 Hi, welcome to NewsClick and today we are starting a show on the Central Vista. There's a proposal to redevelop the Central Vista where a new parliament is going to come up. What is it all about? How is it going to affect the common people, the citizens? And as the government claims that it is going to reduce the carbon footprint and it is also going to enhance the functioning of the government, we will view it from a very critical point and we intend to run a series on it, a series of episodes describing what it is all about, how people are going to be affected and what it means for the people of this country. So let me introduce to our panellists, our guests today, who will actually explain what the Central Vista is all about. We have Mr. Narayan Murthy who is an architect and who is a non-architect in India and who was vociferously opposing this project and also Kanchi Kohli who is an environment researcher who works on environmental issues and was quite active in the transit-oriented development strategy that we witnessed in Delhi especially in Kidway Nagar. So welcome Narayan and Kanchi. So I think Narayan straight away for a common man or a common woman staying in Delhi and different parts because we find lots of articles have come up and people have actually been writing on the Central Vista but there is no husband amongst the common people. What is it all about and why should it be opposed? Because we have seen a parallel drawn by the government especially the person who got the contract describing that look, it's a wonderful thing that is going to happen. So how do you really place it, not just from the architectural viewpoint but for the common people? You know for the last 3-4 months we architects have been talking and thinking about it when the proposal first hit us in September and October it was a bolt from the blue it was an extremely large project for the first time maybe proposed in our country it took some amount of understanding as well but as we got deeper into it we began to realize some of the issues with it which are not visible to the citizen today like there are many many of those issues and which initially became visible to us architects among them who are able to interpret these drawings and plans. Now one of the things we began to look at was the fact that it seemed to be a much larger proposal than it needed to be in terms of physical size and structure itself they were talking about 3 crore square feet of space built up there the idea of making our parliament redundant this building in which our constitution has been written and building a new parliament to replace it seemed a bit strong so the initial thought started around all of that some of the core crucial issues when you come down to it one is the highly emotive issue this is a space which this country conceives of as its iconic national space you know this is the space down which Mahatma Gandhi's funeral cottage went this is the space in which the parliament stands where our constitution was written this is the space we know that the likes of Nehru, Gandhi, Siddhar Patel, Subash Chandra Bose, drove and walked up and down you know momentous things in this nation's history have happened there so it's in that sense a very delicate part of our emotional memory emotional one okay what else the second part of it is that this space was devised as a public space even in the earliest conception the crossing of Rajpat and Janpat it earlier was called Kingsway and Queensway and when we got independence our founding fathers very imaginatively called it Rajpat and Janpat and the crossing of those is the intersection of the government and the people the Janpat connects Kannad place which is the space of commerce to Humayun Storm to Sadhjung Storm I'm sorry and Rajpat of course connects the presidential estate symbolically to the old fort of the urban and that particular crossing was recognized as a public space now in 1961 when we got our first master plan of Delhi that actually made two thirds of the whole length of Rajpat and the whole sweep of the Princess Palace Circle the C.A. Hexagon as it's called into socio-cultural spaces it was meant to be for public theatres, libraries, archives, buildings of that nature today this is set to take all that public space away into government offices which will necessarily be restricted access zones already there government offices only a few of them are there if you look at the length of Rajpat it's only a less than a third of it and so that is the second thing now at the moment the space the open spaces that exist so emotive one socio-cultural one second you said it's more of an urban one urban commons exactly also there is a concept of decentralization in the master plan of Delhi which is a legal document to so to speak it is spoken that no further government offices will come up in the heart of Delhi if they come up they will come up in the NCR region so what could be the rationale for discarding that suddenly and bringing a huge number of offices centralized into one space that of course will bring many issues which probably Kanchi will touch upon better which is to say traffic how is it going to impact traffic how is it going to impact pollution the densification of the space will definitely have certain negatives in the time to follow and this actually flies in the face of the minimum government maximum governance principle of the government we really were looking at downsizing of government it will be the inverse stuff absolutely yeah absolutely I think Kanchi there is an interesting thing that Narayan mentioned and that's about the whole question of densification now we have been watching those videos especially shown by the government official yeah who's got the contract because I've not gone into the ambiguity I mean because people have actually described also it's hugely, hugely ambiguous people don't even know I mean which building is to come up which is to go but one thing that he mentions is it is very low densification I mean it's 25,000 he says we can go even up to 50,000 because and that reduces carbon space and something that he mentions is that 1,000 crore is per annum that's the government going to save you know if the mobility happens to be through underground tunnels so how do you view all this I think first as you yourself said it's this has been spoken as an evolving project and it's also I've never heard of that so you know as we go along we will decide whether this building should come up this building should go down even in the last four or five months you've seen the evolution of the project come up as in when there is a continuously evolving it is having in that scenario for a city and for a country that is trying to deal with issues of groundwater issues of air pollution issues of how much urban construction is eating into public space how much you know whether densification should happen or not happen how much of an area will