Room for the rich in middle of Delhi
Pollution aside, the Indian capital New Delhi is an attractive city. Old Mughal buildings and pre-Muslim ruins from at least seven ancient cities ring the modern capital built by the British when they switched the seat of empire from Calcutta in 1911.
Over a vast area to the south of the capital, the British architect Edwin Lutyens and his associate, Herbert Baker, designed a city fit for an imperial bureaucracy.
Dominated by the viceroy's house, now the Presidential Palace, the new city encompassed a small commercial section, a sprawling bungalow zone, grand parks, and the playgrounds of the British ruling classes: a polo ground and a racecourse.
Homes in the Lutyens Bungalow Zone, known to all as the LBZ, were allocated according to rank and colour of skin. The closer to the Presidential Palace, the larger the bungalow and grounds. Senior British officers could expect a two-hectare bungalow. Junior British and senior Indian officers made do with about 1.2 hectares. When the British left, Indian parliamentarians and civil servants took to the concept like ducks to water.
True, the vast empty imperial mall that crosses the centre between the Presidential Palace and the India Gate war memorial offers about as much warmth and welcome as a grandiose mausoleum, but the rest of the city centre is attractive.
In a city of more than 10 million people, the green, tree-lined avenues of the centre and the vast mall are a relatively pleasant island in a soup of even worse pollution.
There is only one drawback. In this urban idyll there is nowhere for Delhi's vast population. They are forced to live outside, with Lutyen's Delhi planted calmly in the middle like the eye at the centre of a storm.
Incredibly, much to the disgust of the Delhi authorities, the government wants to build new bungalows for members of parliament and other VIPs. And because it has decreed there should be no further development in the LBZ it wants to build them on the polo grounds and the racecourse, moving the recreation facilities to the banks of the river Yamuna to the west.
Inevitably, the shanty dwellers who live there will be displaced and forced to drift elsewhere.
Hanwant Rai Suri, former president of the Institute of Town Planners of India is outraged. 'Why in this day and age have five-acre [two-hectare] bungalows for anyone?' he asks. 'Why should these people get big homes for themselves and their wives only? In this country the bigger the family the smaller the space they have to live in.
'They should build smaller bungalows in the LBZ or put the VIPs in flats. They can't give away the racecourse. We need to conserve these green lungs.' Environmentalists are not all behind him on the question of building more bungalows in the LBZ, although some would agree the existing monster homes could be divided into multi-family residences.
A senior planner from the Delhi authority suggested the politicians should go and live in the poorer suburbs. 'It will help them understand the problems of the city if they stay outside the prime localities.' It might also make it harder to get to parliament in a hurry in case of a three-line whip.
But India is a country where politicians have taken to staying in their official bungalows long after they have left office, where a state chief minister appoints his wife as his successor, when forced to resign to face corruption charges. That way he can keep the chief minister's palace.
The environmentalists and town planners can complain all they like.
But the betting is on a victory for the Urban Development Ministry. National level politicians always get priority.
Shame about the racecourse.
