chief minister has advocated a solution that would involve an ordinance from the urban development ministry that would legitimise all but most blatant abuses in the capital through January 1, 2006. The chief minister has also called for a review and reworking of the master plan.

However, the urban development ministry has been unresponsive. The chief minister also wants the MCD to be split up into several smaller municipalities. Her demand is not without precedent. The privilegentsia lives in zone called Lutyens’ Delhi, where the writ of the MCD does not run; in its place is a small, resourceful civic agency called the New Delhi Municipal Committee that has not only provided citizens under its care the basic amenities such as power, water, sanitation and roads but also quality of life conveniences such as parks, swimming pools, horticulture and recreation.

Between the courts and the MCD, the state and the Centre, Delhi is in on the verge of a major change. Watch this space.

Email: rdesai@comma.in