 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. The floods in Delhi have receded, but the problems of Delhi are most likely to return unless there are some systemic changes made. Today, we're going to talk to architect, heritage conservationist, town planner, AGK Menon about how Delhi's problems arose, what's wrong with the way we look at our master plan, and what is the way out, if any. Mr. Menon, thanks very much for joining NewsClick for this discussion. The Delhi floods are they going to be a moment of awakening for our city planners, for people who actually make the decisions for us, because this was a very terrible experience for a very large part of the city. Well, I think it's not the first time we've been flooded. Maybe we've been flooded excessively this time, but we've experienced floods before and you heard about the 1978 flood, that was also a major flood. Did we learn anything from 1978? Will we learn anything from 2023? So all I can answer is yes, we've had a terrible experience, but have we learned anything enough to make us change the way we're doing things? I don't know, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm at the end of my profession, professional life, and all I can say is that I don't know whether our profession will learn the lessons to do something in a positive way, which will require something like a revolution in planning, a revolution in the way we imagine cities. Because without that kind of revolution, the problem will just go on and on and on. We'll do a bit of patchwork here, a bit of patchwork there, clean the drains, and we'll say, oh yes, we solved the problem, same old drains, it'll again silt up, again it flood, and maybe in 2030 again we'll be talking about the same things. Is it possible to reimagine a city which already exists, especially a city like Delhi? It is possible to reimagine it, but it requires a lot of, again if I might reuse the word, revolutionary solutions. If a problem of flood exists, it's not merely a fact that what has accumulated. You've got to think of the fact that why did what accumulate? One possibility is that we planned wrong. So the question comes, why did we plan wrong? Then if you go step by step by step, we come up with many, many other questions, including are people listening to planners? If people are not listening to planners, we'll come down the line and say, well, we'll have floods. Now, to listen to planners, what do we need? Maybe require a revolution. In other words, the administrator will have to listen to planners, the politician will have to listen to planners. Now, will the politician listen to planners? Will the administrator listen to planners? Is our culture, our culture of governance capable of making that revolutionary change in the way we govern? In other words, let the expert say something, let's listen to it and let's do something about it. Not tell the expert what to do. For example, today in Delhi, the politician is telling us what they want Delhi to be. The administrator is telling us, telling Delhi what is to be and if tomorrow the problems, who will you blame? The planner, the administrator, the politician, who will you blame? Well, I don't know. Sometimes we hear the politicians say, we see the plans that they talk about being executed, but we don't really know whether there has been some planning behind it. When you see as an expert, do you see any planning in the work? Let me give you some simple facts about the present situation. We have a master plan of Delhi, 62 and this keeps on getting updated. The master plan of Delhi very clearly said that, look, Delhi is a capital, it will attract people. Don't make it more attractive by having more jobs, more government jobs especially. 1962 they said that. Today, what are we doing? This government is building more government jobs here. Centralizing it even more. You mean the Central Vista and the ministries around it? Central Vista is one example, but there are many others. Whether it is development, why is there not more development elsewhere? Why is there so much money being spent in Delhi? Now, not that Delhi doesn't require that, of course it requires, but a politician and administrator will have to take a balanced view and say that maybe, again you talk about Central Vista, but talk about Central Vista. Why are we destroying to build? Take the Ministry of External Affairs. It's five years old. We spent 300 crores building a purpose-made building for the Ministry of External Affairs. Could we destroy it? Or the IGNCA? New development. Why is it being destroyed? Or many other buildings? Could they have been refurbished? In other words, if you are a poor country, if you don't have resources, if Mirat requires money, if Nagpur requires money, if Chennai requires money, maybe a politician, administrator, someone should say, okay, now look, there are too many demands in our country. They're too populated. We've got to dispute the publisher a bit more. The resource is a bit more. In so saying, no, no, no, we've got to make Delhi the capital of the world. Spend more money, more