by Dave Prager
So many treasures still unseen. And would any of them be there when we returned? Delhi changes at a rate we can’t comprehend. Just thirty years ago, according to Jenny’s boss Renuka, one of the highest points in the city was the Defence Colony flyover near Nehru Stadium. Renuka, who ran Pardada Pardadi’s Delhi office, told us that it was her favorite childhood destination for her family’s morning walks. They’d go there to look over the city and wonder why Delhi needed a flyover at all. After all, Renuka told us, traffic was hardly a problem: the waiting lists for Bajaj motorscooters was years long, anyone who didn’t have a bicycle just took the bus, and where would anyone want to go anyway? There may have been a handful of restaurants, she said, but no one she knew considered visiting them. “We had no concept of going out to eat.” And in this Delhi before Café Coffee Day, there were just two coffee shops in the city, both in Connaught Place; to go out for coffee would be even more eccentric than going out to eat.
Perhaps I’m being dramatic—thirty years is a long time. But Delhi is apparently unrecognizable even on a ten-year scale. One night, while driving home from a restaurant with Hemanshu, the founder of Eating Out in Delhi, we asked him what changes he’d seen in the last decade. “It would have been unbelievable ten years ago,” he responded, “to think anyone could consider a career as a food critic.” It was an understated answer, and it left unsaid all the changes over the last ten years necessary for such a career path to be viable: an explosion in newspapers, magazines, advertisers and readers; an explosion in restaurants, lounges, coffee shops and dessert bars; and an explosion in disposable income necessary to patronize them and in palates discriminating enough to demand professional criticism. Ten years ago, there were just four “remunerative career paths,” as Hemanshu phrased it: engineer, lawyer, doctor and civil servant. But today, in this city of sudden possibilities . . . !
The three of us fell silent as Hemanshu drove down Aurobindo Marg. And then another thought struck him. “Even this,” he said, gesturing out of the window at the construction of the Delhi Metro. It was nearly midnight but work was in full swing, lit by steaming lamps that were being swarmed by suicidal insects. “Hard hats, safety barriers . . . Ten years ago, there would have been nothing like this!”
Nor would there have been mobile phones, obviously, which Jenny and I spotted even in the poorest villages of Pardada Pardadi’s students, where handsets dangled from chargers that were affixed to jugaad electrical outlets. Nor would there have been escalators, apparently, which explains the distrust so many grandmothers showed as they rode to the third level of the mall. Nor would there have been glass doors, we suppose, which explains why on three separate occasions I saw men walk into the ones at our office: a disquieting thud, a gasp of pain, and then a man sitting on the chair by the door for twenty minutes, rubbing his nose and looking miserable. (Given how little time I spent hanging around the office lobby, it’s possible that those doors claimed dozens of other victims I never heard about.)
According to author Sam Miller, the modernization of Delhi’s infrastructure began with the city’s preparations for the 1982 Asian Games. That event kick-started a construction binge of stadiums, flyovers and five-star hotels.1 But until the 1990s, there were still no malls, no Café Coffee Days, and nothing in Gurgaon but farms and the occasional homestead. (“In 1986, when we moved to Gurgaon, we were scared of the bandits at the edge of the city,” our friend Anirban told us. “We had to come back by four p.m. or else we’d be attacked.”) Economic change—and the escalators and glass doors that accompany it—didn’t really begin until the liberalization of the 1990s. Soon malls were being built,2 McDonalds opened up,3 construction began on the Metro, and Cheerios came out of hiding from under shopkeepers’ counters.
In 2003, Delhi was awarded hosting duties for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and everything was thrown into overdrive: a sense of urgency and an infusion of funds led to the marathon of transformation that was in full swing during our time in Delhi.
But change will be Delhi’s dominant narrative long after the last Commonwealth javelin lands quivering in the earth. Every other day the papers would announce a new proclamation that would revolutionize the city: that Delhi will plant 250,000 new trees, eliminate slums, ensure a citywide power surplus, shrink the protected area around Lutyens’s Delhi, create incentives to encourage high-rise residential development, and actually develop some of the Yamuna’s riverfront real estate for recreational purposes. If even a fraction of these developments come to pass (and every day that the papers weren’t proudly reporting some new plan, they were criticizing the failure of an old one), change is sure to remain the essence of the Delhi experience for years to come.
