For all its unplanned chaos, Gurgaon is better than sterile Chandigarh

 

Fascists and socialists have one thing in common — the urge to impose rigid masterplans on cities. In 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Le Corbusier to design the new city of Chandigarh. Corbusier was specifically asked by Nehru to create a city that was “unfettered” by India’s ancient civilisation. Enormous resources in land, material and money were poured into building the new city. At the same, rigid masterplans were imposed on existing cities. Delhi was masterplanned in 1962 into strict zones according to use. However, the static masterplan is to the city what socialist planning is to the economy. Both cities and economies are organic and rapidly evolving eco-systems. Just like the Mahalonobis model of central planning damaged the Indian economy, the country’s urban thinking was severely damaged by Le Corbusier’s philosophy that buildings were machines for living.

This mechanical world-view is echoed in the Delhi masterplan of 1962, which proclaimed that “there is undesirable mixing of land-uses almost everywhere in the city”. Just as the government had the right to control the economy through licenses, it also had the right to tell people where to live and where to work. The problem is that such an approach cannot create a living eco-system. New industrial cities such as Durgapur never took off and today’s successful cities are still those with British-era roots.

Even Chandigarh, the expensive poster-child of masterplanning, has generated little of economic or cultural value after more than half a century of existence. Much of its apparent “cleanliness” comes from simply having left no space for the poor. Its apparent “greenery” creates a false sense of being environment-friendly but is mostly a result of gobbling a lot of land per capita. It remains a sterile and heavily subsidised city of tax-consuming bureaucrats that encourages neither entrepreneurship nor tax-generating jobs. This is particularly glaring given that it is the pampered capital of two prosperous states. Nehru had wanted Chandigarh to be the symbol of India’s future. Instead, the face of 21st century India is a city that is chaotic, unplanned, infuriating but undeniably dynamic: Gurgaon.

A History of Gurgaon
Gurgaon lies to the south of Delhi and, according to legend, is said to have belonged to Dronacharya who taught martial arts to the Pandavas and Kauravas, cousins in the Mahabharat. Indeed, the name Gurgaon literally means the “village of the teacher”. Despite its proximity to Delhi, however, the settlement of Gurgaon was never particularly large. Its population was estimated at a mere 3,990 in 1881 and nearby towns like Rewari and Farrukhnagar had much larger populations. The Gazetteer of 1883-84 tells that the British used Gurgaon as a district headquarters and that the town consisted of a small market (Sadar Bazaar), public offices , dwellings of European residents and a settlement called Jacombpura named after a former Deputy Commissioner. An old road connected Gurgaon to Delhi via Mehrauli. The road roughly survives as the arterial MG Road but the contours of British-era settlement can just about be discerned if one goes to busy marketplace in Old Gurgaon called Mahavir Chowk. One will also see the remains of an old serai used by caravans heading to/from Delhi. A few colonial era bungalows too survive.

For the first few decades after independence, Gurgaon remained a relatively small town in a largely rural district. The first major change came when Sanjay Gandhi, son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, acquired a large plot of land to start an automobile company in the early 1970s. This is now the Maruti-Suzuki factory, but the project was not initially successful. From the early 1980s, however, a number of real estate developers, particularly DLF, began to acquire farmland along the Delhi border. The idea at this stage was to build a mostly low-rise suburbia for Delhi’s retiring civil servants. Although the Maruti car factory did get going by 1983, no one really envisaged Gurgaon as an independent growth engine.

Laissez-faire City 
The whole dynamics changed after India liberalised its economy in 1991. This coincided with the communications and information technology revolutions. As India globalised, a number of multinational companies discovered that call centres and back-office operations could be outsourced to India. Delhi was a good location for this because of available human capital and a well-connected international airport. However, the necessary real estate could not be created because of Delhi’s rigid masterplan. The old planners had never envisioned white-collar factories. The outsourcing companies, therefore, jumped across the border to Gurgaon and began to build huge facilities for this new industry. This attracted young workers to Gurgaon and, in turn, encouraged the construction of malls and restaurants. As more corporate executives moved in, the retirement home format was abandoned in favour of condominiums. Schools and other educational institutions began to multiply. The pace of expansion can be gauged from a lone milestone that survives on MG Road under the elevated metro line (in front of Bristol Hotel). This is now the effective city-centre but the milestone still proclaims that Gurgaon is 6 km away.

The construction of Gurgaon was not planned although a “plan” did exist in theory. It was made possible by a combination of a lack of rules and the blatant disregard of rules. There was always a whiff of the robber baron. Yet, what was a sleepy small town till the mid-1990s has become a throbbing city of gleaming office towers, metro stations, malls, luxury hotels and millions of jobs. With a population of over 3.5 million, it is no longer a mere suburb of Delhi but a city in its own right.

I am not suggesting that Gurgaon does not have serious civic problems ranging from clogged roads and erratic power supply to the doings of unscrupulous property developers. I have more than enough personal experience of all these issues. It is true that, with a little imagination and foresight, Gurgaon could have been done a lot better. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny the bursting energy of the city. It is a good metaphor for modern India with its private sector dynamism, the robber baron element and a government that is struggling to keep up. Note that Gurgaon single-handedly generates almost half of the revenues of the state of Haryana and it is this money that partly pays for Chandigarh. Meanwhile, if Chandigarh ever makes it as a successful city, it will be due to the dynamism of Mohali and not the fascism of Corbusier.