FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 2 NOVEMBER 2006
A defeat for law
and order?
Although the
contours of the new order will take some time to emerge, it is clear that the
marathon effort made by the Supreme Court to get the government to enforce the
zoning rules in Delhi has failed. The sense of failure was palpable in the observations
made by Chief Justice Sabharwal when he took leave of the case and set a date
for the next hearing that was just beyond his date of retirement. Anyone in the
government who believes that government is about the enforcement of law and
order must surely share this sense of defeat. But there must be some in the
government – the legislators of Delhi state and city, for instance, who think
that the defeat of law was the triumph of democracy. The traders who came out
and blocked the roads would share that sense of triumph – and would feel that
theirs was a just cause and that their win was the triumph of justice. But the
resident of those colonies who has seen his house being engulfed by shops and
road cluttered up by shoppers’ cars – the man for whom the battle was fought
and lost – will feel bitter that the government has so lightly gone back on the
promise, implicit in its regulations, that his home ambience would be protected
from grabbing hands of commerce.
These emotions
are the result of an impasse that no one sees a way out of: it is necessary to
leave the emotions aside and ask ourselves why the constitutional democratic
machinery that was set up to deal with precisely cases of this sort – cases of
conflict of interest amongst citizens – has failed. For every party involved,
the answer would lie in blaming someone or the other; but blame carries no
lessons and can lead to no improvement. The failure was and is implicit in the
regulations – they fly in the face of reality, and reality has blown them away.
The truth is
that the relative mix of commercial, industrial, residential and other
activities in a city changes over time, and that a development plan, however
carefully formulated, however cleverly interpreted, will sooner or later prove
unenforceable. The only plan that can work is one which embodies the
possibility of a continuous, orderly, lawful change in land use. Regulations
must incorporate flexibility. The separation of residential and commercial uses
carries in itself the seeds of failure. The failure may come creepingly in the
form of exceptions for lawyers, doctors and other worthies; or it may come in
the form of wholesale sealings. But it is inevitable. The first thing to do is
to do away with this distinction, and to replace it with a distinction between
uses that are and are not disruptive of others’ peace.
One disruption
that is rapidly gaining ground is traffic. India is in the grip of growth; and
as everywhere else, growth leads to proliferation of noisy, smelly traffic. Governments’
favourite solution for it is to build ever more high-capacity arteries. But
those arteries inevitably start and end up in congested areas and simply shift
the congestion. It would be far better to maximize the vehicle moving capacity
of roads, essentially by two means. One is to phase out slower vehicles:
bullock carts are thankfully gone, but auto rickshaws must be replaced by
something faster and less polluting before too long. The other is to take
parked vehicles off roads. Residences, offices and factories must be made to
provide for parking within for the vehicles associated with them.
Whilst more
sensible rules are required, they will do nothing to decongest neighbourhoods
that were built in another age and for a traffic level that is forever gone. And
yet, it is heartbreaking to see the piecemeal destruction of historic
neighbourhoods in the old cities, for instance of Delhi and Lucknow. In such
environments, more drastic solutions are urgently necessary. There would have
to be severe restrictions on traffic; large areas must be converted to
pedestrian precincts. And they must be accompanied by extensive parking areas
not too far from such precincts. Neither zoning restrictions nor declaration of
heritage zones is enough for old cities; they need more careful, more
continuous preservative activity.
Soon after he
came to power, the Prime Minister had promised the metros that he would give hundreds
of crores to solve their problems. Before he showers his bounty, however, he
should surely invest some resources into seeing that it will be used sensibly. Delhi
has shown the bankruptcy of our traditional thinking about urban land use; the
government should first overhaul its thinking before it starts doing something
about urban problems.
