Dehradun: A child being torn away from her mother’s lap

If Nature is what gives a hill town its essence, then that battle is long lost to an out of place zeal to make the town what it never wanted to be – a reckless growth of concrete with dug up pathways

Dehradun: A child being torn away from her mother’s lap
user

Ranjona Banerji

For the past six years, I’ve lived in a hill town with city pretensions. For older residents of Dehradun, its capital status since the formation of Uttarakhand, in 2020 has been like a death knell. For others, it has been an enormous opportunity for growth and development and change. For others, Dehradun’s capital status is a massive betrayal of the promise that Garsain, far away from here in the Kumaon region, was going to be the capital.

For some of the people of Kumaon, the elevation of Garsain over other towns is fraught with another betrayal and that led to the fall of a chief minister just last week.It’s, as they say, complicated.

What is not complicated is the urban mismanagement that dogs India. Half-finished projects and projects that never finish. Debris that is never cleared. Trees that are destroyed and replaced by concrete bunkers. Potholes in roads and pavements. No pavements at all, only potholes. Open drains and no drains. Garbage, always garbage. Life is an obstacle race and in urban India the use of the term is literal, not figurative.

For the past few months, large blue signs saying “Smart City” have sprung up all over Dehradun. Next to these signs are enormous trenches, a few huge concrete hollow blocks, parked diggers, piles of wires and pipes and plenty of whatever came out of the trench. You don’t always see anyone working on the trench. And when there’s a spot of rain, all you get is what Bengalis evocatively call “kaada”. Mud, clingy, sticky mud.

This “Smart City” idea is one of those dreamt up in offices in the National Capital. Born out of foreign travels by our dear rulers and their officials. Dreams of streets as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks, dreams of Calcutta becoming London, Mumbai’s zoo becoming Central Park and until we banned Chinese-made apps, there were always fantasies of Shanghai.

A few years ago, a bunch of citizens and NGOs in Dehradun got together to stop the flights of fancy of our Smart City application and bring it down to harsh reality. Then, the idea was to rip out a massive expanse of greenery of our old tea gardens and make lots of buildings. We managed to get the authorities to pare back to what we really need.


And it seems what we need is disruption with no completion date. A shop keeper along the city’s iconic Rajpur Road described how they dig up, they fill up and then dig up again. The end result may include no overhead wires, proper sewage and drainage systems, underground fibreoptic cables… Or it may not. No one knows. Because that interesting word – coordination-- is almost never applied to urban works in India.

Apart from the Smart City dream, we also have court orders which have randomly chopped houses, boundary walls, shops, even government buildings based on a 100-year-old map. Property owners with legitimate post-Independence municipal now have to fight against colonial India. And there is always the general lacklustre attitude of the municipal authorities to combat.

Why are you in a such a hurry, is the attitude. One day, the work will get done… After all, Chakrata Road still looks like a war zone almost a decade after buildings were chopped in half to widen the road and a new “shopping plaza” built close by. The plaza remains half-empty and the naked, torn buildings carry on with business as usual. You never really notice them now.

What is left then of a quaint hill town?

If urban centres usually grown organically or around a planned centre, then Dehradun’s origins are lost in crowded, overbuilt streets. If Nature is what gives a hill town its essence, then that battle is long lost. If it is malls, cafes, wide, clean streets that are going to purpose a tourist gateway, then we’re a long way from there.

As you drive down the hills into the plains of Dehradun’s expansion, where the famous basmati rice fields once were, then you have reached urban hell. Only the remnants of Rajaji Tiger Reserve and its dense Sal forests save you from being some nameless, faceless urban sprawl. If the authorities had their way, that damn forest would stop encroaching on the city.

In Watermark, Joseph Brodsky compares Venice to an orchestra and says, “The music is, of course, greater than the band, and no hand can turn the page.” If trees are Dehradun’s water, then the band is leaving the building.

(Views expressed are personal)

Follow us on: Facebook, Twitter, Google News, Instagram 

Join our official telegram channel (@nationalherald) and stay updated with the latest headlines