great cities: delhi's modernist dream proves a far-fetched ...€¦ · great cities:...

Great Cities: Delhi's modernist dreamproves a far-fetched fantasy

Delhi today, six decades after it was originally envisaged as one centrepoint orbited by six ‘ring towns’. Photograph: Fayaz Kabli/

Reuters. MIDDLE: Emergency trains crowded with desperate refugees. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. BOTTOM: Men rest on a

construction site for residential apartments that was halted, unfinished, in 2011. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters.

The planners of independent India’s new capital failed spectacularly in their attempt to create a

poverty-free modernist utopia. Their legacy is a sprawling city awash with slums and hampered

by bureaucracy.

In the late hours of 14 August 1947, on the eve of Indian independence, Jawaharlal Nehru stood

at the podium of the Constituent Assembly and delivered his vision for a new capital city. “We

have to build a noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell,” said the country’s

inaugural prime minister.

Just outside parliament, however, Nehru’s mansion was crumbling.

By David Adler, The Guardian on 05.20.16

Word Count 1,864

Level MAX

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 1

In Delhi’s old city, mobs of young men rioted through Muslim neighbourhoods with impunity.

Families fled from their homes, stuffing themselves into train cars or marching from the city centre

by foot. A few kilometres to the south, thousands more poured into Mughal ruins at Purana Qila

and Humayun’s Tomb. Fleeing violence in their home states, these families found refuge in the

makeshift colonies sprouting on Delhi’s periphery.

The city appeared, according to a report in the Daily Mirror, “like a battlefield with blazing houses,

hordes of refugees, dead cattle and horses and the rattle of automatic weapons”.

The departure of the British left a subcontinent divided. In the aftermath, 350,000 Muslims fled

Delhi for Pakistan, while 500,000 non-Muslims arrived in the city in 1947 alone. It was labelled

“history’s greatest migration”. It was also a scale of transformation for which the city was entirely

unprepared. Services came to a standstill: trains, buses, hospitals, even phonelines. Without

trains, the food supply dwindled to just two days’ worth of wheat.

Yet Nehru and his team of planners remained undeterred. Over the course of the coming decade,

they would develop the most ambitious masterplan in India’s history: a capital city free of poverty

and slums. “Delhi was to be Nehru’s ‘all-India’ city,” says Ashutosh Varshney, professor of

political science at Brown University. “It was to be the first city that belonged to the independent

India.”


The ingredients of Delhi’s ambitious plan were, however, imported. Far away from the tumult of

independence, eight British and American consultants from the Ford Foundation had gathered in

Berkeley, California, to review maps, draw up plans, and mock up drafts of India’s new capital

city. Albert Mayer, the head of the programme, was a prominent New York planner and architect.

They called their project the “Delhi imperative” – their imperative being to bring the ideas of

England’s garden city movement to bear on Delhi’s chaotic and sprawling urban form.

Of course, almost none of the committee members had worked in India before. The Berkeley

meetings were, in many ways, briefings on Delhi and its centuries of disjointed urbanisation. Yet

Delhi has a long history of outsourcing its vision to foreign planners.

A half-century earlier, when it became the capital of the British Raj, Edwin Lutyens arrived as

chief architect of the Delhi town planning committee. Over the course of two months, he assessed

the city on the back of his elephant, then withdrew, satisfied, to the mountains, to reshape Delhi in

his image of a “proper European capital” – wide avenues, axial vistas, parks and roundabouts,

just like his beloved Champs-Élysées. Lutyens’ portion of the city became known as New Delhi.

The Ford Foundation committee similarly sought to reconstruct the city anew. “Delhi was to

become the model of development for India,” says AK Jain, a former commissioner of planning at

the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). “The masterplan was Nehru’s showpiece.”

On paper, the masterplan is a high modernist dream. Six “ring towns” grow from Delhi’s

periphery, each with its own “economic, social and cultural ties with the central city”.

Under the guidance of the newly founded DDA, each town should hit its targets for population,

manufacturing and employment for each of the next 30 years of urban growth. And, of course,

they would be beautiful – in the words of the plan, beauty “should pervade the design of all public

and private buildings: modern industrial buildings in attractively landscaped grounds, pleasing

shopping centres, simple and beautifully designed schools and homes.”

