Connaught Place has turned whiter than white, the roads have seldom been smoother, the traffic never so orderly in recent memory. The air has turned crisper toward the evenings, heralding the onset of the coming autumn, and the swollen Yamuna has already receded to a mere suggestion of a river. You can scarcely remember the ordeal of the past several months when large swathes of the city had been dug up seemingly forever. If this is what all those people on the telly called a fiasco, give us a fiasco every time, you can reasonably conclude while comfortably ensconced in your private saloon. Even if you do not own a fancy car, you can now take the metro to many more destinations across the national capital region. Despite all the sound and fury in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, the event seems to be progressing fine, save some mishaps early on and the many mysteriously unfilled seats in most stadia, and Delhi seems set to become moreliveable than ever once the games get over.

With good reason. After all, never before has Delhi, or any other city in the country for that matter, seen development works on this scale. When was the last time you heard of the city spending Rs 165 crore on potted plants? Or Rs 400 crore on streetscaping? Or Rs 740 crore on shifting slum-dwellers to purpose-built flats? Or Rs 800 crore on upgrading areas such as Daryaganj, Paharganj and Karol Bagh? The list goes on. All the way to include Rs 7,200 crore on the Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS), Rs 12,700 crore on the new T3 airport terminal and Rs 19,000 crore on the second phase of the Delhi Metro.

“The preparation has all the glitz and glamour of the Indian wedding pandal. What is worrying is that it also has just as much longevity as any wedding pandal.”

H R Suri, former president, Institute of Town Planners

“If you have spent so much money, it cannot be all waste, even if you discount large-scale corruption,” agrees A G K Menon, convenor of the Delhi chapter of the Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), “Residents can only benefit from improved infrastructure and beautification of parts of the city.

The larger question, though, as Menon and other urban planners continue to ask, is whether the city should have spent a staggering sum of at least Rs 70,000 crore – some informed estimates peg the total expenditure at more than Rs one lakh crore – in this fashion. When you begin to address this question, you soon get to the even larger question as to whether the city should have spent money on this scale at all.

Given the government’s assertions that the 11-day sporting extravaganza came as Delhi’s one-way ticket to the league of world-class cities, it is time to look at the legacy of the Commonwealth Games. Now that the few foreign guests who turned up have returned home, it is no longer unpatriotic to do so. It is time to ask whether the games village should have been built on the river bed and whether switching from the original plan of using the accommodation as a hostel to selling it off as any other privately built condominium smacks of a ploy to facilitate and legitimise an illegal and ill-advised construction. Or whether Rs 550 crore should have been spent on the elevated Barapullah road which was built just to transport athletes from the games village to the main venue at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Especially since traffic was going to be severely curtailed on the regular roads as well. In any case, was any new flyover needed at all?

"You have made the city even more attractive. You have made a strong magnet even more stronger while you needed to create an alternate magnet. So, will you arrive at solutions, or attract more problems?"

A GK Menon, convenor, Delhi chapter, INTACH

The more closely you look at the details of the projects and the funds splurged the more you realise that there is much less to the legacy of the games than meets the eye at first glance.

The metaphor of the Indian wedding that some of the organisers, including sports minister M S Gill, have been using to justify the delays and  cost escalations may in fact be far more apt than many of us appreciate. “The preparation has all the glitz and glamour of the Indian wedding pandal. What is worrying is that it also has just as much longevity as any wedding pandal,” says H R Suri, a veteran urban planner who has twice been president of the Institute of Town Planners, India, “Such events should lead to permanent facilities. If you hold the Olympics next, you will need to start all over from scratch because you are going to sell off the apartments at the games village that you have built by destroying the riverfront. What will you destroy next time to build something like this again?”

Architect and author Gautam Bhatia uses the metaphor somewhat differently but expresses a similar sentiment when he says, “Maybe we should have held the games in temporary tents. That would have been a better way of showcasing India. We Indians are experts at temporary structures such as wedding tents. A Pappu Tent House would have been a more authentic way of showcasing India than imported goods and services from Australia, America and South Korea. If this event was about the pride of India, there is nothing to be proud of in the manner we have organised it. The only message that we have desperately sent across is that we are almost as good as you are. There is nothing Indian about our solutions.”