Except for one problem: what the city builds, the people take away. The city is perpetually eroded by the impact of Delhi’s glacial traffic—not “glacial” in the sense that it’s slow, but in the sense that every Delhiite inflicts imperceptible damage simply by joining the flow of traffic. On a municipal–geological scale, this amalgamated impact forces the city to continuously rebuild everything it’s already modernized, just to keep pace.
When Americans think of traffic, we picture a four-lane highway at a standstill, an orderly queue of tail lights stretching into infinity. Everyone in the American jam fantasizes about driving down the shoulder to bypass it, but the threat of traffic tickets and social condemnation keeps us waiting within the lanes. Delhi’s traffic jams, though, create pressure in two dimensions: not only do they stretch into the distance, but they also impose tremendous outward force even beyond the roads’ shoulders. In a Delhi traffic jam, the bigger vehicles commandeer the inner lanes, smaller cars jostle among the outer lanes, and motorcyclists and bicyclists are pushed past the shoulders, into the gutters and onto the sidewalks. And just as pebbles dragged by glaciers become geological sandpaper as they flow, so too are the lightest elements of Delhi’s traffic causing the most damage. Bicycle pedals are scraping curbs, motorcyclists are spinning wheels and spraying abrasive gravel, and everyone’s knocking debris into storm drains that will one day cause them to stop up, flood and undermine the pavement. The occasional bus slamming into a telephone pole doesn’t help, but the long-term damage comes from every dragged foot, every kicked rock, and every horseshoe sparking along the pavement. Millions of pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, cars, buses, trucks, horses, cows, camels, and elephants aggregate into unrelenting infrastructure erosion, one nick in the concrete at a time.
But it’s not just the pressure of jammed roads that’s eroding Delhi’s infrastructure. There’s also the tendency of traffic to find the quickest route between two points regardless of where the infrastructure intends for them to go. Shortly after we moved to Hauz Khas, the city built new medians down a stretch of nearby Aurobindo Marg. These concrete islands were raised a full foot off the ground, and they prevented cars from making the illegal U-turns they’d been enjoying ever since the old medians had worn down into rubble. Unfortunately for those new medians, though, traffic coming off the Ring Road really wanted to make those illegal U-turns, because the first legal U-turn was one long half-mile beyond where traffic entered this stretch of Aurobindo Marg. And in evening traffic, that single half-mile could take fifteen minutes. Similarly, pedestrians and bicyclists certainly weren’t going to walk all the way to the U-turns when they could just cross directly over the medians. And that’s how it began: in less than eighteen months, pedestrians and bicyclists had instigated fissures in the median that scooters and motorcycles had widened and shaped, creating a half-dozen holes through which autorickshaws and even cars were eventually passing.
I’d shake my head at the cars crossing these rubble strips, but I’d also silently hope my driver would follow their lead to shave precious minutes off my commute home.
Even beyond the traffic, other beavers are gnawing at the city’s infrastructure. The sun bakes the concrete. The monsoon floods undermine it. And the bureaucracy contributes poor planning, thoughtless execution,
and rampant corruption that overlooks sub-par materials and construction. Again I bemoan the fate of Aurobindo Marg: a few months after we left, the city decided to replace a nearby open storm-water drain with a buried 1,200mm drainage pipe. This on its own would be a perfectly satisfactory capital investment if only they hadn’t decided to channel the outflow of three 1,800mm sewage pipes into this single 1,200mm conduit.4 I’m certainly no engineer, but basic addition suggests an error in their planning. And sure enough, the new pipe couldn’t handle all that run-off during one day of heavy rain: the water back-flowed, causing so much damage that whole sections of the street caved in. Northbound Aurobindo Marg was closed for over a month for repairs.5
Poor, hapless Aurobindo Marg! How we wept for that beleaguered street.
