Implosion (10 page)

Delhi’s municipal authorities’ tight grip, which is supported by the Ministry of Urban Development, has continued across the city. This creates even greater rewards for corrupt bureaucrats who sanction unauthorized developments that include conversion of houses and flats to shops and offices, addition of extra floors and other extensions to existing buildings, increased building densities, commercial redevelopment of old traditional villages as the city envelops them, and construction of palatial ‘farm’ residences and weekend retreats on large plots of land around the city’s perimeter. As with virtually every Indian city, there is little or no control of building standards, nor any effective safety measures such as fire precautions. Many bazaars and other crowded areas are unsafe.
¹⁵
Colonies (as residential districts are called in India) have sprung up all over the city, teeming with as many as 250,000 residents in broken narrow lanes, crudely erected concrete and brick buildings, and a jumble of low-hanging electricity cables that typify India’s poorer urban areas.

Such haphazard development, often without public services, has of course fuelled the economic expansion of the capital, without which India’s growth in the 2000s could not have happened. From time to time, various areas are regularized
¹⁶
– sometimes as a political gesture before elections – but only enough to bring a glimmer of order and not so much, or so precisely, as to reduce the power of extortion and inflow of bribes. That was evident in 2012–2013 during the preparation of a new Delhi master plan. The same is true of towns and cities across the country.

Purges of unlawful construction often have ulterior motives. In 2005 and 2006, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) blitzed and sealed the fronts of shops, homes and other buildings across the city with mechanical diggers and bulldozers, provoking violent scenes and near riots that had to be controlled by security forces. officially, this was a drive to clear illegal extensions that had been allowed, in most cases, because MCD officials had been bribed. Four small shopping malls on the Mahatma Gandhi (M.G.) Road, a major highway from Delhi to Gurgaon, were included in the partial demolitions in a move that illustrated cruel authoritarianism and a lack of care for the environment. The buildings housed upmarket designer fashion shops and restaurants, which were well-built and were less at fault than thousands of other illicit structures across the city.

It was suggested at the time that the owners were being forced out in order to make them move to a new mall that was being built nearby. Later, it was alleged that the then chief justice of India had authorized the demolition ‘around the time that his sons got into partnerships with mall and commercial complex developers, who stood to benefit from his sealing orders’.
¹⁷
The MCD, which is famous for being riven by corruption, did nothing to tidy up the sites after the front of the buildings had been hacked by its mobile cranes and diggers. Seven years later, the buildings still stand semi demolished on a major highway, looking as though bombs had hit them.
¹⁸

Buccaneering Gurgaon

Restrictions on development in Delhi led to growing pressure for office space and homes in authorized developments, which eventually burst outside the city to what are now the satellites of Gurgaon in Haryana, Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and beyond. Noida began as an industrial development by the Uttar Pradesh state government, which drew up an overall master plan that provided fast highways and open areas, plus good water supplies because it lies in the relatively water-rich Gangetic flood plain. Diverting from the planners’ intentions, it rapidly expanded into residential and commercial development, and is now a thriving though chaotic conurbation providing jobs and homes for over 650,000 people. Like Delhi itself, it is beset by predictable crony capitalism on land deals, poor governance, and law and order problems.

Gurgaon should be a showpiece for modern India. It epitomizes the country’s rapid growth and economic success with stylish buildings housing top multinationals as well as Indian information technology and industrial businesses. There are masses of blocks of flats to accommodate the aspirational young, plus shopping malls, night clubs and golf courses, and Delhi airport is nearby. But it is not a showpiece. Instead it is an unplanned, uncoordinated concrete and plate glass jungle. A total lack of infrastructure planning has led to failing water supplies and drainage and sewerage systems, plus a lack of organized parking facilities, all spelling disaster in the next decade unless there is a dramatic change.

Originally there was just an old village here, together with (since the end of the 1970s) the factories of Maruti, India’s largest car manufacturer. A mixed bag of developers, with varying degrees of ethics (or lack of them), moved into what till then had been undeveloped farmlands, buying up and agglomerating small plots from the locals, and getting together with local politicians to bully landowners and obtain permissions. It started with residential developments for people to escape from Delhi, followed by modern office blocks of a quality that Delhi lacked, and then mushroomed with mixed developments. A master plan was superimposed, but it came too late to solve water and sewage problems.

The most successful of the private sector developers was Kushal Pal Singh, a businessman then in his forties, who worked for Delhi Land and Finance, now called DLF. The company had run out of land in New Delhi, having developed what became prosperous middle-class suburbs such as South Extension, Hauz Khas and Greater Kailash, so Singh moved out to what is now Gurgaon. There he began the urbanizing of rural settlements of the agricultural Ahir and Jat castes and, in the process, turned DLF into the country’s leading real estate company.

He illustrated the original buccaneering spirit in a
Business Standard
interview in 2005.
¹⁹
‘I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families. I wore kurtas, sat on charpoys, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick. To understand why this was important, it is necessary to understand the landholding pattern. The average plot size in Gurgaon was four to five acres, mostly held by Hindu undivided families. Legally, to get clear titles, I needed the consent of every adult member of these families. That could be up to thirty people for one sale deed. Getting the married daughters to sign was often tricky because the male head of the family would refuse to share the proceeds of the sale with them. So I would travel to their homes and pay the daughters in secret. Remarkably, Gurgaon’s farmers sold me land on credit. I would pay one farmer and promptly take the money back as a loan and use that to buy more land. The firm’s goodwill made them willing to act as bankers for DLF. But it also meant I had to be extra careful about interest payments. Come rain or shine, the interest would be hand-delivered to each farmer on the third of every month at ten a.m. We bought 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, more than half of it on credit, without one litigation against DLF.’

