by Jesse Marks:
As he drove over an overpass in his private car, Anil Pandit of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) complained about the citizen protesters who had recently been getting in the way of his work. “Look at all this development—it’s all happened in the last few years,” he said, gesturing out the window at the brand-new buildings and construction sites marking the route. “There will always be people protesting it, but do you really want to stop this?” He paused, scanning the city’s changing skyline. “Do you really want to go back to the Middle Ages?”
Pandit works in the sports division of the DDA, the government organization responsible for planning and executing the 2010 Commonwealth Games, a high-profile athletic competition that will bring athletes from throughout the former British Commonwealth to Delhi for two weeks of sports events.
The frenzied and often controversial construction of athletic facilities for the Games exemplifies the growth that has overtaken Delhi in the past few decades. The city’s population is increasing by 500,000 people every year, a rate that is double the national average. Economic expansion, meanwhile, has kept pace with the rest of India, bringing hundreds of thousands of new jobs to the city and giving birth to a new middle class.
All this physical development and new wealth has brought great hopes for Delhi’s future, and the city government has set the bar high, vowing to make Delhi what its leaders have called a “world-class” or “model” city in time for the Commonwealth Games, when it will be showcased on the international stage.
The goals for the Games are not misplaced. Nor are they fantasies, at least not by the look of Delhi’s physical progress so far. The quickly expanding infrastructure offers physical evidence of the city’s changing nature and new direction. But problems behind the scenes—in the workings of government, business, and everyday citizens—obscure the vision for a better Delhi and stand in the way of achieving “world-class” status.
The Commonwealth Games offer a test, challenging Delhi to make the jump now. But the hurdles are high.
Playing Host
Every four years the Commonwealth Games bring together thousands of athletes for a competition rivaled only by the Olympics in talent and prestige. In the 78-year history of the Commonwealth Games, the 2010 event is expected to be the biggest yet.
Along with the competitors, of course, come tourists and the media. Hundreds of millions will watch from around the world. With all eyes upon Delhi, the Games will provide an opportunity to showcase the city as an exotic and attractive place to visit, invest in, or live— Delhi’s coming out party to the world, so to speak. And with billions of dollars of Games-related revenue expected, the Commonwealth Games can be very profitable for the host city.
Five years ago, Delhi beat Hamilton, Canada, in the final round of voting to host the 2010 Games. The event, which usually rotates between the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, has been to Asia only once, when Kuala Lumpur played host in 1998. Commonwealth Games Federation CEO Mike Hooper, a New Zealander now living in Delhi to oversee the preparations, admitted that geography played a role in Delhi’s bid for the Games. “Geopolitical matters do come into play, and one of these was perhaps the members’ desire to see the Games move around and be more representative of the Commonwealth,” Hooper told the Globalist.
But he stressed that Delhi’s proposal was impressive regardless of these considerations. The bid included promises to provide the athletes with quiet and high-end housing, to replace the city’s perpetual gridlock with world-class infrastructure, and to modernize its athletic facilities to 21st century standards.
In the five years since being awarded the Games, Delhi has worked to make good on these promises. While the city already has sufficient sports venues left over from hosting the 1982 Asiad Games, a multi- sport event for countries from all over Asia, most of these venues are being refurbished and modernized at great cost. Moreover, throughout the city, infrastructure is being built from scratch.
This work is about more than just throwing the best Games possible. The changes the Games bring to Delhi will affect the city long after the athletes and crowds leave, which means that as it prepares for 2010, the city has to cater to more than just their international guests.
The World-Class City
In the eyes of the city government and others planning for Delhi’s future, the Games are only a benchmark in the city’s progress. Their vision is built around the Games, but it does not stop with them.
Sheila Dikshit, Delhi’s chief minister, is one of the forces behind this vision. This 70-year-old woman is a powerful and established political figure. She has already served an unprecedented two five- year terms, and plans to run for a third term this November. From her office inside the Delhi Secretariat, Dikshit spoke excitedly about her city’s future. Delhi, she claimed, can become a “world-class city, a beautiful, vibrant, and organized place, which makes all of its citizens—poor and rich—happy and comfortable living here, and which caters to all their basic requirements of health, education, water, power, and good roads.” If her vision becomes reality, Delhi will combine the best aspects of all of the world’s most famous cities with its own unique culture and history.