become a dust bowl or not a whole bunch of these issues are even difficult to tackle you know on factual basis primarily because it's an evolving project you never know what is going to happen and what we have right now is two or three kinds of discussions that have happened we'll start with building the parliament first so everybody is focused on how many trees are going to be cut with respect to the parliament now if you see the parliament construction and redevelopment along with the entire central vista the impact zone changes and if the for instance most impact assessment procedures will look at a 5 kilometer or 10 kilometer radius around the project now if the project is evolving the radius is evolving so you need to first be very clear and disclose what the project is and once the project is you know has been spoken about then you actually devise what the impact zone is what is going to be the impact on groundwater what is going to be impact on air you know it's quite ironic that this is coming at a time where the city has been raising huge concerns about prefelling about open spaces every year the government needs to actually land a banning construction activity because of air pollution so in the light of all these concerns being thrown up it's a little bit of a surprise that you know a large scale redevelopment project is coming up and it's been treated as a very routine construction project so A what we can figure out is it's evolving nobody knows what is going to happen so every day it is evolving probably we never heard of such a project I mean you know there are DPRs and there's a set project I mean how we constructed so it's quite ambiguous that way and second you also mentioned about there's no count of the trees that we're going to lose so even if there is a count you first need to figure out what the project is and with respect to that project what is the how many are the trees and that also has to be read in the light of when was the last tree senses so what is this radius that you're trying to explain because this 5 kilometer radius how does I mean what does it mean for a common purpose so basically for any urban construction project or any project I would say there is a procedure for environment impact assessment now environment impact assessment usually is you take a radius of about of about 10 kilometers and that 10 kilometer radius is determined on what the site is now if the site is smaller your 10 kilometer radius is smaller if the site is long bigger so if it's from Rashtrapati Bhavan all the way to India gate the site changes if it's from Rashtrapati Bhavan to Yamuna the radius changes so all those kinds of things have a huge bearing on how we even understand what impact it's going to have on us. Okay so Narayan I think there's another very interesting feature about the project and that pertains to because some there is a kind of grouping even amongst the architects because definitely a good number of architects are opposing it but some of them actually also came for the bid they wanted the contract so are you per se completely against the project that people have also mentioned about the cost or do you think that the way this contract has been given to a particular person that is actually problematic so as one of my friends who is an architect is very fond of saying he's also part of this effort and he says architects can never be anti-development but it depends on development so to a very great extent no architect says per se that you cannot recognize the fact that maybe some government offices need to grow or maybe our parliament needs some other facilities which are lacking today the issue is that how do you in a democracy evolve a program like this this in a democracy first there should be some level of debate among parliamentarians in open society among academics, among domain experts domain experts like environmentalists domain experts like urban planners for a minute to digress and explain what people are talking about in a few kilometers radius it's as simple as the fact that if there is a traffic jam today at All India Medical Crossing the effect of that sometimes can be felt as far away as Gurgaon so that is the reason why an impact assessment is done from the perspective of traffic, from the perspective of tree count in that general area from the perspective of how much the population is which is going to overload say things like metros tomorrow so that's the reason so there should actually for a project like this a brief detailed project report as it were across disciplines to look at the overall issue to define first of all what the problems are which need to be solved through this project and therefore what would the correct methods of solving them be and that is then given to the architect the architect is only the interpreter of that brief that brief is not set by architects it is set by sociologists, by planners, by environmentalists, by the government of course so that is completely lacking in this project so what all architects were pointing out so even out of the bidders as you mentioned in September I believe and this is before I got aware of the project when the first meeting pre-bid meeting happened there were 27 architectural firms present 26 of them signed a request there and then written to the government that this should not be conducted in this manner as a tender but should be conducted as an open design competition which is a major issue 26 people signed that only one 27th person did not who got it? can't you because we are running short of time and we will be doing a series of episodes on it how do you because a section of the people I mean natural layers, bird watchers they said if you want to reconstruct capital just take 50 kilometers off I mean why don't you move out I mean what is your want to redevelop this region? I think that question is not only about picking up government offices from one place and you know moving the injustice to another place it has to be also a full detail discussion of the social implications of even moving you know government out of this place obviously you will be creating some government of another place I think a much more considered view of how much will be gained from I mean rebuilding I mean raising something fully down and rebuilding or just renovating the entire space and managing with that given that we have issues of heritage we have issues of environment we have issues of lived history all part of that and I think critically this is a very important public space which is visited from across the country okay I think that's all that we have right now thank you Kanchi for that but I think in the first episode what we are able to understand is that there are major implications and those implications if not addressed then it is something which is a very ambiguous, non-transparent and is definitely going to hit the citizens of Delhi and probably of the entire country thank you so much