Capital city is let down by its leadership

The Capital is a black hole. You put anything — money, machines or men — into it and it all goes down in a swirl. As it sexes up for the Commonwealth Games, the city is at its unlivable best. It has high-rise buildings but no water and electricity; it has swanky malls but parking is an unending nightmare, and despite an army of 5,000- odd civic engineers, it is an example of how urban planning can go horribly wrong. It has a woman chief minister, but the women on its streets are unsafe.

Worse, there are no immediate solutions to the city’s woes, and they will continue well after the Games. Delhi’s failed political leadership equates construction with development, and remains blind to the fact that Delhi is hardly fit to be inhabited by its own residents, let alone by the foreign tourists it desperately hopes to attract during the Games.

Admits a senior bureaucrat in the Delhi government: “If the Commonwealth Games were a window of opportunity to build Delhi, then we have wasted it. All we have ended up doing is a ‘window dressing’.” The lack of coordination between civic agencies and the bureaucratic wrangling is reflected in the sloppy execution of the city’s makeover plans. The painfully slow, and disruptive, Connaught Place facelift is just a case in point.

Even though the city gets just 20 per cent of Mumbai’s rainfall, it unfailingly finds itself unprepared to meet the challenges that the monsoon showers pose to its infrastructure. Says K.T. Ravindran, Delhi Urban Art Commission (DUAC) chairman, “Most Delhi roads have design blunders.” The topped-up concrete layers stall groundwater recharge and the design flaws increase the water run-off on the road surface. And even as the commuters get stuck for hours on water-logged roads, our babus and engineers — all amply supported by the contractor mafia — refuse to go for inexpensive solutions to the problem.

The solutions can be drawn from expertise available in India, stresses Sunil Bose, senior scientist at the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI). As a starting point, we could look at how Mumbai extricated itself from the floods of 2005. “After the floods, the business capital got a high-level Standing Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) without any political leaders,” points out Bose.

The city shows no signs of recovery from its terminal decline despite its Games-driven bridal makeover.