This was a social vision as much as an architectural one. “Tamils should be there, Telugus

should be there, Assamese should be there,” Varshney explains. “The city was to incorporate all

the languages and all the regions of India.” For Delhi’s planners, the key to implementing this

vision was centralisation. Until then, they argued, Delhi had “evolved in a haphazard manner,

more often that not without the benefit of planning development in the public interest. Private

interests run rampant, overlooking or not being concerned with the efficiencies and facilities that

are required.”

The DDA would take over the sole responsibility for directing Delhi’s growth. “As the development

authority takes shape, two things happen,” says Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the

Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “First, there is a fair degree of land acquisition and

eminent domain. Second, almost all private development in the city comes to a halt.” Delhi’s


major developers, who had constructed colonies through the south of the city, were no longer

allowed to build. Instead, the DDA amassed more than 50,000 acres of land for its various

construction and redevelopment projects.

“The entire city is taken over as a public project,” Mukhopadhyay says. “Once the DDA starts

growing, there is a much more intentional effort to reshape the city. They want to create an

imperial capital.”

Grand Overambition

Outside of the development authority, however, the masterplan remained a fantasy. “The promise

was so seductive: a large land nationalisation, formal employment in the government, and the

state building all levels of housing to construct a more equal and mixed city than a real-estate

market would have,” says Gautam Bhan, professor at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements

in Bangalore. “But many parts of it fell apart slowly.”

At the root of the issue was the fact that the Delhi government – like city governments around the

country – was close to bankruptcy. “They just didn’t have the resources,” says Mukhopadhyay.

“The pressure on the city is growing. But the DDA is overwhelmed.”


The total revolving fund at the height of its masterplanning was no more than 50 million rupees –

or roughly $1million: “Not enough to build more than a few metres of metro railway,” says

Mukhopadhyay.

The result was that, over the course of the coming decade, the DDA consistently fell short. It

promised to develop 30,000 acres for residential use, but delivered only 13,000. Where it did

succeed in developing housing stock, it was rarely for Delhi’s poorest. A mere 10 percent of the

DDA’s housing plots were designated for its low-income group between 1960 and 1970.

Without support from the state, the refugee crisis that had spurred Nehru to action at

Independence intensified. “The pressure on the city – the attractiveness of the city as a

destination – is growing, and the DDA is aggressively planning to stop the bleeding,” says

Mukhopadhyay. “But given India’s politics … it just can’t stop people from coming in.”

Each year, more than 200,000 new migrants arrived in Delhi from the surrounding countryside.

Tent cities that first appeared in the early days of independence grew into larger neighbourhoods,

as residents built up from kutcha houses of mud and wood to pukka houses of brick and stone.

Relatives joined their families, built new rooms, and Delhi’s periphery steadily urbanised outward.

It had become a “partition city”, and its migrants had become residents. But the DDA refused to

recognise them. Under its public ownership of the city, informal settlements were illegal, and their

residents were invaders. In many cases, the authority moved to evict and relocate these illegal

occupants to make way for its new projects. In others, Delhi’s slum-dwellers were left

unacknowledged.

They could apply for legal titles to the land, known as “regularisation”. But moving through the

bureaucracy would take them years, if not decades. The DDA trapped them in a double bind: it

outlawed informal construction, but failed to provide formal accommodation to replace it.

According to Ashutosh Varshney, providing for the urban poor was never part of the DDA’s vision.

“Where the poor were to be located, what kind of facilities were to be made for them – I don’t

think those questions were discussed, or featured in that imagination.” Furthermore, Delhi’s

planners never adapted to the new reality. “At independence, the ideal of this planned, modern

city makes some sense,” says Mukhopadhyay. “But that ideal has been continuously confronted

with a different reality. A lot of the DDA’s planning is purely fictional.”