money, more money, make it much more attractive and to make it more attractive, get rid of the old. So I'm saying with that kind of mindset, why would you not have floods? I'm not saying that Central Vista is a cause of floods, but I'm saying the mindset is a cause of floods. We knew in 1978 that these are the problems. We could have changed the solution, have solutions, have engineers come and say, look, there's a way to do it, and they build drains, they build drains, the build drains don't work. So maybe we should be spending more money making sure that the drains work, etc, etc. So again, I'm trying to say that, look, it has to do with our governance, our agency, you give to experts. You don't tell the expert what you want. You ask the expert what we need. But the dream which is shown through the media by the people who govern, by the politicians, is that you're going to become like one of those beautiful cities in the world, according to them, to London. I have no problem with that. Of course, I'd like my city to be that. But I'm also realistic. I'm saying that I look around. I see the rest of my world, rest of the country, rest of the people, and say, well, what am I doing about them? I don't mind that each person should have a palace. Who am I to say each person should not have a palace? Similarly, why should Delhi be the capital of the world? Why can't I have more cities that are more equitably developed? So when the vision is presented that we want to make Delhi to be the most beautiful city in the world, why can't we see the similar thing about some other place in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu or Kerala, etc. Would decentralizing, as they love to say, would it solve the problem of, say, flooding? This is the immediate flooding we had. Again, I'm saying that, yes, I told you, it's a mindset problem. Decentralizing, federalism. Again, politics comes into it. We are going anti-federal. We are becoming more central. So decisions are being made more centrally. Right. And so it follows. It follows, one after the other, the other. So again, I'm not making a simplistic one-to-one correlation. But when I told you that we need a revolution or thinking, we need a revolution or thinking because at several levels we need to change. You can't change the drainage problem because you have a revolution in drainage solutions, but it has to flow through to the highest level. And the most important reason why your city needs to work efficiently, even when there's a crisis like excess water, is because people depend on it. Just a few minutes earlier, you were telling me about what happened during the COVID-19 lockdown. In many of our cities, not just Delhi, that people left. Why did that strike you as odd? Everyone else thought, well, they're going home. It's fine. See, you get to the core of planning, urban planning, core of it. What's the purpose of urban planning? To make a beautiful city or to make a satisfying city? What would you prefer? Now, you and I were well, we have got jobs, we have got good resources. We want a beautiful city. A poor person, what would they want? They can walk close to where they live. And a good home, good place, etc. Now, look at the master plan. Look at what we're doing here. Obviously, we're building palaces for ourselves. Look around. So the COVID was a good example because if I said what's the purpose of planning, the purpose of planning is to make a city feel like home. And at the moment of crisis, people fled the city. Would that correlation not be the planning failed? If the purpose of planning was to make people feel at home, and when a crisis strikes and you leave home, obviously, it's a problem. So I'm just saying, I'm making a simple analysis that town planning has failed. Architecture has failed. Governance has failed. Generally, shall we say, post-independence India, our purpose of planning, everything has been to be questioned once again. Take a simple thing about post-independence India. What do we want to be like? We want to be like another Western developed city, Western developed nation. Whereas our resources, our problems are quite different. Most of our town planning ideas come from town planners and thinkers who thought about problems in the West and came up with urbanization solutions there. But we say, well, that's universal. It has to be said. So it is not universal. Can you give me an example of how that is actually playing out today? Take a simple thing like our population problem. We've got humongous urbanization taking place. Today, if you're saying our cities are crowded, if I told you that tomorrow is going to double the amount of crowded, because that's statistical. As we develop, as the economy develops, people are going to come to cities. So cities are going to double. What are we doing about it planning-wise? Changing land use patterns and allowing construction. How do we do it? And what way will we do? In other words, if you have one Delhi, maybe we'll have two Delhi's in another 50 years. Now, the second Delhi, how is it going to be developed the same way as this? With