The entire philosophy behind the preparations for the games has rankled with the urban planners. The reason, Bhatia says, is that at no point did the organisers pause to consider whether the event could be turned into an opportunity to address the growing problems in the city. It was always a case of easing some of the mess of the rapidly expanding city through piecemeal solutions. The legacy issue did not figure prominently in the official scheme of things, he says, simply because the organisers focused on just a fortnight rather than the 50-year lifespan of a building. “The stadia are not filled even during the games. There is every likelihood of these structures turning into white elephants soon,” he laments. This, when Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium alone has taken Rs 900 crore to refurbish, Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium Rs 512 crore, Siri Fort Sports Complex Rs 329 crore and Talkatora Stadium Rs 295 crore, among other stadia, accounting for a total of more than Rs 5,000 crore.

Dunu Roy, director of Hazards Centre, the non-government organisation which has compiled these figures, says his latest estimate of the total expenditure for the event stands at Rs 1,02,000 crore. Of this, non-games expenditure accounts for Rs 46,681 crore, he says. The new airport terminal, the BRTS, the expansion of the Delhi Metro and development work in unauthorised colonies are among the key components under this head. “Costs have escalated by four to 40 times,” says Roy, “Remember that the initial bid for the entire event was just Rs 1,772 crore. Within six months, the figure for the stadia alone was revised to Rs 1,700 crore, which eventually went up to Rs 5,214 crore.”

As both the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and Central Vigilance Commission have detailed in their reports, as has the media through a series of exposes, most projects have been beset by the twin evils of gross corruption and substandard quality. Delhi has just joined a long list of cities that have hosted such events and struggled to repay the debt over the next 10 to 30 years. “Los Angeles is the only city since 1968 – the year from when financial records for such multi-discipline international sporting events are available – which did not fall into the debt trap,” says Roy, “That is because Los Angeles is the only city that did not build new facilities for the summer Olympics that it hosted in 1984.”

In a study conducted at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, senior research officer Debjani Ghosh, who earlier taught urban planning at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, pointed out as much. Ghosh also did a comparison with the Asian Games that Delhi hosted in 1982. “If India had to host the Commonwealth Games, such an event could only have been held in Delhi. No other city has the infrastructure that Delhi already had in place. No other city, whether it be Mumbai or Kolkata, has the land,” she says, “But those who marvel at the Asiad forget that the then prime minister stepped in two years ahead of the event, while in the present case the prime minister stepped in only three or four months ahead of the games. If you consider the absence of a central command in this case, the authorities seem
to have managed a pretty decent job in the end.”

The cost however spiralled so much that, Roy says, the government will have no option but to raise at least Rs 3,000 crore per year just to service the debt. This will lead to an inevitable rise in taxes and user charges, including a possible leasing out of the stadia and privatisation of some of the flyovers, he says. “How else will the stadia pay for themselves?” he asks, “Surely, not by holding such events once in 20 years. I won’t be surprised if the government imposes a special games tax on fuel, too.” Justice G S Singhvi of the supreme court expressed it most memorably when he observed, barely a fortnight ahead of the games, “Till October 15, Commonwealth is a public purpose, and thereafter it will be private purpose... When the new bridge collapsed, it collapsed like a pack of cards. There is rampant corruption...”

Ghosh agrees that the issue of legacy is linked directly to the post-games use of the facilities that have been created or renovated. “Much will depend on how these stadia are used after the games. Unless they are used on a regular basis, there will be little incentive to maintain them,” she points out.

If these planners had their way, though, Delhi would not have spent so much money on such an event at all

“If I were to be offered Rs one lakh crore to spend on Delhi over three years, as the organisers of these games have done, I wouldn’t take it,” says Roy, “Delhi does not need more than Rs 20,000 crore for all the improvements it needs.”

Menon, too, says that planning for Delhi should not be considered in isolation, especially since the budget under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) for 60 cities across the country over seven years, including the share of the states, is just about as much as the amount spent on these games. In this context, therefore, even considering a budget of Rs one lakh crore for a single city, any city in India, is anathema to planners.

“Much of the problem arises from this self-demeaning concept of a world-class city,” says Menon, “If we just say that we will deliver first-class games, we can do so at a fraction of the cost. If I were to plan such an event, I would have done it anywhere but at this venue. Instead of relocating slum-dwellers to Bawana, I would have held the games in Bawana or Narela. This alone would have reduced the costs considerably and developed an alternative area at the same time.

