Planning the Unplanned - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 37

group and the National Thermal Power Corporation. Today it is best known as the com-
puter hardware equivalent of a flea market.
'Such physical rot is an outward indication of the enormous corruption that gripped the
DDA in its heyday of the 1970s and 1980s,' Rana Dasgupta, a writer, reported in Granta ,
the UK-based quarterly magazine in 2009. 14 The DDA would keep the supply of land low
and developers would claw back the cost of their bribes with poor-quality construction.
'This racket was big business, and some of the largest fortunes in the city were made by
mid-level DDA engineers whose job it was to rubber-stamp new projects - and many of
them resisted promotion out of these lucrative positions for years.'
Delhi's municipal authorities' tight grip, which is supported by the Ministry of Urban
Development, has continued across the city. This creates even greater rewards for corrupt
bureaucrats who sanction unauthorized developments that include conversion of houses
and flats to shops and offices, addition of extra floors and other extensions to existing build-
ings, increased building densities, commercial redevelopment of old traditional villages as
the city envelops them, and construction of palatial 'farm' residences and weekend retreats
on large plots of land around the city's perimeter. As with virtually every Indian city, there
is little or no control of building standards, nor any effective safety measures such as fire
precautions. Many bazaars and other crowded areas are unsafe. 15 Colonies (as residential
districts are called in India) have sprung up all over the city, teeming with as many as
250,000 residents in broken narrow lanes, crudely erected concrete and brick buildings, and
a jumble of low-hanging electricity cables that typify India's poorer urban areas.
Such haphazard development, often without public services, has of course fuelled the
economic expansion of the capital, without which India's growth in the 2000s could not
have happened. From time to time, various areas are regularized 16 - sometimes as a politic-
al gesture before elections - but only enough to bring a glimmer of order and not so much,
or so precisely, as to reduce the power of extortion and inflow of bribes. That was evident
in 2012-2013 during the preparation of a new Delhi master plan. The same is true of towns
and cities across the country.
Purges of unlawful construction often have ulterior motives. In 2005 and 2006, the Mu-
nicipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) blitzed and sealed the fronts of shops, homes and other
buildings across the city with mechanical diggers and bulldozers, provoking violent scenes
and near riots that had to be controlled by security forces. officially, this was a drive to clear
illegal extensions that had been allowed, in most cases, because MCD officials had been
bribed. Four small shopping malls on the Mahatma Gandhi (M.G.) Road, a major highway
from Delhi to Gurgaon, were included in the partial demolitions in a move that illustrated
cruel authoritarianism and a lack of care for the environment. The buildings housed up-
market designer fashion shops and restaurants, which were well-built and were less at fault
than thousands of other illicit structures across the city.