the drainage problem, with the same problem, with the same transport problem, or what? So when I told you that we're going to revolutionize thinking, we have to revolutionize thinking for this reason. Because the past thinking has not worked. It has worked for some of us, for you and me. Maybe it has worked. So interestingly, you also mentioned there are parts of the city of Delhi which did not flood and which are actually the older parts. The older parts. Take Shah Jainabad, for example. Why is that? Because when they planned these old cities, whether it was in the 1700s, 1600s, 1500s, 1400s, they selected the site very carefully, where there'd be proper drainage. It's not as though that here's land, let's build. You got to first understand what is the ecology of that area. And based on the ecology of that area, you got to develop it, not by statistics, by numbers, by a simple thing that road has to go from here to there. Today when we talk about an Indian way of planning, obviously there isn't one uniform Indian way of planning. But it also becomes loaded in the sense of a majoritarian way of planning. Central Vistas, perhaps one example of that. Is that going to be a risk going forward, even if we re-imagine there would be this risk? Yeah, it's a good question. I can just sort of give you a simple answer. When a planner plans a city, they imagine a flat piece of land. Now, tell me one area in India where it's a flat piece of land, where there's nothing, it's empty. There are villages, there's a land, there's a monument, there's this, there's that all. You know, when the mass planner of Delhi was made, there were about 300 villages. They're horse cars, you know, green park, all these areas, they've got all these, what we call urban villages. What happened? Where are those urban villages? They've all been made into, you know, lal doras. In other words, they were gated and forgotten. Whereas surely it was not an empty piece of land, it was an inhabited piece of land. It had land which was productive. Yet the plan comes and says, no, no, no, no, this is all going to be wiped out. We'll make, you know, horse cars, green park, you know, jorbag and golf links or whatever it is. And we just plan these areas. Whereas if it was as urban as it happened, the best, they'd always say, look, these people have rights. Let's respect the rights and build accordingly. But the villages had no rights when the Delhi was being planned. And so when I say that when we're going to double up population, will we give the people rights? Or will we say, no, no, we just go to bulldoze them and get them out and build. So again, coming back to a very urgent problem now, poor people come to the city because they want jobs. You don't give them land, you don't give them housing, they settle somewhere. At no cost to us at the government, they're not asked the government money. And yet the government suddenly wakes up and says, but how? But we need that for development. Get out. Or sometimes just for beautification. Oh, beautification. It's ugly. We are the capital of the world, you know, you can't have ugliness here. So I'm saying that this is no way to plan. And when you say, what's the solution? That's why I told you, it has to revolutionize the way of thinking. We've got to think, imagine that the people have rights, the cities, the villages have rights, the, you know, all the people have rights. And we've got to respect those things, not saying that, you know, nothing can happen, they can be negotiated. But we have to plan according to what is the reality. The reality is that we have a diverse population, diverse ecology, diverse environment, and we're going to plan accordingly. But yet we talk about planning as flat piece of land, which has to be. Like a map unfold on a table and then you draw what you imagine on it. So will that change? I don't know. As I said, I'm at the end of my career, and I've not been able to make it. Now, if you ask me a question like that, I don't know if the next generation is going to manage that. Perhaps they'll only manage it when there is an absolute crisis, maybe another flood, another flood, more people, you know, being homeless and dead and all that, then maybe something might happen. But will it change? Right now, for the people who come to Delhi to work here, they really don't seem to be finding a home here. Something or the other is pushing them out. You can't think of planning as an economic problem, as a statistical problem. It is a human problem. Now, are we designing a city with humanity and human beings in mind? They're numbers, of course. When they say that we've got to build for 10 million people, they're numbers. But who are these 10 million people? They're people with lives and feelings and ideas and beliefs and all that. They're not merely just mindless numbers, but yet planning is made as mindless numbers. When the first master plan was made, it was for 5 million people. Then it was for 12 million people. The third master plan was for 22 million people. Now we're doing the fourth master plan. And they're saying, okay, now