|
|
| |
|
     
|
Delhi: The Rot Continues... It's the original paradox. There's no shortage of businesses in the city, and thanks to Gurgaon, more are pouring in; the Supreme Court's Green bench has made things a lot better in what was once India's smog capital. Still, everyone who is anyone loves to hate Delhi. By Seetha
Aditya Tawakley woke up reluctantly. Monday mornings were bad enough. They were infinitely worse when one happened to be living in Delhi. He had come back to his hometown after 15 years of living abroad and in Mumbai. He had noticed definite signs of decline (amid a lot of improvement, he had to admit) when he returned five years back. And life was only becoming more difficult with each passing day. Water shortage, power cuts, traffic jams, and parking problems. As his friend Sanjay Verma, Director of real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, often said: ''Delhi presents a picture of a city that has found it difficult to cope with growth.'' He wondered what the day had in store for him. He didn't have to wait too long to find out. There was no electricity (only in Delhi would you have power cuts in November). That meant the booster pump wouldn't work, so he'd have to bathe before the water supply stopped in another hour. With water heated on the gas! Forget that long shower. He gnashed his teeth in rage when he thought of the Rs 3,000 he had spent on the booster to draw water from the main water pipe and those ugly, black Sintex tanks to store the water in. He knew it was illegal to do so, but heck, what is one supposed to do when one gets only four hours of piped water supply each day? At least he hadn't installed a bore well to draw water directly from the ground, depleting already scarce groundwater resources.
Delhi may be on the banks of the Yamuna, but it didn't have its own source of water, relying instead on the water the neighbouring state of Haryana released into the river and on groundwater. The demand-supply gap of 20 MGD (million gallons a day) was worsened by a 35-40 per cent leakage through the system (against the worldwide average of 10-20 per cent). Worse, uneven distribution ensured that taps flowed 24 hours in the houses of a privileged few living in the Lutyen's Zone (the area built by the British)-the ministers, senior bureaucrats, and members of Parliament. Tawakley had heard Delhi's lieutenant-governor V.K. Kapoor assuring that water supply would go up 20 per cent once the 140-mgd capacity plant to treat water brought 300-odd km away from Tehri in Uttar Pradesh was completed. Well, till then he'll have to rely on his booster. If the electricity supply didn't let him down, that is. With a 1,091 mw peak power deficit, power shortage was endemic to Delhi. The Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) claimed power supply had been better this year, but that hadn't stopped the load-shedding entirely. Apparently, it wasn't because of power shortage but 'system constraints'. As far as he was concerned, it was still a power cut. It meant he had to invest Rs 10,000 on an inverter. The voltage fluctuations at other times also meant he had to shell out Rs 7,000 on fixing a voltage stabiliser to the mains. That was Delhi for you. If the system failed to deliver, people just went out and made their own arrangements, civic discipline be damned. In fact, Chandiwala Estate in Okhla, if he were to believe what one of his friends told him, an office complex which housed the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, ABB Alsthom, and h-p subsidiary Agilent, didn't rely on DVB power at all. The building management had provided for diesel gensets, which met the entire needs of their tenants.
Aditya left his duplex flat in the suburb of Vasant Kunj and braced himself for the 20-km hour-long commute to his Connaught Place office. Driving in Delhi had become a nightmare. The number of vehicles zipping around on the streets had increased six-fold in 20 years-from 5.4 lakh in 1981, to around 35 lakh now. Make Your Own Way With no public transport worth its name, barring 17,000-odd buses (3,700 of which were to be pulled out, according to a Hindustan Times report Tawakley had read) it was no wonder that Delhi had more personal vehicles than Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai put together. Congestion, fuel wastage, and pollution were inevitable. Thanks to the Supreme Court coming down heavily on pollution, the air over Delhi was a mite cleaner than two years before, but smog still tended to cloud the skyline on winter evenings. Aditya hoped the ambitious 52-km long metro project with a capacity of carrying 60,000 persons per hour in one direction (ready by 2005) would further ease the pressure. Half an hour to go and he had hit his third traffic snarl near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. All thanks to an ambitious flyover that was being constructed, one of the 25 that had been commissioned over the last couple of years. The traffic jams, Kapoor had said, were a result of this. Once they were all ready, driving in Delhi would be a pleasure. Aditya doubted that. Some of the flyovers had certainly made a difference, but a pleasure? Given the level of traffic discipline among Delhi drivers? His thoughts were rudely interrupted as his driver slammed on the brakes. A car had just jumped lanes, scraping his car. His driver was all set for a fight but the lights had turned green and Aditya had to get to office by 10 am. Aditya was still fuming as he entered the plush glass-fronted DLF Centre on Parliament Street where his office was located. In the foyer, he ran into Stuart Purdy, the chief executive office of Dabur-CGU Life Insurance. Purdy had driven all the way from Gurgaon, the satellite city in Haryana, where he lived. He claimed he could now drive like a Delhi-ITE. ''It's great fun,'' the burly Irishman grinned. Purdy had almost caused several accidents when he first came to Delhi and often stopped to give way to traffic. Aditya wished Kapoor could hear Purdy. Kapoor had recently said in an interview: ''The Delhi citizen is more disciplined today than five years ago. Delhi has grown out of several villages and the cultural change is still taking place.'' Aditya's day wasn't proceeding too well. His first appointment started 15 minutes late. The person he had to meet couldn't get parking space in front of the building and had to circle the entire block before finding one. His company was one of the few firms that had chosen to stay on in the central business district (CBD) instead of shifting to spacious, well laid out Gurgaon as several multinational companies had done. Nestlé, British Airways, American Express, Lucent Technologies were just four of the more than 15 multinationals that had moved on. Aditya recalled a conversation with Hardeep Singh, President (Indian sub-continent), of foodgrain major Cargill Seeds, which had shifted to Gurgaon from a south Delhi office complex two years back. ''A lot of the negatives of Delhi are taken care of in Gurgaon,'' Singh had said. There was less pollution, the quality of office accommodation was far better (unlike the eyesores that office complexes in Delhi invariably degenerated into), the prices were 30-40 per cent cheaper, and there was a range of housing facilities available for the staff not to mention the above-average recreational facilities. 1 2 |
|
Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication INDIA TODAY |
INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY | |
 |
 |
FOUNDED