Zaif’s former employees were lucky, but thousands of others have not had the same good fortune. Along the Mehrauli Gurgaon road stands MG-1, MG-2 and dozens of other shops, and multi-storeyed shopping complexes draped in large blue tarpaulin sheets to cover broken plate glass windows and shattered doorways. No one knows where the thousands who worked in them have gone, what the abrupt loss of their jobs has done to their lives and how they’re coping with this catastrophe. But what is infinitely worse is that no one seems to care.
The media has portrayed this as a struggle between traders and residents’ welfare associations which have been campaigning for the cleaning up of their neighbourhoods. Since trader is a bad word in what is still a society dominated by feudal values, their sympathy has, on balance, been with the residents. But not one newspaper or TV channel has devoted space to the impact the demolitions are having on workers in the unorganised sector.
So great is the insensitivity to the poor in this city that in the battle royal that is developing before the Supreme Court over the Delhi state government’s right to amend the Master Plan, the contenders are only the traders’ associations on the one hand and resident welfare associations on the other. No one is representing the poor and insecure unorganised sector workers for whom the outcome of this battle means life or death.
Yet this is the first thing that anyone should have been thinking about. On an average, each shop in Delhi employs four to five persons directly. In addition, the shops are serviced by an unorganised sector transport system that employs at least one person per shop. Finally, the shops employ tailors, sweepers, car park attendants, electricians, carpenters, plumbers and others. All in all, each shop provides employment to anywhere between eight and ten persons. Thus, if the Supreme Court decides to overrule the revision of the Master Plan that the state administration announced last week, up to 3.5 million workers employed by about 350,000 shops which have sprung up over the years on the ground floors and basements of houses in residential areas will find themselves out of work. In a country where there are not enough jobs being created for all who come into the job market every year, this would be a catastrophe.
The revised Master Plan will only mitigate and not prevent the catastrophe for it only makes provisions for shops on the ground floors and basements of the 118 roads that were selected for the purpose by the Master Plan 2001. It also does nothing to prevent the continued closure of the multi-storey complexes that have sprung up all over Delhi.
The state government’s pusillanimity can be traced back to the many cautionary notices that it has been sent by the Union law ministry not to enrage the czars of the Supreme Court. But what it reflects is the complete failure of the Centre, the city and the court to understand that it is the Master Plan 2001 that is at fault and not the people who have set up the commercial complexes. The Plan was intended to regulate the development of the city from 1981 to 2001 and was itself prepared only in 1990. It is therefore already 16 years out of date. In 1990, India was still a slow-growing, struggling, dirigiste economy. No one could have anticipated the foreign exchange crisis in 1990, the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, and the explosion of growth and development of an affluent middle class that has occurred since then.
This only highlights the fact that laws based upon the urban master plans are not like laws against theft or murder. They seek to regulate growth on the basis of assumptions about the future that are more often than not overtaken by actual developments. They, therefore, presuppose constant revision and regularisation. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Mehrauli Gurgaon road. In 1990, it was lined with sleepy farmhouses. Today, it’s the main artery between Delhi and the rapidly growing and extremely affluent new urban complex surrounding Gurgaon. The development of shops and multi-storey complexes along it was not only inevitable but necessary. It filled a lacuna in the city’s Master Plan—it did not violate it in anything but the dead letter of the law.
The Master Plan needs amendment, but not all of it. Only the parts that deal with mixed use have fallen far behind the actual development of the city. In these, the principle to follow is to allow as much of it as there is demand for within the parameters of the need to maintain law and order and unobstructed circulation. This is what makes the cities of Europe and older parts of Indian cities like Colaba in Mumbai so eminently liveable. The best course for the Delhi government would be to adopt theBJP’s proposal to allow mixed use in all streets of more than 40 feet width and to regularise the commercial use of the Mehrauli Gurgaon road.
