The City Beautiful Chandigarh: Lessons for the City Capital and City Commercial!

 Thanks to huge infrastructural bottlenecks, a drive can be quite stressful anywhere across the country. Ruminating cows, needless overtaking, screeching horns and a startling wannabe teens cricket team in the middle of the street is not all too surprising. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkatta; the reservoirs of modern India, the story is everywhere the same. Or so did I thought! Until I visited the City Beautiful. A drive down the Le Coubusier designed capital city, Chandigarh, left me overwhelmed.

Chandigarh, derives its name from Chandi Devi, whose temple is situated in the adjacent Panchkula district. Also, ‘Chandi ki Var’ a ballad poem by Guru Gobind Singh, the first Guru of the Sikhs gives Chandigarh, the word ‘Chandi’ in her name. And the word Chandi in Hindi also means silver! The word Chandigarh is a conjugation of two words, ‘Chandi’ and ‘Garh’, and literally means the fortress of Devi Chandi. And the fortress of the Divine, it indeed is! With its well-manicured lawns, sprawling green, expansive multi-laned roads and huge omnipresent road-side Ashokas, Deodars and Euclyptus, the city retains its spacious heavenly aura with materialist modern day amenities present in abundance. The affluence of the city can be gauged from the presence of international brands, huge malls, multiplexes and not to forget the exhorbitant land rates! Just an acre of land I was told, can cost upto 6-8 crores! Whopping, unreal and of course, unaffordable! After all, it is an expensive affair living in the fortress of the Divine, more so when taxed by mortals like us!

Chandigarh is a new city with historic roots. After the sad partition of India in 1947, the  province of Punjab needed a new capital. Temporarily, Shimla was decided as the capital of undivided Punjab. But the need for new center was strongly felt by the then Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Envisioning the concept of Chandigarh, he famously said to the architects that with Chandigarh, India will present to the world a new city that will symbolize the constitutional aspiration of a new India liberated from the archaic traditions and past. In short, the dream was to make Chandigarh an architectural expression of the confidence and reposte of the new emerging India.

The initial architectural plan was made by Albert Mayer, an associate of Mathew Novicki. Unfortunately due to his death in a road accident, the great architect had to be replaced by the legendary Swiss architect Le Corbusier who along with his team of Maxwell Fry, Jane B Drew, Pierre Jeanneret and the young promising Indian team of M.N. Sharma, U.E. Chowdhary and Aditya Prakash laid the plan for the new capital of Punjab in 1951.

With a  human development index of .86 and a population of around 100,000 and the highest per capita income in India, Chandigarh the capital of Punjab and Haryana, is one of the most well laid out cities in the country. The city that was initially designed to home some 500,000 habitants has today over double the population and is one of the highly densely populated city with 7900 habitants per square kilometers. Yet, the signs of infrastructural fabric withering away is far from visible!

With the symbol of an open hand, the city of Le Corbusier, continues to welcome government offices, people & corporations alike with her open arms. The capital of Punjab & Haryana and itself a Union Territory, it holds some15 medium to large Industrial units, has over 2500 small scale industries. The Chandigarh IT Park hosts the best names in the IT sector and continues to retain top spot as the ‘Emerging Outsourcing & IT Services Destinations worldwide.’

 Chandigarh also apparently has the largest number of per capita vehicles and yet is consistently rated as the cleanest city in the country.

So what is it in its architecture that despite her burgeoning population, increasing office and bureaucratic presence, Chandigarh continues to remain clean, green and spacious. Perhaps the reason resonates in the policy making and planning that was subsequently followed by development.

Ambitiously dreamt by India’s first PM, Pandit Nehru and painstakingly envisioned by Le Corbusier, the city is divided in sixty sectors of 800 by 1200 each covering a total area of 114 km square. The highly sophisticated 7 lane system of circulation in the city, successfully mitigates the menace of traffic and preserves the habitant zones from the nuisance of traffic. Interestingly, city has no sector  numbered 13. Seems like even the scientific designers had a touch of superstition! Each sector is well equipped with public amenities, cultural centres and green spaces and there are habitation zones for the rich and for the middle class bourgeoise alike. Interestingly the central sector number 17 situated at the heart of the city iis the principal centres of commerce, restaurant and bars. The infrastructural burden on sector 17 is supported by ancillary commercial centres in sector 35. Also all the other sectors have their fair share of everyday malls, magazines, daily necessities and schools.

Compare this with the 'planned' unplanned development in India’s unarguably very important cities: Delhi & Mumbai. Delhi with a population of around twenty million habitants, 1500 km square and a population density of around 12,000 per kilometer square is an infrastructural nightmare. Mumbai, the commercial capital and significant contributor to GDP and an average per capita income of over $ 1000, is an even more gory story. Millions of homeless sleeping on the streets, living painful lives at the mercy of police, gangs and mafia, it indeed is a deplorable and grim picture of an emerging economy. Is unplanned development, unmitigated migration and policy failure the genus of these modern day soulless jungles of concrete?

Does this development and infrastructural layout in the City Beautiful have any lessons for the Commercial and Political capital of India?