Gurgaon: A Travelogue

The other day, I had the occasion to take some people on a guided tour of Gurgaon, the new city that has sprouted up south of Delhi.

After passing Indira Gandhi’s dacha – which, I pointed out, is now well within city limits – we took the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road.

As someone who has been regularly traversing this route for more than 20 years, I pointed out to my guests how, after “liberalization,” the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road has become a “Main Street” of sorts, with thousands of fancy shops lining both sides.

This time, however, all the shops were closed: The Metro. They are building the metro link to Guragon as an overhead line. They are digging and putting up pillars all along Main Street!

And the horror story didn’t end. After crossing the Delhi border and entering Haryana, the first little town you come across is Sikandarpur. The pillars of the metro have been built right through Sikandarpur’s narrow Main Street! All cars have to by-pass Sikandarpur. There are signs saying the “market is open,” but no one goes.

And so we were finally in Gurgaon. An almighty mess. After some strange twists and turns we were back on the old Mehrauli-Gurgaon road, the part that connects with the Notional Highway to Jaipur.

A few years ago, they had screwed up this vital highway connector road by allowing a dozen or so shopping malls to be built alongside. So now this has already become Main Street. And the metro rail pillars are being built right bang in the middle of this Main Street!

Why not build it underground?

The politician, who is not spending his own money, will say, “It costs too much.”

Then why not make the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road into a 8-laned proper Main Street, with wide footpaths and plenty of parking – why, that would cost even less.

And does the politician, who is spending other people’s money on other people, ever think of the huge losses being borne by the owners of all the swanky shops? Is this grossly unjust “private cost” being factored in?

And so we drove around Gurgaon. All the high rises. And all the broken streets. The shabby little markets. And then we stepped back. I took my guests a few kilometers down the Gurgaon-Faridabad road. We stopped at the edge of the plateau and stepped out to look and the tremendous expanse of empty land that greeted our eyes. Land from here to there to there. Land, land, and more land. And in the middle of all this open space, some tall housing towers have been built, crammed together. “This is Gurgaon,” I told them.

And sure it was. On the way back we could see that Gurgaon was nothing more than tower housing amidst abundant land. There is enough space to build bungalows for all. After all, the netas and baboos live in bungalows on one acre plots in the city centre. Why can’t the people live in bungalows 30 km outside?

My guests thanked me profusely for the enlightening tour. We went for lunch to Red Coral on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road, but this excellent restaurant was closed: the metro.

Maybe they are just trying to drive property prices down. If the entire stretch had become a real Main Street, with an underground connection, property prices would have soared.

Predatory State?