maybe the city will not grow that much, but it'll grow a bit more. But they're still talking in terms of numbers. Is there a unity in the planning vision from 62 to 21? Well, the unity is that we've not learned lessons. The 1962 plan revealed a lot of flaws. Did we correct it in the second master plan? No, we did not. Can you refer to a couple of them? Well, a simple thing like, we didn't think of need for industry. That time it was thoughts of an administrative curve. Industries came up. So when the second master plan came, suddenly we saw a lot of industrial areas. What do we say? We say it's illegal. Get rid of them. Polluting. Get rid of them. So if you had learned lessons, you would have said, okay, we didn't think of these things. These industries came up because people needed jobs, people need economy, people need to develop. Maybe we should plug them into the plan. In other words, change the master plan a bit more and make them legal and make them more less polluting, make them more amenable to better environmental conditions. No, but what we did was, no, they went against the plan. The plan is written in stone. They went against it. So we got to get rid of them. The stone has to remain. The plan has to remain. So it happened in the second master plan. It happened in the third master plan. It's happening in the fourth master plan. And I'll tell you the most egregious problem in the fourth master plan, which is 21 to 41. Our master plan has four levels of planning. The master plan, zonal plan, local area plan, and the local construction, the local plan. Now, local area plan is a very important thing. Right. This is the time when you say, okay, now look, we have developed so much. This is the thing. Let's look at the local area. Let's take any area, you know, horse cars or whatever it is. Here's a, what's the local area? In Delhi, we've got about 272 wands. So we've got 272 local area plans. Each ward has that councillor. So the idea is that maybe a ward can be considered as a planning unit and say, well, what went right, what went wrong, how to correct it. Okay. Wonderful idea. We made mistakes in the past. Let's correct it in future. What did the fourth master plan says? Fourth master plan says, get rid of local area plans. Can you think of a more egregious suggestion than that? But this is what the fourth master plan is saying, that we are not going to have local area plans. Because what was done in the master plan, what was done in the zone plan, perfectly already written in stone, it has to remain. So when you say, will we learn lessons, I'm saying, where am I going to learn lessons? Okay. This is actually very puzzling because when you talk about a local area plan, which is a ward level plan, you're talking about a different kind of system. You talk about human beings. People have lived there. They've got histories there. They've got people have grown up there. They know what the problem is. And you tell them, well, let's find a solution. Is that planning? Is that more satisfying? Is that maybe it will be beautiful, maybe not be beautiful, but it'll be satisfying. It'll make people happy. So if they say, look, this is my area. Hey, I'm getting flooding here. I've got this problem there. Can we resolve it? But that won't happen now. Because they said there's no local area plan because what was the master plan said is law. What was the zonal plan saying is law is written in stone, can't change. Okay. So Delhi, it will basically trundle on in this fashion. In this fashion, we'll go from crisis to crisis. Today, you're talking about that flood plan. Tomorrow, we'll talk about traffic problem because we centralize everything in central vista. Now traffic problem will start and maybe 10 years from now, someone like you will come and interview a plan and say, what do we do with the traffic problem? And we'll say, look, we are sitting at the beginning of the traffic problem. What's going to happen? So these are the issues. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope that people watch and learn and start to maybe put pressure on the government to... That's the only way it'll happen. If people understand planning, one thing when this mass plan was going on, they tried to do a survey of citizens. And do you know what a mass plan is? No, we don't know what it is. You know what the mass plan says? No, we don't know what it is. Majority, not about 50%, 60%, 70%, 95% of the people didn't know what a mass plan and what it is. And yet it's determining their lives, determining their way of living. So if a mass plan is so incomprehensible, maybe it makes only sense in the local area plan because at that point, you know, there's my home, there's a school, there's a shop, there's parking, that's the only place where the plan really makes some sense. And you get rid of it, get rid of the possibility of solution. So this is the the issue. Thanks, thanks very much again for joining us. Thank you very much for watching this video. We're going to keep an eye on how Delhi develops even in coming episodes. Thanks very much for watching again.