But there’s hope. Aurobindo Marg is a symbol of all that ails Delhi’s infrastructure—but it also represents the bright promise of Delhi’s eventual future. Because all those construction barriers, jackhammers and men wearing hard hats had a higher purpose: the city was lifting Aurobindo Marg up so it could slip the Delhi Metro underneath. Phase II of the Metro (which now connects the city’s southern sprawl with the system already so successfully unifying the northern, western, and eastern stretches) was inching forward the whole time we drove grumpily over it. And it was imperceptibly transforming this beaten boulevard into a model of urban infrastructure.
We felt genuine pride when we first saw the map of the future Metro displayed in the Central Secretariat station. Our fingers traced the green line, feeling sudden ownership of the planned route by virtue of its proximity to our home as it followed Aurobindo Marg south from INA Market, past AIIMS and Green Park, until it deviated from our now-beloved street with a gentle left in the direction of Malviya Nagar. We did have a moment of worry when we realized that that left turn took it directly under our flat, imagining that our ICICI-ruined mornings might be preceded by the nighttime lullaby of a seventy-two-ton tunneling machine pummeling bedrock below our pillows. But the team building the Delhi Metro had a world-class reputation for good reason: absolutely no noise or vibration ever disturbed our slumber.
With the Metro’s construction now complete, Aurobindo Marg has been sewn up and topped off with a fresh layer of asphalt. And Delhi’s future rolls on well-oiled wheels underneath it as proof that the city can accomplish great things. I imagine the Metro pulling smoothly out of the Green Park station and passing silently beneath our flat, and that the loudest sounds to disturb our former neighbors are still Anya’s dogs barking at passing cars and Mr. M. yelling at parking ones. Somewhere near Qutub Minar, the Metro blinks into the sunshine above M.G. Road, with each one of its passengers representing one less point of pressure on the road below. Meanwhile, the merchants of M.G. Road reclaim their sidewalks, entice their patrons to return, and rehabilitate the half-destroyed buildings that remain as reminders of darker times.
We have no doubt that this sort of leap forward will occur all across Delhi in the years and decades to follow. Isolated accomplishments—an overpass here, a footbridge there—will ease the pressures at particular points until, on a geological scale, Delhi moves forward faster than its progress can be eroded away. In fact, by 2021, Delhi’s Metro will cover almost 275 miles, giving it more route-miles than New York’s subway. Already it stretches from the northernmost poles of the city to eastern and western satellite cities; it connects the airport directly to New Delhi Railway station; it reaches deep into central Gurgaon; and it has many more lines under frantic construction.
Delhi’s geographic sprawl makes the Metro experience very unlike New York. In the central areas of the New York’s boroughs—and especially in Manhattan—the subway is rarely more than a brisk walk away. But Delhi’s stations tend to follow the main roads, which means that other forms of transportation are necessary to get from the neighborhoods to the stations. This has changed the character of getting around Delhi: instead of forty-five terrifying minutes in an auto, there’s now just ten terrifying minutes on either side of an air-conditioned train ride. Progress!
And more progress: with the Metro construction complete, M.G. Road is back to its intended width. Rushhour traffic has been upgraded from singularly cataclysmic to routinely traumatic. It’s enough to reinstate the feasibility of leaving the office before seven p.m.
(But even as some pressures are alleviated, new ones are created. Every train into Gurgaon spills thousands of riders into a city without an infrastructure for getting them to their offices. Which is why Gurgaon is now hastily building a Metro of its own. And meanwhile, over at the NH-8 toll plaza—well, that’s a situation that can’t be discussed in polite company.)
Our optimism about Delhi’s future does not stem from a belief that the city is an extraordinary model of development. We’re optimistic for precisely the opposite reason: that there’s no reason to think Delhi is different from any other city. In fact, all of the problems we saw in Delhi just reminded us of New York City.