In 2007, Singh listed the company on the Indian stock exchange and five months later
Forbes
magazine estimated him to be India’s fourth richest man, worth $35bn.
²⁰
Dramatic falls in DLF’s stock market prices had reduced that figure by October 2013 to just $3.4bn.
²¹
Saddled with heavy debt, DLF sold hotels, wind farms and other diversifications while maintaining its core activities. It was also hit by controversies that included a deal with Robert Vadra, husband of Sonia Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka, whose sudden wealth and business activities (which included DLF) had begun to lead to criticisms of the ruling dynasty. The deal exposed widely suspected and gossiped-about links between businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats in Haryana. A Vadra company called Sky Light Hospitality had bought a 3.53 acre plot in February 2008 in Manesar-Shikohpur near Gurgaon for Rs 7.5 crore from a local real estate company that was owned by a businessman said to be close to the chief minister of Haryana’s Congress state government.
²²
The following month, the state’s town and country planning department issued a housing development licence for 2.7 acres of the land and, within 65 days, Vadra entered into an ‘agreement to sell’ to DLF for Rs 58 crore.
²³
The land value had gone up nearly eight times in two months because of the change-of-use licence, allegedly due to Vadra’s political connections.
²⁴

DLF has built impressive-looking office blocks, some of which would not look out of place on the Hong Kong waterfront. But, along with other developers and Haryana’s state government, it did not provide the basic infrastructure needed for an area that grew to a population of 1.5m by 2011, with 3.7m forecast by 2021. In an interview in 2011, Singh admitted that ‘the city is based on archaic planning norms’, adding (apparently to deflect the criticism) that there were ‘big roads, golf courses’ in later phases of DLF’s developments.
²⁵
There was no mention of providing basic amenities. The city was ‘thinking malls and high-rises, but not water or sewage’, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said in 2012.
²⁶

‘Gurgaon is drowning in its own excreta,’ warned the centre’s director general, Sunita Narain. In 2021 Gurgaon would need 666m litres of water a day, she said, but would on present plans only be able to treat and supply 573m litres. It would be generating 533m litres of sewage daily, but have a capacity to treat just 255m litres. Chalta hai?

Notes

1
.   ‘Three-fourths of Indian cities functioning without a Master Plan’, Sudhir Krishna, Urban Development Secretary, reported in
The Hindu
, 30 September 2012

2
.   ‘Excreta Matters’, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi 2012,
http://urbanindia.nic.in/programme/uwss/slb/SeptagePolicyPaper.pdf
, and
http://www.cseindia.org/content/excreta-matters-0

3
.   ‘Back to the Village’,
http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/momgandhi/chap76.htm

4
.   ‘India’s Urban Awakening – building inclusive cities’, McKinsey Global Institute, April 2010

5
.   Ajit Mohan, ‘Weekend Panorama: Who Will Champion India’s Cities?’, ‘India RealTime’
,
10 September 2011
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/09/10/weekend-panorama-who-will-champion-india’s-cities/

6
.   Nandan Nilekani,
Imagining India
, pp. 209-232, Penguin 2008

7
.   In conversation with JE, March 2013

8
.   In conversation with JE, April 2013

9
.   ‘Inside the slums, Light in the darkness’,
The Economist
, 17 January 2005,
http://www.economist.com/node/3599622

10
. Ibid.

11
. ‘Report of the High Powered Expert Committee on Making Mumbai an International Financial Centre’,
http://finmin.nic.in/the_ministry/dept_eco_affairs/capital_market_div/mifc/fullreport/execsummary. pdf

12
. Ibid. Mistry resigned from his High Powered Committee just before the report was published, apparently because he disagreed with public sector bankers on the committee who were insisting that the report’s criticisms of their operations should be watered down.

13
. ‘Slum & the city: How “planned” Navi Mumbai lost the plot’, Firstpost.com, 29 May 2013,
http://www.firstpost.com/mumbai/slum-the-city-how-planned-navi-mumbai-lost-the-plot-825695.html?utm_source=mail&utm_medium=newsletter

14
. Rana Dasgupta,
Capital Gains
,
Granta
107, Summer 2009,
http://www.granta.com/Archive/107/Capital-Gains/1
and
http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp

15
. ‘Most East Delhi buildings are unsafe’, National Institute of Disaster Management survey,
The Times of India
, 13 December 2012,
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-12-13/delhi/35796550_1_nidm-lalita-park-new-structures

16
. ‘91 more illegal colonies to be regularised’,
The Hindu
, 23 January 2013,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/91-more-illegal-colonies-to-be-regularised/article4335069.ece

17
. ‘A former Chief Justice defends his honour’,
The Times of India,
2 September 2007,
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=Q0FQLzIwMDcvMDkvMDIjQXIwMTAwMA==&Mode=HTML.
But the allegations continued later in September 2007, as these two reports show: ‘How true is Justice Sabharwal? Probe demanded’. Merinews.com, 20 September 2007,
http://www.merinews.com/article/how-true-is-justice-sabharwal-probe-demanded/126536.shtml;
‘Justice Sabharwal’s Defence Gets Murkier – Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, part of the eminent panel that framed allegations against former Chief Justice of India Y.K. Sabharwal, rebuts the retired judge’s rejoinder point by point’,
Tehelka,
22 September 2007,
http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=Ne220907JUSTICE.asp

18
. ‘MG Road buildings to rise from the debris’,
Indian Express
, 11 September 2012,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mg-road-buildings-to-rise-from-the-debris/1001343