The quest to realize that dream has already begun. Much of this development has centered on massive changes to Delhi’s transportation infrastructure. Work is underway to renovate Delhi’s notoriously chaotic Indira Gandhi International Airport, which will receive a new domestic terminal, an international terminal that will service 35 million passengers each year, and a new runway capable of handling the Airbus 380, the largest passenger plane in the world. Within the city, construction has begun on more than a hundred overpasses meant to ease congestion. For public transportation, Delhi has finally opened the Delhi Mass Rapid Transit system, commonly referred to as the Delhi Metro. Today the city has 40 miles of clean, efficient railways that ferry over 700,000 people every day, and the system’s length is scheduled to triple in time for the Commonwealth Games.
Alongside these physical improvements, the city’s government has begun a concerted effort to reach out to its citizens and improve daily life. Upon entering office in 1998, Dikshit’s government initiated the Bhagidari program, a project aimed at facilitating communication with Delhi’s residents through partnerships with various citizen groups and non-governmental organizations operating in the city. A new Neighborhood Watch program has helped to lower crime in many of Delhi’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and a large-scale effort is underway to clear Delhi’s streets of its 60,000 beggars.
These changes are not results of the Commonwealth Games, but their scale and schedule are being dictated by the looming deadline. “The Games will be a catalyst to move more quickly on these initiatives,” explained Dikshit. Hooper, too, used the word “catalyst” to describe the Games’ impact, speaking more profusely about the ways in which the Games are helping Delhi move forward. “Better power and water supply, improvements to the road network, the Metro and the airport etc, these will all benefit residents in the long term,” he said. The ultimate goal is not to model Delhi after another city but to make Delhi the best city it can possibly be. “I cannot say that Delhi should become like New York or like Bangkok or like Tokyo,” Dikshit told the Globalist. “Delhi has its own character, and Delhi has its own strengths and limitations.”
But not everyone, it seems, agrees on where Delhi’s limitations lie.
The Village and the River
As Dikshit and Hooper testify, the Commonwealth Games have provided the impetus for speedier development. Few have complained about the infrastructural improvements, even with their enormous price tag. But what could have been a barely noticed element of Games preparation has caused concern among scientists and journalists, frustration within the city government, and anger from average citizens.
To accommodate the thousands of competitors and officials who will come to the Games, the DDA has contracted construction giant Emaar MGF to construct the Athletes’ Village, which will contain both housing and training facilities. The complex will cost $40 million and will feature 1,168 luxury apartments in 34 towers. It will occupy 27 acres on the banks of the Yamuna River, which runs through the center of Delhi. For two weeks the village will house everyone competing and working at the Games. After the athletes leave, the apartments will be auctioned off as high-class residences in the geographic center of the city.
Located on a largely undeveloped swath of land with a beautiful view of the Yamuna, the Athletes’ Village will be removed from the noise and frenzy of Delhi’s streets. The site’s equidistance from most sporting venues makes it highly convenient for the athletes, and its neighbor, the Akshardham Temple, an architectural behemoth and popular tourist attraction, offers a taste of Delhi without the chaos of downtown.
The river the Athletes’ Village will overlook, meanwhile, is no typical river. Winding its way down from its origin in the Himalayas, the Yamuna travels 851 miles through the Haryana, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh provinces before merging with the Ganges. like the Ganges, many consider the Yamuna a sacred river. According to Hindu legend, anyone who bathes in it sheds all fear of death.
Now, however, industrial pollution, human sewage, and repeated damming have made the Yamuna one of the most polluted waterways in the world, though it remains a major source of water for the city and a lifeline for the farmers who live on its riverbanks. Its floodplains are as important to the city as the river itself, since they provide essential flood protection by absorbing overflow during the monsoon season.
The Globalist did not need to travel far from the construction site to meet the most impassioned critics of the Athletes’ Village project. One social action group, Youth for Justice (YFJ), has set up a camp adjacent to the construction. As the primary organization protesting this construction, the YFJ activists have spent every day for the past several months outside the site. The group, comprised of farmers, shopkeepers, professionals, and even some of the site’s former security guards, has become the voice for the myriad concerns behind this construction. Numerous scientists and journalists, speaking out through legal and political avenues, have offered equally disconcerting accounts. So far, their persistent cries have been unheeded.
Accusations of Abuse
In April, Vikash Kumar and Anil Pandey, journalists for a monthly magazine called The Sunday Indian, published an article detailing allegations of abuse and injustices leveled by construction workers and guards at the Athletes’ Village site. They claimed that workers were forced to live in crowded, disease-infested quarters, to work grueling shifts with few breaks, and to do even the most dangerous jobs without basic safety equipment. When questioned by the Globalist, several security guards who were on strike and protesting with YFJ repeated these claims. They alleged that between 35 and 40 laborers had died due to preventable accidents or disease since construction began, and that none of these laborers’ families had been compensated or had even received official notice of the death.
