Delhi needs strategic interventions, not master plans, says Sanjeev Sanyal

 

Few cities in the world have been as dramatically transformed as Delhi in the last hundred years. From a decayed Mughal city at the end of the 19th century to the grand imperial capital and then to the capital of independent India. It is now one of the largest and fastest-growing mega-cities in the world. Spread across three states, the metropolitan region has a population of 16mn. However, this apparent success hides virtual civic collapse. Despite ambitious master plans and large sums of money, Delhi has proved unmanageable. Is there another way?

Master plans’ dismal history
According to the Delhi District Gazetteer 1883-84, Delhi had a population of 173,303 in the late 19th century. The grandeur of the Mughal court was long forgotten and, after 1858, it was no more than a large provincial town. That changed when the British colonial government decided to shift the capital to Delhi in 1911 and hired Edwin Lutyens to design a city to reflect imperial grandeur. Lutyens created what was effectively the first “master plan” for New Delhi. It was meant for a population of 60,000 — mostly government officials and their retainers. The old city was still expected to remain the commercial hub.

Lutyens’ Delhi was completed in the mid-thirties but the urban plan collapsed barely a decade later as the city found itself with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing West Pakistan. The authorities dealt with the crisis with ad-hoc arrangements but in 1962, a new master plan was devised. Given the thinking of the times, it was a framework for low-rise suburbia where the government would decree land-use and zoning. From their “commanding heights” the planners declared that “there is undesirable mixing of land-uses almost everywhere in the city.” Just as the government has the right to control economic activity through licences, it also has the right to tell people where to live and where to work.

The 1962 master plan was a dismal failure. The city developed in unpredictable ways while the government failed to deliver on many promises. Even by 1981, only three of the fifteen district centres proposed in the master plan had been developed. Offices, clinics and shops moved into residential areas as the designated commercial areas were grossly insufficient. Even by 1992, with the population now nine million, only six of the fifteen district centres were developed.

Liberalisation created economic opportunities that pushed the gap between plan and reality to breaking point. Eventually the pressure exploded out into brand new areas like Gurgaon and Noida. The official response was yet another master plan announced in 2007 called Delhi 2021. Two years later it already looks outdated.

Why master plans do not work
The most obvious problem with master planning in Indian cities is the lack of governance. The civic authorities simply do not have the ability to enforce the master plan even in the national capital. Secondly, all master plans require proper implementation and sequencing of public investment. As discussed earlier, a combination of corruption and incompetence meant that important aspects of the 1962 master plan remain unimplemented even today.

There is, however, a more fundamental flaw with the whole master planning approach. It is a vestige of socialist-era thinking that presumes a predetermined trajectory of urban development. Therefore, it cannot deal with the organic evolution of a living and vibrant city. It is the same reason that the Mahalanobis model of economic planning was doomed to fail. There was no way in which Lutyens could have predicted Independence and Partition in 1913 and the 1962 master plan could have anticipated Gurgaon’s BPO boom.

Indeed, master planning has failed in most cities in the world. Singapore is one of the few exceptions but, even in this case, success has been mostly due to the Singaporean government’s unique ability to think strategically and to adjust the model constantly. India lacks the technical, administrative and political capability needed for continuous policy risk-taking. So what is the alternative? In my view, the governments that run the National Capital Region should concentrate on two things — basic governance and a few strategic interventions.

Back to basics
My criticism of master planning does not mean that I am advocating a free-for-all. Even in a market economy, the state is needed to provide basic governance and public goods. Thus, the NCR needs a simple set of municipal rules regarding property rights, traffic, street-hawking, advertising signage and so on. The government should concentrate on enforcing these rules. Similarly, the authorities should worry about parks, public health, sewage disposal and other public amenities. The government should not be concerned about whether or not an up-market restaurant should be allowed in an abandoned mental asylum in Mehrauli.

Strategic interventions
Of course, the government will, from time to time, need to make large strategic interventions in order to cut through intractable gridlocks in the urban eco-system. However, these should strictly be interventions that will open out new urban vistas and have large multiplier effects. The Delhi Metro is an example of such a strategic investment that was necessary to get away from Delhi’s reliance on roads. The Metro is changing the urban eco-system of Delhi in unpredictable ways, but that is the idea.

Another intervention in the same vein is the proposal to clean Delhi’s 300km network of nullahs and turn them into a network of walking paths criss-crossing the city. This would dramatically improve the last-mile connectivity of public transport, encourage walking for short trips and encourage social interaction; not to mention improve drainage and sewage disposal. This is a cheap and simple intervention but has the potential to fundamentally change Delhi’s DNA. Again, the exact outcome is not pre-determined but it opens up a whole new way for Delhi to evolve (interested readers can visit www.delhinullahs.org).

To conclude, it’s time we cut through the Gordian Knot created by the traditional approach of formulaic command-and-control master plans. Instead, the Delhi administration should go back to basic municipal management. At the same time, long-term issues should be dealt with strategic interventions that have systemic multiplier effects rather than by micro-managing a pre-ordained master plan.