Delhi Beat: Traffic Snarls!

Published on Unboxed Writers on 3rd May 2011

A neighbour’s teenaged children leave home every evening for about an hour when it’s time for him to come home. Visits to friends, trips to the market, or to the sports complex, are all scheduled around this time to avoid Dad, who comes home spitting and snarling as a result of having battled Delhi’s office rush hour traffic on his 20 kilometre daily work commute, ever since the driver quit his job a month ago. His wife wishes she could follow suit! The situation is worse for multiple income families where almost everyone is fit to be tied by the time they make it home!

As traffic-related problems rise exponentially in the Capital, driver woes have surpassed maid servant laments as the prime topic of conversation among Delhiites (a raw nerve for the commuters as well as for the members of their households), even as ‘traffic-talk’ has become the standard drawing room conversation. The incidence of road rage is the highest in NCR Delhi among all Indian cities, including as it does, numerous instances of street brawls, broken limbs, and not too long ago, even a murder! Parking space is another nightmare that Delhi’s denizens face regularly, be it within their own colonies, or outside.

Small wonder, when Delhi NCR, apart from its own population of about 19 million, and a population density of more than 9000 persons per square kilometres, also houses an extensive expatriate population, and accommodates thousands of commuters from outlying areas who come to work in the city every day. Delhi has a car density of 85 cars per 1000 persons—roughly 10 times the national average, and 1992 kilometres of road per 100 square kilometres, as against the nation’s average of 74! And these figures don’t come anywhere near explaining the chaos that reigns on the Capital’s roads 24×7.


For one, they do not spell out the fact that most car-owning households have almost as many cars as members. The entry of all the automotive majors of the world into India post-liberalization, coupled with the fact that Delhi is near the top in the tally of per capita incomes and has arguably the highest incidence of bandwagon hopping, has spawned an upsurge in car-loans, and consequently, the number of cars. Nearly 3.5 lakh cars are added to the roads of the Capital every year!

Second, they cannot depict the fact that flyovers that have literally mushroomed all over the capital, have merely become fresh points of traffic congestion, not only because of the sheer volumes and numbers being added on a continuous basis, but also because during the peak rush hours, there are usually a couple of broken down trucks/ buses/ tempo carriers causing traffic snarls for miles and miles!

Further, the statistics do not capture the fact that since almost as much of NCR Delhi’s population lives in slums and ‘semi-rural’ settlements as in posh colonies, bungalows, mansions and apartment complexes, the traffic clogging its roads at all hours of the day and night has multifarious, heterogeneous elements, that turn the act of driving through it into a nightmare on wheels!

It is impossible to explain in terms of figures the proliferation of two-wheeler and three- wheeler passenger vehicles, and buses of all descriptions—DTC (both AC and non-AC) as well as private (school buses, tourist coaches, interstate buses and private stage carriages—yes, the rogue Blue Line buses, though officially phased out, still continue to ply nonchalantly, though in smaller numbers than before); not to mention the hoi polloi of cycle rickshaws, bicycles, RTVs, three-wheeler carriers, tempos, trucks, tractors, horse and bullock carts, occasional camels and elephants, construction cranes, cement mixers, dumpers, and tractors with wagons that populate the roads of Delhi. And they could be carrying anything—a load of potatoes or cabbages, a contingent of cars, livestock, garbage from colonies to the landfills, construction material, furniture, or even villagers en route to a political rally or a festive occasion!

All these diverse components of Delhi’s traffic ply blithely at their own varied, merry paces, regardless of frivolities such as traffic rules, red lights, lanes, overtaking norms, free left turns, and of others sharing the road with them! Enforcement of traffic rules seems to be an unheard-of concept (at least ever since Dr Kiran (Crane) Bedi was relieved of the charge of Delhi’s Traffic Police), and traffic cops have a field day, reeling in prime ‘catches’ for their ‘private collection’, especially around festival time. There have been observed instances of pedal-happy drivers brazenly jumping signals, sticking out their arms to pass a currency note to the traffic cop on duty with practised ease, without even bothering to slow down!

Plus, the state of the city’s infrastructure, be it roads or drainage, ensures that the first showers wash away major chunks of the best roads and flood what is left of them, leaving the increasingly congested traffic floundering on waterlogged rutted thoroughfares! It is not uncommon for a 10 kilometre commute to take as much as an hour in normal rush-hour traffic, and up to two hours on a rainy day!

The Metro is already overcrowded to the extent that guards have occasionally been observed stuffing in stray arms and legs sticking out of carriages, to enable the doors to close and the train to move! It is unlikely that the Metro, even when upgraded to its planned 200 km of track length as opposed to the present 100 km, would be enough for the commuter population of the city. The Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), which might have introduced some sort of method into the madness that is Delhi’s traffic, failed spectacularly at the inception and may not be given another chance.

The pot holes on the roads would be almost funny, if only they, amongst other reasons, had not earned for Delhi, the doubtful distinction of the slowest traffic in the country, with an average speed of 15 kmph (Mumbai comes second at 18 kmph). It seems wiser to either stay at home or walk to destinations less than 2-3 kilometres away, even if it means tying moistened handkerchiefs around the nose and mouth to filter out the noxious traffic fumes. The traffic travails also seem to have revived some variant of the purdah system, as women forced to negotiate the roads on foot muffle themselves in dupattas, stoles or scarves to minimize the damage to their skin and hair.

Delhi is crying out for better road infrastructure, a much larger Metro network and stringently enforced traffic rules. The vocabularies of those who drive regularly on the roads of the Capital are generally among the most colourful in the world, and it is not hard to see why!