But Kapil Mishra, co-director of YFJ, says that the problems started even before construction began.
After years of overlooking the Yamuna floodplain in their development plans, the DDA granted a Hindu sect permission in 2002 to construct the massive Akshardham Temple on the riverbed. The DDA also constructed a massive levee it hoped would protect the structure from flooding. In 2003, the city built the Shastri Park Metro Station and the Yamuna Metro Depot on other sites along the riverbed. The next year, it gave the green light for the construction of the Shastri Information Technology Park.
According to YFJ, this construction has displaced families without providing alternative places for them to live or ways to support themselves. Mishra translated what one farming family told the Globalist. “We used to farm up there,” the father said, pointing to the construction site. “Then the police came and used rods to violently remove us.” He went on to say that his land had been cut in half because of the construction. YFJ supported his claim and added that this farmer and his family were not alone.
According to YFJ, in 1949 the Delhi government signed a 99-year agreement that guaranteed the farmers’ rights to land unless the city needed to undertake a project “for public interest.” YFJ said that the development of the floodplain, justified as a public project, has led to the destruction of hundreds of acres of farmland as well as the removal of 300,000 slum dwellers who had illegally occupied various other sites along the riverbed. Only a quarter of these squatters, YFJ claimed, have been relocated by the government. Manoj Misra, the director of an environmental group known as Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan (Yamuna Forever) and a close ally of YFJ, explained the irony behind the squatters’ presence at the site: “They did not own that land; they were not farmers…they were the leftover people from the Asiad construction work. A lot of them were workers who were brought to the city to build the stadiums for the Asiad games. They never went back, they moved into slums, and now they are being removed.”
On the process of construction and relocation, Kapil Mishra complained: “It’s not public. It’s not democratic.”
An Invitation to Disaster
Scientists and environmental activists have raised other serious concerns about the site’s construction. Citing the unique relationship between Delhi and the Yamuna River, they worry that the city is setting itself up for disaster the next time the river floods.
Aside from his work with Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan, Manoj Misra was a member of the Indian Forest Service for 22 years and headed the World Wildlife Federation’s Traffic-India division (part of an international network against illegal wildlife trade) for five more. Now, he has joined other scientists in arguing to anyone who will listen that significant construction on the riverbed could put the entire city in danger. Misra and his allies have even filed a public interest litigation against the Delhi government for their alleged destruction of the Yamuna, but as the court case enters its 10th month, construction continues. Still, Misra presses on.
“There is a misbelief among city planners that, if in other cities the riverbed can be developed, then why can’t the Yamuna be developed too?” he said. He explained that many fail to realize—or choose to ignore—that Indian rivers are different than rivers in other parts of the world. “They don’t realize that this is not a similar river. The rivers of India are monsoon-fed. They only get water every three months, during the monsoon—and they get lots of it then. In England, you get water every other day,” he said.
Scientists at the Center for Science and the Environment (CSE), one of India’s most respected environmental think tanks, make the same argument. Anumita Roychowdhury, associate director of CSE, told the Globalist: “There is a very significant difference between our rivers and European rivers. Our rivers require a space to flow. This construction is encroaching on the river’s space.” Pradip Saha, managing editor of the organization’s quarterly magazine, Down To Earth, added: “All those intervening in the riverbed are civil engineers who treat rivers like a canal. A river is not a canal.”
Misra cited recent floods in 1977, 1978, 1988, and 1995 to augment his point. “In the 1995 flood, there was so much water that there were boats on what is now planned to be developed as the Athletes’ Village,” he recalled. According to Misra, that disaster might soon be surpassed: “Now, with all this construction along the river, the floodplain has been cut in half. When the next floods come, where will the water go? It will either pop over the embankments or enter the city through reverse flow into the 22 drains that bring the city’s sewage into the river.” This is bad news for a city built around a 14-mile stretch of already flood-prone river.
“City planners should not do anything which further aggravates the problem,” Misra concluded. “High-rise, permanent construction along the riverbed is simply an invitation to disaster.”
The Official Response
The Delhi government and Emaar MGF, the construction company, have heard all of the criticism, from the allegations about worker mistreatment at the construction site to the flood risk associated with building on the riverbed. But so far, they have done little to change their policies or practices.
