What’s at the heart of another New Delhi?

The Rashtrapati Bhavan, seen in the background, and other Grade I structures from the Lutyens’ era, will be spared in the Central Vista Redevelopment Project. Pic/Nishad Alam

Trees will be everywhere, in every garden however small it be, and along the sides of every roadway, and Imperial Delhi will be in the main a sea of foliage. It may be called a city, but it is going to be quite different from any city that the world has known (sic)…," said Captain George Swinton, Chairman of the Town-Planning Committee, in his vision for the new capital of British India in 1912. Despite a World War and an exhausted treasury of his Colonial nation, some portion of this vision got translated two decades later. The trees are now being plucked to fish another Delhi from giant, dusty craters in the artery of India's capital city.

"One of the Prime Minister's dream projects is to reconstruct those buildings built between 1911 and 1927 like North Block, South Block, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament building," said Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs at a public event of Delhi Development Authority in September 2019. This dream that Puri attributed to PM Narendra Modi is now called the Central Vista Redevelopment Project. It will overhaul the visual and spatial character of the space around the nearly three-kilometre-long road with the President's House on one end and the India Gate on the other in Central Delhi.

Centuries-old trees are being felled around Lutyens, which is being dug up to make room for new buildings and tunnels. Some of the heritage trees will be transplanted, but environmentalists claim this is a highly expensive exercise. Pic/Nishad Alam

"The original plan of 1912 Lutyens, plotted the crossing of Rajpath and Janpath as a cultural hub. Now, here too, government buildings will come up," says historian Swapna Liddle.

Designed by British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, Central Vista comprised secretariat offices in North and South Blocks flanking the Viceroy's Home (now Rashtrapati Bhavan, President's House), along Rajpath (then Kingsway), Imperial Records Department (The National Archives of India), and later, a Parliament House.

The Master Plan for Central Vista, New Delhi 2019, designed by Gujarat-based architectural firm HCP Design, Planning, and Management Ltd. Pic courtesy/hcp.co.in

The Rajpath-Janpath intersection was studded with cultural institutions like National Museum, an annexe building to The National Archives, and Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts by regimes of democratic India post 1947. Now, most of the buildings from independent India are in line to be demolished for the Rs 20,000-crore Central Vista Redevelopment Project. The newest among them is Jawaharlal Nehru Bhawan, which hosts the office of the Ministry of External Affairs, and is barely a decade old. It was built at a cost of over Rs 200 crore, and is also a green building complying with environmental efficiency norms.

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The Lutyens' era buildings, excluding the President's House, will become museums - the Parliament House set to be ‘Museum of Democracy' with a new, bigger Parliament constructed on the opposite side. A centralised office for all the ministries, new residences for the Prime Minister and Vice President, and underground tunnels connecting these critical buildings, are among the new constructions being planned. The total area to be redeveloped is 86 acres.

AG Krishna Menon, architect, urban planner, conservation consultant

"When you recast something to a new form, you want a clean break from the past," says social anthropologist Sarover Zaidi. "The plan is trying to present the idea that this is some kind of a new India that we're planning and it has nothing to with the other parts - Colonial, Nehruvian Socialism, etc - that feed into the symbolic notion of the country."

The Central Vista Project has been opposed and critiqued by citizens and specialised professionals - environmentalists, historians, architects, lawyers, urban planners - for bulldozing laws and due processes and has also been opposed by way of a bunch of petitions and hundreds of written objections, filed all the way up to the Supreme Court of India.

Kanchi Kohli, who works in the environment, forest and biodiversity governance at the Centre for Policy Research, says the long-term environmental impacts of the project have been underplayed

Two days before the Coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, the land-use pattern on six plots in the Central Vista area was changed to favour the government's wish - from recreational (public) land to government offices. Land use patterns - residential, commercial, recreational/ green, etc - are defined in the 20-year Master Plans by Delhi Development Authority, the city's nodal land management agency. "The Master Plan for Delhi, 2021, is a legal document like the Constitution. How is it being violated? By changing the land-usage plans," says AG Krishna Menon, architect, urban planner, conservation consultant, who is among those who petitioned the Supreme Court against the project.

The process for awarding the contract to the consultant architectural firm has also been questioned in Supreme Court. Gujarat-based architectural firm HCP Design, Planning, and Management Ltd, headed by Bimal Patel, has taken charge of the project.

The Parliament House, which opened in 1927, will function as a museum. A new Parliament will be constructed on the opposite side. Pic/Getty Images

There was no design competition, as is the norm in public projects, but a bidding process that asked firms to have a minimum turnover and technical capabilities that only a few would possess. It also demanded an earnest money deposit of Rs 50 lakh. Only six Indian firms could bid, and HCP, the one selected, had quoted the highest consultancy fee of Rs 230 crore.

The apex court ultimately dismissed all petitions, with only one of the judges in the three-judge bench noting violations of due processes. "This project has still not gone to the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, which is a requirement to build anything in the NDMC area," Menon says.

Swapna Liddle

An online petition, An Appeal to Fellow Citizens: Save Rajpath, Save Delhi!, floated by architect Madhav Raman questions the environmental impact of long-term construction activity, tree felling and transplantation, water and waste management needs of the project.

