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Land rush spoils Delhi’s enviable green records
As a trainee reporter back in the mid-1990s, I remember
being asked to get inputs for a story debating whether Green was a passing fad
or a permanent agenda. By then, Delhi had already discovered the PIL route.
NGOs and activists started filing Public Interest Litigations (PIL) on issues
such as the dirty Yamuna, vehicles spewing pollutants, construction inside the
Delhi ridge and hazardous industries
fouling city’s air and groundwater.
The judiciary did not disappoint. The Delhi high court
stopped the DDA from building a road inside the Vasant Kunj forest that had got
legal protection as a reserve forest in 1994. The Supreme Court ordered the
government to clean the river, introduce unleaded fuel for vehicles, and
relocate industrial units out of the city.
It was not easy implementing these orders. Riots broke out
in the streets as the city government went about shutting down illegal
industries. Owners of buses, taxis and three-wheelers took their vehicles off
the road in protest against the switchover to cleaner-burning Compressed
Natural Gas (CNG) and Delhi went without public transport for weeks. But the
strong court mandate did not allow the government to buckle.
By 2002, the Capital’s CNG-run public transport became the
largest such green fleet in the world. Hazardous factories were also pushed out
of city limits. A series of fiascos, however, made the task of reviving the
Yamuna appear more difficult than cleaning up the Augean stable. But it seemed
that the green agenda was here to stay.
Even election manifestos started promising clean air, fresh
water and more greenery.
Yet, environmental concerns could never temper the city’s
insatiable hunger for land. India’s most densely populated city, Delhi is short
of 1.13 million housing units. For half of its population, this means living in
slums or poorly provisioned illegal settlements. Many of these colonies have
come up on the riverbed and on the ridge forestland.
Three months to Assembly elections, chief minister Sheila
Dikshit in a report released last week justifiably claimed credit for
introducing CNG, opening waste disposal plants and bringing birds back to the
city. But the damage to the Yamuna floodplain and the ridge forests by
regularising illegal habitation were also passed off as achievements. Call it
administrative insensitivity or political compulsion, the government has a
reason for going soft on the city’s poor who have little choice.
But how can it defend a series of mega sarkari constructions
on ecologically protected areas? Every time a structure comes up on the Yamuna
floodplain, it is regularised as the last exception. Yet, new ones keep coming
up. Delhi Secretariat, Metro stations and loco-sheds, Ring Road bypass and
DTC’s Millennium bus depot are all owned by the state.
The ridge board’s biggest challenge is to protect the forest
from the government itself. Large tracts of natural forest have given way to
landscaped public parks. Regular dumping of construction waste by the DDA has
converted parts of the ridge into graveyards. Even the army started building
housing quarters on forestland without permission. No wonder that almost 40% of
the Delhi ridge forests have disappeared.
Last month, HT had reported how the Public Works Department
was constructing a road inside Asola sanctuary in the southern ridge without a
statutory clearance from the National Board for Wildlife. Just as the National
Green Tribunal ordered the PWD to stop construction, the government came up
with another plan to build a hospital inside the Chhattarpur stretch of the urban
woodlands.
With half of the world already living in cities, pressure on
scarce urban land resources will only increase. Delhi is no exception. But the
answer is in redeveloping and repurposing existing areas rather than eating
into our precious ridge and riverbed. Because, without air and water security,
land alone will not hold Delhi’s growing dreams.
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