Dibakar Sarkar, the director of sports for the DDA, has been in charge of overseeing much of the construction for the Commonwealth Games. Arguing that displacement of people on the Yamuna riverbed has not been a major problem, he told the Globalist: “There was some encroachment, but not very much. Most of the land belonged to the DDA, and a portion belonged to the Uttar Pradesh government, and we paid them compensation.” He also claimed the people living on the land were not farmers and were not using the land productively.
In response to the accusations of abuse at the construction site, William Rattazzi, CEO of Emaar MGF, adamantly denied the accusations: “I’ll tell you this: The way we treat our labor is the best in India. Nobody has died on our site, from disease or accidents, nothing. That’s rare in India…I walk through the living areas at least once a day myself. I’m the CEO—not the project manager—but that’s how important this project is to us. We take care of our laborers.”
Chief Minister Dikshit seemed unfazed by the protests and strikes at the Athletes’ Village. “These things keep happening. They must have gone on strike because they wanted something,” she told the Globalist. “If something comes to our attention—you know, seriously—of course we will investigate.” When asked if the accusations of worker mistreatment qualified as a “serious” concern, she replied: “Yes, certainly it is. We would like labor conditions to be much better than they actually are. But how can you act if you don’t know what is wrong?”
Sarkar and Dikshit both refuted claims that construction on the riverbed may lead to catastrophic flooding in Delhi. Sarkar claimed that since new embankments now protect the Athletes’ Village site, the land should no longer be considered part of the floodplain. Furthermore, he said that since the river is dammed in various places, including just a few miles upstream from Delhi, it lacks the natural flow necessary to flood in a monsoon. He pointed out that his organization has received all environmental clearances necessary to begin construction. Dikshit was more firm in her dismissal of the complaints. “The Yamuna does not flood anymore,” she said. “In any case, we have a system. The moment the river rises above a danger point, we evacuate people immediately.”
With so many high-ranking government officials behind this construction, Hooper left no doubt about the status of this Athletes’ Village site: it will not change. “We were told by the DDA that there were approximately 67 [environmental] conditions for work on the site, which they advised would be met. We’re relying on assurances given by the DDA and others, and we trust those assurances.” As for the objections to the plans, he said: “We are aware of these, and hopefully they have been addressed through the conditions imposed. The decision made in 2003 was not hasty.”
Unique Limitations
Even with all these controversies, the Commonwealth Games remain part of the Delhi government’s plan to develop the city, a plan that starts on the Yamuna floodplain itself. To city planners, the riverbanks represent undeveloped land in a city where space is at a premium. As the development of Paris, London, Moscow, and virtually every other Western city has proven, riverfront locations make for prime tourist attractions and luxury residencies. Delhi’s leaders clearly hope to do the same with the Yamuna.
But the Yamuna is not the Seine, and Delhi is not Paris. Delhi’s needs today are more complex, its limitations greater. And with the Commonwealth Games only two years away, the stakes on this one project are particularly high.
The city has only one shot—one Commonwealth Games—to achieve its “world-class” vision. If the dozens of scientists who have spoken out against the Athletes’ Village construction are right, Delhi may be about to squander that chance. A catastrophic flood during the spring monsoon could leave Delhi reeling from a costly disaster and desperately searching for new accommodations for the incoming athletes. Looking beyond the Games, one bad monsoon could wash away years’ worth of costly planning and development—not to mention thousands of lives.
Disillusioned by his futile efforts move the Athletes’ Village site, Mishra lamented: “In the last five years, things have gone bad. The connection between the government and the people is no longer there.”
Dikshit’s first nine years in office were marked by a grassroots- based approach toward addressing the concerns of everyday citizens. In her dismissal of issues surrounding the Athletes’ Village site, Dikshit has strayed dangerously far from her own successful model.
If the rushed schedules and lofty international goals brought about by the Commonwealth Games have turned Dikshit’s government away from this democratic approach, the real and lasting consequence of the Games may be a widening gap between the government and its people. The true measure of Delhi’s development will come not in the number of construction projects completed by 2010, but in what remains after the tourists go home: whether this current rift between the Delhi’s citizens and leaders proves a temporary slip in the heat of the moment, or whether it widens further with every new project undertaken.
Delhi’s leaders must recognize the long-term consequences of this disconnect and address it now, before it becomes the model for all future development. Without listening to—and acting on—the concerns of the people, Delhi’s leaders will never understand what Dikshit herself called the city’s “unique limitations.” Without this domestic reality check, Delhi may soon stumble in its race to become a “world-class” city.
Jesse Marks is a sophomore Economics and International Studies double major in Berkeley College and a managing editor for the Globalist.