Ishita Chauhan, 25, wakes up at 7am. It is peak June summer, but the morning sun barely sneaks through the narrow lanes of Katwaria Sarai, where five and six-storey buildings rise cheek by jowl. Here, balconies are so close that they offer views only of the inside of other houses. The neighbourhood is already awake – shops on the ground floor are preparing for the day, rickshaws and two-wheelers scurry through the lane.
HT investigates planning failures, illegal constructions and weak enforcement in this 4-part series. (Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo)
An MBA student from Madhya Pradesh , Chauhan stays in bed for a few minutes, scrolling through her phone in a weak effort to push back the start of another hectic day. She shares her flat with two women. The thin, single-brick walls of her room – decorated with postcard images of trips with friends and family, woven together with fairy lights – barely muffle the sounds of the neighbourhood. The opposite wall carries a more serious tone – it holds her study deadlines, charts, and timetables. She doesn’t have time to waste.
The cook – hired for ₹ 5,000 jointly by the flat’s three inhabitants in an effort to maximise their study time – rings the doorbell at 7:30am. Groceries and vegetables are available downstairs in the market. Ten-minute delivery apps, still unavailable back home, also come in handy. The next two hours pass in a whirl. Her roommates wake up. The flat has a single washroom shared by three students who are generally on a tight schedule – so things get hectic.
By 8:30am, breakfast is ready, chores are finished, and she leaves for classes which start at 9am. She cuts through a park which has been turned into a parking lot for cars. She dashes past overflowing drains, under dripping AC units, and through lanes where a mesh of wires hangs above her. “We mostly walk to the institute. Even walks at night do not feel unsafe for women,” she says. For longer distances, there’s a bus stop nearby, and Hauz Khas metro station is also not too far away.
For millions of students, and those beginning their professional lives in Delhi , spaces like Katwaria Sarai, Hauz Rani , and Saidulajab offer a rare resource: affordable housing. Accommodation, shops, even basement reading rooms, the ecosystem caters to a rent-based economy.
These areas serve as way stations – people live here for a few years before moving to planned neighbourhoods. Government departments turn a blind eye to these unplanned enclaves and their sheer lack of public amenities and basic safety. Residents, pragmatic that they have no other options, tolerate them. Until something happens – like the building collapse in Saidulajab on May 30, and the fire in Hauz Rani on June 3 that together claimed a total of at least 29 lives.
It is an urban reality evident in a bird’s eye view of the city-state that is India’s Capital, or, more contemporaneously, a drone photo of it. More prosaically, it is also evident in numbers: according to Census 2011, the population density in New Delhi district, or Lutyens’ Delhi, the centre of the Capital, was a little over 4,000 people per sq km. In north east Delhi, it was 36,155. In east Delhi, 17,913. And even in south Delhi, where Hauz Rani is located, 11,060. The latest Census has just started, but it is very likely that the numbers for New Delhi haven’t changed much (there’s no housing for anyone not in government, mostly) – and just as likely that numbers for the other districts have grown by around a third.
The crisis has been in the making for decades, and dates back to the Partition of India, when Delhi saw a surge of people from across the newly demarcated border. It overwhelmed civic services, and led to unregulated, haphazard development. It was in this backdrop that the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was established in 1957 under the Delhi Development Act to manage rapid, urban expansion and severe housing shortages. Its charter says “To promote and secure the development of Delhi according to the plan and for that purpose the Authority shall have the power to acquire, hold, manage and dispose of land and other property....and generally to do anything necessary or expedient for purposes of such development and for purposes incidental thereto.
Working directly under the Delhi administrator or lieutenant governor, the all-powerful DDA was tasked with master planning, providing affordable housing, rehabilitating the slums and managing land. It has had a complete monopoly over land and its development, zoning laws, even commercialisation in Delhi since 1957. And such has been its impact that even the emergence of satellite cities Noida and Gurugram can be attributed to it – for if DDA had performed the role it was created for, neither may have existed.
In 1957, the population of Delhi was estimated to be 1.96 million. Now, Delhi, which covers an area of around 1,484 sq km, has an estimated population of 25 million, but a majority lives in unplanned enclaves, 675 sl…
Read the full article at Hindustan Times →
India