Not today’s New York City, but rather the New York City from Jacob Riis’s 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. A pioneering work of photojournalism, Riis’s book exposed the more fortunate classes to the terrible things happening in neighborhoods that are today among the hippest in the city. Looking through the pictures6 of bygone New York, we see children sewing shirts in sweatshop conditions, women huddled miserably with blankets wrapped around their shoulders, alleys strewn with trash, blind beggars, squatters’ camps, shoeless men with rags wrapped around their feet, and the expressionless faces of people who stoically endure it all. The poor were stuffed into squalid slums in this old New York, and the city was tortured by issues of pollution and sewage. Hogs were its primary method of waste disposal, horses plagued it with four million pounds of manure every single day, and one visitor famously described the whole of New York as a “nasal disaster, where some streets smell like bad eggs dissolved in ammonia.”7
All of which mirrors the issues Delhi is coping with today. Glancing through the pictures and reading the text of Riis’s book, the parallels between these two cities separated by oceans and decades are striking, down to the same method with which one elderly man in one of Riis’s photos wraps a scarf around his head to stay warm. His scarf, his scraggly beard, his defeated eyes: he’s identical to the poor souls we saw huddled on Delhi’s cold sidewalks.
Nor is New York the only city with this historical parallel. Glancing through history, it emerges that almost all of today’s world-class cities rose from similarly dismal conditions. Paris, for instance, brought us the word “loo” because Parisians would shout “gardez-loo” before emptying their chamber pots onto the sidewalks below their windows. Edinburgh had a similar reputation, and its stench was even given the ironic nickname “The Flowers of Edinburgh.” Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it regularly caught fire in the 1960s. As late as 1977, Singapore’s government had to convene extraordinary action to clean up its filthy namesake river. London, Boston, Shanghai—most of today’s world-class cities were once defined by a small upper class, a huge lower class, and terrible problems from their oversupply of labor. We admit that our understanding of developmental economics is loose, but it does look like there’s a pattern: for all these cities, the solutions came as the middle class emerged.
Obviously, there are significant differences between New York and New Delhi. First and foremost, New York has that human-scale street grid which Jenny and I hold in such esteem. But the parallels extend even beyond the mere fact of poverty. Consider the Yamuna against New York’s Hudson River: a century ago, the Hudson was cut off from the city by docks and warehouses, just like the Yamuna today is cut off by farmland. New York’s rivers were glimpsed from bridges or buildings, but few people interacted with them in any way beyond those who worked on the docks or those who dumped bodies off of them.
But as New York’s economic structure changed, so did the city. Today, the Hudson River boasts parkland running almost unbroken along Manhattan’s entire west
side. Paris and Edinburgh are similarly magnificent, Cleveland is planning its waterfront revival, and Singapore’s reputation is without peer. (“I got your holiday card and it made me somewhat of a celebrity in my neighborhood,” Anurag emailed me after I’d left India. “Everyone was like, ‘Ooooohhh a gora sent him a postcard, that too from Singapore!’”) London, Boston, Shanghai—they’ve all emerged from their low points. And there’s no reason to think that Delhi won’t do the same.
Jenny and I aren’t alone in seeing a bright future for distant Delhi. The phrase we heard over and over again was “world-class city.” It was a goal enunciated by the politicians, the papers and the people. Most Delhiites to whom we spoke eagerly anticipate the city reaching this standard, even if it’s unclear exactly what this benchmark entails beyond the hazy promise of something better.
Many people are ushering in this new era in their own way. Mr. M., for instance, wouldn’t do so much shouting at passers-by if he didn’t think he was helping. Nor would Anya chastise urinating men. Nor would Sam Singh return to India to start his school when he could have just as easily saved his fortune and retired in comfort. Delhiites are well aware of the challenges, of course, but that doesn’t change their optimism. When I asked Anurag about his vision, he rattled off a half-dozen examples of things that were catastrophically wrong in the city and then expressed unflagging optimism that they’ll figure it out eventually.
As long as the middle class keeps growing, we agree. The rich always insulate themselves from their city’s problems, and the poor are always too busy trying to eat to worry about what’s around them. The middle class is development’s catalyst: it has the incentive to care about what’s around it along with the influence to agitate for change. The middle class will vote, it will write letters to the editor, it will spend money in malls that encourage markets to clean up. The middle class will grow, Delhi’s labor surplus will move towards equilibrium, and Delhi will develop in the model of so many other cities before it.