Environmental clearances have also been smoothened out for the project. "There are already allegations of indiscriminate dumping of demolition waste on the Yamuna floodplains, with little oversight or action," says Kanchi Kohli, who works on environment, forest and biodiversity governance at the Centre for Policy Research. "The components of the projects have been broken up in such a way that either the environmental impacts have been underplayed or will never be assessed simply because the law does not require them to do so," she says.

For instance, by February 2020, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) had sought environmental clearance only for the new Parliament building. It later clubbed the clearance with a growing list of planned constructions in the area. The Environmental Impact Assessment - done by Kadam Environmental Consultants, a consultant of the CPWD - was "designed more to justify the need for the project, rather than studying its ecological viability," Kohli says.

The area also has protected environmental heritage. "NDMC notified heritage list of 2009 includes Central Vista Precincts. Rajpath, water channels on its either side, green plantations are all in protected heritage," says Liddle. This area is presently dug up, trees are being felled, and public access, including photography, is prohibited.

Despite ongoing opposition and petitions, PM Modi went ahead with a bhoomi pujan to kick-start work on the site in December 2020.

In April 2020, India, including its capital city, was ripped by a contagious second wave of COVID-19. Health facilities were inadequate and unavailable, affecting critical essentials, such as medical oxygen, hospital beds, intensive care, essential medicines, ambulance and funeral services. While the national capital was put under a lockdown to check infection transmission in April, the Central Vista Redevelopment Project was declared an essential service. The CPWD secured permission from the Deputy Commissioner of Police, who answers to the Union Home Ministry, and arrangements for construction workers to live at the site in makeshift camps were made.

There are two kinds of built heritage involved here. One is heritage buildings, the other is the heritage precinct," says Liddle. The heritage buildings of the Central Vista area are protected by the heritage clause of the Delhi Building Byelaws. Buildings such as Rashtrapati Bhavan, North and South Block, National Archives and the Central Vista Precincts are Grade 1 Heritage as per the NDMC list of heritage protected by the Byelaws, meaning they can be altered only under a narrow set of conditions with due process. Few buildings like National Museum are not notified as heritage by law, and are hence, unprotected. "Many buildings constructed after Independence are iconic. Heritage doesn't end in 1947," says Liddle. She says they, too, should be protected.

While the buildings from this category have been spared demolition, the Heritage Precincts of Rajpath are being tampered with.

Heritage is about the entire space and how people have interacted with it, environment, trees that are close to 100 years old and the sensitive water drainage, says Kohli from CPR. "None of that has found due assessments or prioritisation while ordering land use change or environmental approvals." She also notes that heritage trees will be moved under the guise of transplantation, which is a highly expensive and scientifically intensive exercise. Even then, there is no guarantee that these will survive.

In an interview to a national daily, environmentalist and filmmaker Pradip Krishen also noted the tree cost of this project, citing the HCP Design's assertions to stick to the ‘palette' of trees that Edwin Lutyens planted, while ignoring more recent, but important trees of the area like "chir (cheed) pine, maulshri and bistendu, which are a distinctive part of the landscape around Vijay Chowk".

The contents of buildings facing demolition are heritage too, say experts. There is little information on where the contents of National Museum and National Archives will go, plans for access in the period of construction, and their subsequent relocation. "This material is consulted by students, researchers, scholars. If these places remain shut in the intermediate period between demolishing the old building and setting up a new one, will all research stop?" asks Liddle. "A building has traditions attached to it," she says, citing that the Constitution was drafted in the Parliament and the building has a history from pre-independence, too. "The new building cannot have the same historical associations."

Architect Menon echoes a similar thought: "If the North and South Blocks are going to be emptied and converted into museums, it does not remain heritage. You have taken the soul out of heritage'

The Vista plan has high-rises planned to house all government ministries in one place. "Changing form might change the rules of access," says social anthropologist Zaidi. "A smaller, older building has a notion of parts to public access. If you make a new and shiny building, you deploy more security to protect it. Intimidation can be built into the design."

Experts are also mulling if updating the given architecture would have been a better idea, than demolitions and new constructions. "For example, London's Parliament Westminster, that's older than our Parliament, is under restoration. They are not making it a museum, but upgrading it," says Liddle.

Closer home, the Karnataka High Court, a century old heritage building was set for demolition in 1982. Upon a feasibility study catalysed by citizen petitions, it was found to be safe for use, and the spatial shortages were augmented by building additional courts around it. "My job as a conservation architect is to preserve architecture. The buildings being demolished in Central Vista Project are not beyond repair," says Menon, who had participated in the viability assessment process of Karnataka High Court, as part of INTACH.

"Heritage is not something that's a hundred years old. It is to conserve memory. What we were, what we did, is conserved," he says.

But Delhi's heritage has already been changing. "In the last few years, India Gate has become a more inaccessible space. More security, more spaces cordoned off," says Zaidi. Liddle has a similar memory: "I have been familiar with the India Gate area for 30 years, and it has become increasingly formal after the war memorial ate into a large part of the erstwhile open area."

But, buildings also signify power, says Zaidi, citing this redevelopment as an attempt to recast national spaces and symbols. "Delhi, and in it, Lutyens Delhi, is the most important symbol."