Urban planners argue that the so-called development bequeathed by the games may actually end up accentuating the city’s problems. For example, they say that flyovers serve just 13 percent of the total population that owns private vehicles. They also argue that the expansion of the metro is likely to concentrate congestion along its routes, clogging the city further. Strengthening the bus service would have made more sense, says Roy. In any case, the games have led to creation and improvement of facilities in a small area, thereby widening the gulf with the rest of the city. West Delhi, for example, has remained largely untouched by these games. “The approach seems to be to just accommodate the trends. If more people are taking to drinking, let us build more whisky factories, seems to be the approach” says Bhatia, “The need, on the other hand, is to provide a substantial upgrade of basic facilities of drainage and so on to everybody, including in the slums and, equally important, to clamp restrictions on the unsustainable habits of the growing middle class. Whether it is for ownership of land or of cars, there is need to restrict the increasing consumerism of the middle-class. Some people say it is undemocratic to do so. What nonsense! All great cities in the world, whether Copenhagen or Vienna, are liveable only because they have effective restrictions in place.”

"If I were to be offered Rs one lakh crore to spend on Delhi over three years, i wouldn't take it. Delhi doesn't need more than Rs 20,000 crore for all the improvements it needs. I would spend the  sum only on housing and livelihoods."

Dunu Roy, director, Hazards centre

Bhatia is not alone in lashing out at the government’s basic approach to planning for the city. “If you can limit the number of coolies, autos and cycle-rickshaws, why not cars?” asks Roy. He says it is also a complete myth that there is no choice but to relocate slum-dwellers to Bawana. “There is enough land, right here in South Delhi,” he says, “If you can destroy the ridge and give away the land for building malls and a five-star hotel in Vasant Kunj, or to malls in Saket, why can’t you build houses instead? If a Delhi Haat can come up over a drain, why can’t houses?”

Roy says he would rather spend on just housing and creating livelihoods to transform Delhi into a more liveable city for all. “Don’t build houses for the poor. How can a family earning Rs 3,000 per month afford to pay up Rs 60,000 at one go, as the government is demanding from those who have been relocated? Give them plots instead. People can always build houses for themselves in a more cost-efficient manner. Just give them plots and access to credit,” he says, and adds, “Similarly, all you need to do is just support livelihoods. Provide sanitation and other infrastructure to vendors, for instance. These people will manage the rest themselves. But to do this you have to first understand and appreciate that street food, for example, is organic part of the city.”

Planners are therefore arguing for sustainable Indian solutions to Indian problems. “I don’t think much of what they have built using the games as the excuse is relevant for the city either today or after the games,” says a disappointed Bhatia. Menon says the problem stems from the desire of those among the decision-makers to transform Delhi into Shanghai or Singapore instead of a global Indian city. “Forty percent of Delhi’s population lives under the poverty line. If I have to plan for Delhi, I cannot turn to any Western city for solutions. None of them has as many poor people. I can look to them for best practices but not for solutions. Where is the plan to make Delhi a more liveable city for this section of the population? The only solution the organisers of the games offered was to turn these people out,” Menon fumes.

"Maybe we should have held the games in temporary tents. We Indians are  experts at temporary structures such as wedding tents. A Pappu Tent House would have been a more authentic way of showcasing India.

Gautam Bhatia, architect and author

Suri says the expansion of the metro is a prime example of wastage of public money. “Why couldn’t the existing railway lines be used for the Delhi Metro? Delhi already had a ring railway besides several railway lines connecting Rohtak, Rewari, Ghaziabad, Agra and Loni, among other places. Where was the need to set up a separate infrastructure at such cost? Now, even after spending so much on the metro, is the metro able to serve a majority of the commuters? The answer in this city will always be no,” he says. The important issue in terms of transport, says Bhatia, is connectivity more than even increase in the number of modes of transport. Everybody living anywhere across the city should be connected by reliable public transport, which is still not the case despite a massive expenditure on the metro. There is a longstanding need to augment local forms of public transport for short distances, he says.    

One legacy of the Asiad in 1982, reminds Ghosh, is that most of the labourers did not return to their native places. “Perhaps that is why the organisers have been very clear that this time round the labourers should be made to return home,” she says, “But what if these people stay on and become part of the cityscape? Will they add to the number of slum-dwellers?”

Menon says the organisers have violated a classic town planning strategy in this respect. “The fundamental principle is that you don’t add to the congestion in an already congested area. In this case, however, you have pumped money into a city that has already been a strong magnet for people from across the country. One of the main problems facing Delhi is that there is no restriction on the number of people flocking to the city. But now, you have made the city even more attractive. You have made a strong magnet even stronger while you should have created an alternative magnet. By doing so, will you arrive at solutions, or attract more problems?"

Unfortunately, the question is a complete no-brainer. It seems Delhi dazzled during the games only to deceive in the long run.

This first appeared in the October 16-31 issue of the Governance Now magazine (Vol.01, Issue 18).