VIEW OF THE SLUMS IN THE FIRST MASTERPLAN OF DELHI Mahalakshmi HV Shikha Puri Somrita Bandyopadhayay
FORMULATION OF THE MASTER PLAN Delhi was to be the first city to become a part of the Independent India In 1962, an ambitious master plan was formulated to create a capital city free from slums The master plan was formulated by eight British and American consultants from the Ford foundation, headed by Albert Mayer. They were inspired by the Garden city movement to bring order to the chaos of Delhi s urban sprawl GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT A method of urban planning formulated by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1896. Howard s garden city concept combined the town and country in order to provide the working class an alternative to working on farms or crowded, unhealthy cities. Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.
THE IDEA OF NEW DELHI Delhi was to become the role model for the development of India Six ring towns would grow from Delhi s periphery, each with its own economic, social and cultural ties with the central city. Each town should hit its targets for population, manufacturing and employment for each of the next 30 years of urban growth. Beauty should pervade the design of all public and private buildings: modern industrial buildings in attractively landscaped grounds, pleasing shopping centres, simple and beautifully designed schools and homes. The city was to incorporate all the languages and all the regions of India. For Delhi s planners, the key to implementing this vision was centralisation.
MIGRATION CRISIS In the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, 350,000 Muslims fled Delhi for Pakistan, while 500,000 non-muslims arrived in the city in 1947 alone in what was termed as the greatest migration in history. It crippled the city s infrastructure as the city turned into a haven for refugees.
FORMATION OF THE DDA In 1957, the Delhi Development Authority was established to guide the process of development in the city. In 1962, it came up with the first Master plan. DDA amassed more than 50,000 acres of land for its various construction and redevelopment projects. The entire city was converted into a public project to build the imperial capital On the other hand, Delhi s major developers, who had constructed colonies through the south of the city, were no longer allowed to build. Very soon the DDA was overwhelmed with the scale of activities required for the current load on the city and almost went into bankruptcy It promised todevelop 30,000 acres for residential use, but delivered only 13,000. A mere 10% of the DDA s housing plots were designated for its low-income group between 1960 and 1970
RISE OF SLUMS IN DELHI Each year, more than 200,000 new migrants arrived in Delhi from the surrounding countryside. Tent cities that first appeared in the early days of independence grew into larger neighbourhoods, as residents built up from kutcha houses of mud and wood to pukka houses of brick and stone. Relatives joined their families, built new rooms, and Delhi s periphery steadily urbanised outward. It had become a partition city, and its migrants had become residents.
THE NEW MASTERPLAN DMC has drawn up a schemes for relocation of the squatter settlements in areas not too far away from major work centres. Precautionary below quality things to maintain a low rent Structures Facilities as per density of planned layout Space standards A relaxation of by laws is also suggested to enable such construction Space standards for schools, parks, streets, etc to be at par with Sub division regulations
In case of a village overtaken by urban development should not be left as such since they have a tendency to develop into slums. Instead, they should be integrated into the neighbourhood. Advisory integration to larger neighbourhoods with a mixture of different Social groups Income groups Housing types Reasonable areas to be earmarked in several zones for LIG migrating to Delhi.
Large scale demolition cannot be done, due to financial burden involved on public bodies, To keep the slum dwellers near the work place, it was recommended that major effort be made to improve the slums rather the demolition. In case of slum rehousing, individual plots of 80 sq. yards were to be given.
CRITICISM The DDA refused to recognise slums. Under its public ownership of the city, slums were illegal, and their residents were invaders. In many cases, the authority moved to evict and relocate these illegal occupants to make way for its new projects. In others, Delhi s slum-dwellers were left unacknowledged. The DDA trapped them in a double bind: it outlawed informal construction, but failed to provide formal accommodation to replace it. Even today new slums continue to crop up, housing roughly half of Delhi s 18 million residents.
Providing for the urban poor was never part of the DDA s vision. Delhi s planners never adapted to the new reality. The city s planners buried their heads in the original masterplan, and continued to pursue their original targets. The biggest failure was that it took 30 years for the next plan to come. From the outset, Delhi s planners have imagined a vibrant capital city with ordered growth and universal housing. Yet in doing so, they planned for a city that did not exist, and they left the city s actual residents without a plan.
SOURCES The First Master plan Of Delhi, 1962 https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/20/story-cities-23-delhi-india-modernistfantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lutyens%27_delhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/garden_city_movement http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpuprojects/drivers_urb_change/urb_infrastructure/pdf_land%20tenure/naerus_esf_c hakrabarti_delhi_informal_settlements.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.660.153&rep=rep1&type=p df