Yes, you really cannot Place it!

In what lies before your eyes, you really Cannot Place the Capital’s erstwhile beauty spot. To say this is worrying would be an understatement of suspect intent. It is shocking to see what the authorities have done to it and how, the best they may be able to manage prior to the Big Games is cordon it off, perhaps with some huge postered barricades though one is not sure how that can be done to an entire area which lies in abject ruin.

It is a nightmare to be caught at this arterial centre where most of the traffic for ages has circled in and out on a daily basis. The roads are non-existent to such an extent that it would take only a maniacal optimist to say with conviction that they will be Games ready within 40 days. The sewers lie open and the pits would give a huge complex to depths. Add to that the complete traffic blockage 24x7 and you sadly give up on Delhi'ites’ favourite haunt for the past more than 100 years.

Not that CP has not seen construction activity ever before but never before has the mess turned so alarming and severe that you wish the administration had not been given the mandate to go rough shod over Delhi’s centerpiece without time bound planning. An underground Palika Bazaar was built here without even a fraction of the mess that the place is today. So was the Metro’s central feeder line, with the DMRC going on about its work with minimal intrusion even though the metro construction meant the insides of CP were being emptied out and remodelled.

Why the NDMC could not start and finish the job of renovation (this is not renovation, it is more like a bombed site) since 2009 when it started off on the area is a question none answers. After the renovation of one insignificant block last year as a model to show the citizenry how nice it will look once it is done up, the municipal body disappeared from the scene, only to return like a monster on the roll at the mouth of the Games.

Apparently such has been the slothfulness of the administration that it has, till now, been able to use up only Rs 150 crore of the Rs 450 crore sanctioned for the renovation of CP. But that’s the least of the crimes committed on the gentry of Delhi, not to mention the shopkeepers of this British era shopping colonnade some of whom have all but gone bankrupt due to the longtime disrepair of their showrooms.

Consider this: Even if you were doughty enough to reach your favourite shop in CP for some purchases, first, you will go round and round trying but failing to park your vehicle; second, even if you were able to do that, you would not know how to reach your shop with mounds of debris, heaps of mud slush and life-threatening pits lying open all around the marketplace, not to mention the undone pillars that would convince you that the building may come down any moment; third, if and when you reach the shop, there will be no A/C working and a harassed shop-owner will tell you how the power cables have been snapped and they have been living in the stifling environment through the summer; and of course, if you are a plastic person, which many of us are, you will be shocked to know that for the past more than a month, the credit card machines cannot be operated due to the construction activity all around!

Totally frustrated and wondering why you decided to do this to yourself, you will try to wade out of the mess but will get stuck in the traffic jam, only to take over an hour to extricate yourself from the Connaught Place circle.

If you talk to the officers incharge of doing up CP, they tell you with élan how all citizens have to bear with development activity and CP is just one hub of that. True, and that’s what puts you down. No one would have hated the Commonwealth Games or questioned their holding had the work around the big event been done in an orderly manner.

The quality of life that an average Delhi'ite was ripped off in the process — and for more than two years now — is liable to attract serious charges of heinous crime against humanity elsewhere in the world.

But in India, chalta hai and aise hi chalta rahega. Really, our citizenry should get some global award for having a celestial elasticity limit when it comes to testing of powers to tolerate atrocities. Really, who is to blame if a Government which has done everything in its power to take away even a single peaceful moment from its voters continues to return to power for third term running?

With due respect to our Chief Minister, the gentle-spoken and apparently well-meaning Sheila Dikshit, how can one not question her governance and her now her very apparent inability to plug the mess that is raining on the Capital like never before?

Surely, someone needs to be nailed for this undoing of Delhi! Not a mere fall guy, like it has happened with the scam-struck Games, but a person or a body or a Government that has really been responsible for Delhi’ites praying that they were not put through these totally unlivable conditions heaped on them in the name of building infrastructure.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, August 29, 2010