Yet the city’s planners buried their heads in the original masterplan, and continued to pursue their

original targets. “The biggest failure was that it took 30 years for the next plan to come,” says

Bhan. “So the essence of planning – review, course correction, adjustment – vanished. There is

no plan that can shape a city for 30 years, no matter how good.”


"We Are Building The World-Class City"

Even five decades after its first masterplan, the DDA was waxing poetical about its

accomplishments in its 2006/07 annual report: “In the 50 years of its relentless efforts to maintain

the pace of development and match steps with the best cities of the present era, DDA has

crossed one milestone after another. Emperors have come and emperors have gone, history has

been written and rewritten, but Delhi has continued to grow in glory and spread its warmth.”

Even to the most casual observer, that report is a masterpiece of magical thinking. Much as it

was on the eve of independence, Delhi today is the site of frenzied urbanisation. Skyscrapers,

malls and gated communities sprout from farmland on the city’s eastern edge. Trucks flow from

highways into factories along its north. Throughout, new informal settlements continue to crop up,

housing roughly half of Delhi’s 18 million residents.

Yet the DDA remains largely blind to these changes. At Vikas Sadan, where its headquarters are

located, Nehru’s urban planning apparatus remains intact, a fossil of a different era. Bureaucrats

shuffle through long, dark hallways. Stacks of rotting files line hallways and closets; triplicate

traces of decades-old applications. In one office, four engineers sit cross-legged behind their

desks, drinking chai and examining new plans for a housing development. “With this, we are

building the world-class city,” one tells me. He pulls out a copy of the masterplan 2021, which

promises to “make Delhi a global metropolis”: a centre of IT innovation, green parks and new

high-rise housing.

Outside, lines of housing applicants snake around the block, holding thick folders of forms, bills

and photocopies. Their joke is always the same: if you apply for a house from the DDA, your

great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter will live to inhabit it.

Modern Delhi was born of this contrast – great vision, and little implementation. From the outset,

Delhi’s planners have imagined a vibrant capital city with ordered growth and universal housing.

Yet in doing so, they planned for a city that did not exist, and they left the city’s actual residents

without a plan.

According to Mukhopadhyay, this is the “original sin” of Delhi’s urban conception. “You can

imagine going wrong for five, 10 or even 30 years. But at which point do you start recognising

reality?”


Quiz

1 What are two central ideas of the article?

(A) History's greatest migration took place at the same time Nehru tried to establish

Delhi as an important capital. The number of people who moved into the city at

this time affected transportation and access to food.

(B) Delhi was symbolic of India's newly gained independence. Even so, city planners

wanted to remake the city in the style of European cultural centers.

(C) Nehru made it his mission to recreate Delhi into an orderly, beautiful city that

emphasized public interests. People now joke about how this plan has made it

impossible for them to actually receive proper housing.

(D) Urban planners worked on a city plan for Delhi that would allow for increased

urban growth. The DDA lacked money and did not respond effectively to the city's

refugee crisis, so the plan was never realized.

2 According to the article, each of the following contributed to Delhi's ineffective development EXCEPT

(A) outsourcing the city's design to foreign urban planners

(B) the government's inability to provide adequate funding

(C) regularization that kept people from land titles

(D) the hasty migration of Muslim families from Delhi to Pakistan

3 Which sentence BEST summarizes how the DDA affected Delhi's poorest residents?

(A) The DDA was unsuccessful in creating a working transit system.

(B) The DDA largely ignored those who lived in Delhi's slums.

(C) The DDA denied access to land for residents to build their own homes.

(D) The DDA couldn't find a way to accommodate both private and public

development.


4 Which of the following statements accurately represents the relationship between the article's central

ideas?

(A) Nehru envisioned Delhi as a beautiful, modern city center. The inability of the DDA

to implement this unrealistic vision left the city's residents with no actual plan.

(B) The DDA was created to rebuild Delhi into a modernized capital. It was formed to

stop reliance on foreign planners.

(C) Nehru called on experienced city planners to actualize his vision. They wanted to

curb private developments throughout Delhi.

(D) Delhi's government was nearly bankrupt when it attempted to redesign the city.

The DDA refused to offer much housing for the poorest of Delhi's residents.


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