Delhi Beat: The place to be

Published on Unboxed Writers on 26th April 2011

Netaji Subhash Place at Pitampura, flush by Wazirpur Depot on the Ring Road, is perhaps the only commercial complex in Delhi to felicitously combine the attributes of an office complex, shopping hub and food court. The complex, along with the expanse of assorted shops selling an eclectic mix of clothes, jewellery, street food of all kinds, sweets, household gadgets as also provision stores, realtors, automobile dealers, photographers, restaurants, bakeries, electronics, tuition bureaus, hobby classes, specialized coaching centres and pavement bookstalls, that stretch from Wazirpur Depot on Ring Road (inner) to Madhuban Chowk on Outer Ring Road, constitutes what has been dubbed ‘North Extension’ or simply ‘North-Ex’, as a counterpoint to the ‘happening’ South-Ex.

An obscure, unheard-of, downmarket locality till about two decades ago, North-Ex is now an integral part as well as the face of the changing realities of the capital. One of the first areas to be served by the Delhi Metro, it has grown by leaps and bounds. Today, with its easy access to upcoming trendy residential complexes by the best builders, schools, cultural centres, movie theatres, malls, adventure parks, restaurants and newest five star hotels, it is rapidly coming up as the place to be in the Capital.

Thus runs the story of Delhi. At one time, it used to be Chandni Chowk market for traditional finery and jewellery; Pahar Ganj for chaat and chhole bhature; Jama Masjid for traditional non-vegetarian food; Karol Bagh, Kamla Nagar and Lajpat Nagar markets for medium-range everyday shopping; Defence Colony market, Khan Market, GK market and South Extension (South-Ex) market for the fashionistas and trendsetters; and Sarojini Nagar Market for patri or pavement shopping. And at the heart of it was Connaught Place, where it all came together, and where you could do it all at the same place. This was at a less congested time when the population of Delhi was less than a million and the capital stretched from the Yamuna River in the east to Najafgarh village in the west, and from Pithampur village (now Pitampura administrative zone) in the north to Mehrauli in the South.

And then came the decade of the 1990s, and with it, the spread of Delhi in all directions. As immigrants from rural to urban areas who initially used to flock to Mumbai—the country’s de facto industrial capital—in search of livelihoods, grew insecure in the wake of Shiv Sena’s activities, the more secular and tolerant Delhi with its rapidly developing infrastructure, industries, employment prospects and facilities became the country’s new ‘land of opportunity’.

In the past two decades, the population of the city has soared from 0.82 million to nearly 19 million at the most recent count. And to accommodate the burgeoning population, the city has extended itself to its present area of 1483 square kilometres, initially spanning the Yamuna and spreading to its eastern side, and then engulfing neighbouring towns and areas such as Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Badarpur, Bahadurgarh, Sonipat and Gurgaon into the National Capital Territory (NCT) Delhi. And this is the present Delhi—an extremely congested cosmopolis, with an average population density of over 9000 persons per square kilometres, and a highly developed public transport system as well as network of roads which, however, falls perpetually short of the requirements of its almost impossibly dynamic populace!

The combination of the city’s sheer geographical spread and its extremely high population density resulted in the inevitable outcome. No longer were these ‘specialized’ markets sufficient to serve the needs of the people of the city. The interminable commutes and the humungous traffic jams clogging the roads spawned the universal demand for everything much closer home, even if it came with a higher price tag—anything to avoid a needless tussle with the traffic in extreme weather!

And so came the era of self-sufficient markets in every area of the city, preceding the ‘mall culture’. No more trudging through the alleys of Chandni Chowk and Karol Bagh for wedding finery—Ushnak Mal Mool Chand, Rati Ram Ram Vinod, Ram Chandra Krishna Chandra, and now Chhabras and Narangs all have outlets in various parts of the city, as do all the top jewellers, plus a host of new ones. No more battling the traffic to browse the pavement markets at Sarojini Nagar and Lajpat Nagar—you have it all at almost walking distance! And no more lugging the family to Connaught Place for a Nirula’s ice cream or to South-Ex for Baskin Robbins. Nirula’s and Baskin Robbins (along with the newest ice-cream chain, Giani’s) have all come to your doorstep, so to speak—either in a market accessible almost on foot, or at the nearest mall. And even today, though nuclear families with little children might find air-conditioned, brightly decorated malls with the latest trendy retail outlets and play areas more convenient, really avid shoppers worth their salt still prefer to browse the open air markets for their needs as well as for unexpected surprises and treasures.

It was in this era that North and West Delhi, considered slightly infra dig till about two decades ago by inhabitants of Central and South Delhi, started coming into their own. From being looked down upon as the bastions of ‘refugees’ (from Punjab) and laalas (residents of the old, walled city relocating to escape the congestion), these most thickly populated localities of the Capital became, almost overnight, the most promising markets in post-liberalization Delhi. The original ‘refugees’ and lalaas with their immense drive and ‘go-getter’ spirit made it good and have been replaced by their second and third generations, now living amid the city’s most modern civic infrastructure and cosmopolitan amenities (the last to be developed, hence, the best).

The current inhabitants of these areas, thus, have the advantages of both, the money and luxury provided by their progenitors and the most updated infrastructure and civic amenities provided by the government. They have studied in the best schools, imbibed the global culture and have brought together the choicest elements of commercial, industrial and cultural development into ‘their area’—shopping complexes, offices, eateries, malls, adventure parks, movie halls; even Dilli Haat—and all conveniently located to be accessible from the Delhi Metro! ‘North-Ex’, thus, truly epitomises the ‘immigrant revolution’ that is underway in Delhi.