[in-enaction] enaction: Petition before the PM, Delhi Metro (and others in the making)

| petition circulating. some of these issues are
| jaded, having been around since the late eighties
| at least. the 'take the metro underground' plea
| apart, we quite enjoyed the non-plannerly solutions
| proposed. some of which might still work.
|
| also interesting (and quite apart from the solutions
| implied throughout), we enjoy the Mumfordian reference


PETITION BEFORE THE HONOURABLE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA

Hon'ble Dr Manmohan Singhji
Prime Minister of India
South Secretariat
New Delhi

Respected Pradhan Mantriji,

Construction of Delhi's Metro Rail Project is a major
achievement of India's Railway Engineers. They have
made important contributions towards project
implementation by introduction of innovative
technology and systematized project management.

However, these laudable achievements are completely
overshadowed by the project's lack of interface with
the urban fabric of the city. Major part of the
project, about 205 km long, a distance from here to
Agra, comprises of massive, elevated rail tracks,
guaranteed to deface the surrounding cityscape. With
the completion of 44 km of phase I of these tracks,
the character and reputation of Delhi as a symbol of
India's heritage is already degraded. Addition of
another 161 km of such rail tracks will so destroy the
city's character, that people traveling on major roads
of Delhi will cease to experience buildings and trees
altogether. Instead day in day out, wherever the
people go, they will be overwhelmed with rail tracks
on their heads all over the city. Known as a "City of
Monuments", Delhi could well acquire the adage: "City
of Serpentine Concrete" in the near future.

DMRC project is a massive, Rs.40,000 crore undertaking
based on the longest ever conceived elevated,
metrorail network in the world. Such projects, the
world over in domestic societies, are subjected to
environmental evaluation prior to implementation.
Citizen participation is invariably ensured, even
welcomed as a necessary prerequisite. An exercise in
citizen participation has never been conducted by any
Local Authority here in Delhi. On the contrary, DMRC
is known to follow a hush-hush approach. Routes are
published only after contracts for their construction
are awarded. A finalized map showing all the routes of
IIIrd and IVth phases is even today impossible to
obtain.

It is regrettable that the project has been planned as
a stand alone transport system, detached from the
Master Plan. Even worse, the Delhi Master Plan 2021 is
now amended to accommodate one kilometer wide strip of
land of dense, commercial use all along the rail
corridor. Amazingly, this 205 km. long strip
encompasses land equivalent to half the city of
Chandigarh, making it a thoughtless Sub Sity with
Metrocity. The logic of Urban Planning has been turned
on its head. Instead of fitting a transport system
into a well organized land use framework, land-uses
are now arbitrarily altered to chase a transport
system. By ignoring imperatives of planned urban
development in favour of commercial interests of the
DMRC system, citizens of Delhi will now continue to
suffer the consequences of misconceived developmental
policies that result in haphazard urban growth.

Delhi as India's Capital enshrines and projects the
country's heritage of its civilizational values. It
would be ironic id Delhi's image of a cradle of
millennia of history is obliterated by an ugly
colossus of concrete based on 19th century technology.
And that too at a time when India is fast emerging as
a formidable reservoir of intellectual capabilities on
the world stage.

It is a matter of gratification that the Prime
Ministers of India have always taken keen personal
interest in the planning of Delhi. Pandit Jawahar Lal
Nehru will ever be remembered for initiating the
Master Plan of Delhi, Mrs Gandhi for intervening to
replan the Connaught Place Extension of New Delhi, and
Shri Rajiv Gandhi for ensuring that the DMRC's North
South corridor remained underground across Lutyens
Delhi.

While substantial damage is already inflicted on Delhi
by the elevated rail tracks of the first two phases of
the DMRC scheme, your personal intervention is
urgently requested to ensure that Phase III and IV of
the system are modified to exclude elevated tracks
altogether. The whole system must be kept underground.

I.................................... hereby petition
the Honourable Prime Minister of India to ensure that
the IIIrd and IVth Phases of DMRC's Metro Rail system
are kept entirely underground.

Signature:
Date:
(label with name, address, phone numbers and CoA
registration number affixed)