Lutyens’ Delhi – the beauteous heart of the capital city, with tree-lined boulevards and colonial bungalows – was built by rulers (the British) to set themselves apart from the ruled. Eighty years after the bungalows were built by Edwin Lutyens, after whom the area is named in official papers as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone or LBZ, they are crumbling edifices caught in a time warp, or rebuilt by their occupants to modernise the interiors and (illegally) add rooms. Answers to occasional questions in Parliament reveal that this is usually done at substantial public cost. A more modern, less colonial concept of a capital city with a showpiece centre – but without five-acre lots for single bungalows – has been an obvious need. As private residential construction began to imitate international standards when it came to fittings and fixtures, the denizens of the bungalows also felt the need for change, and for mod-cons.
What they thought up was an imaginative scheme. Take a 123-acre stretch of land next to the city’s diplomatic enclave (no other city in the country still thinks of “enclaves”), auction a plot in one corner to a hotel, and use the money to redevelop the whole area. What has come up, at the end of the exercise, is New Moti Bagh (or New Pearl Garden). This has 116 bungalows and 376 high-rise apartments for senior functionaries from joint secretaries to ministers, and including judges — all of it behind a security fence and gates with guards, making for a government version of a gated community, like Beijing’s Zhongnanhai where China’s socialist rulers live. Tucked in a corner of the whole complex, as required by building by-laws, are 500 flats for “economically weaker sections” (EWS). As a study of the mindset of today’s rulers, this is educative. The bungalows offer six or eight bedrooms apiece, and have three or four “quarters” to house domestic help; the apartments are easier for citizens to relate to: with three bedrooms and a room for the help. If you set aside the EWS housing, the density is between four and five dwelling units per acre.
What about the opportunity cost, or what else might have been done with the land? Since the complex is designed to match high-end private sector housing, with added government features (no private developer would dream of setting up new bungalows in the heart of a crowded city), it would be instructive to understand the private sector equivalent. If about half the total land were to be set aside for public spaces (roads, parks, community market, club with swimming pool, amphitheatre, etc — all of which New Pearl Garden has), the area available for housing construction would be about 60 acres, or close to 300,000 square yards. At the city’s permissible floor area ratio of 200 (which is proposed to be raised shortly), the built-up area could have gone up to 600,000 square yards, or 5.4 million square feet. If all units were to be of 3,000 square feet, you could have had 1,800 units instead of the 500 that have been built. At the going rate in the vicinity of Rs 60,000 and more per square foot, the revenue potential works out to Rs 32,000 crore. For 492 non-EWS dwellings, the opportunity cost per dwelling unit is, therefore, about Rs 65 crore — more for the bungalows, less for the
high-rise apartments. Our members of Parliament, who seek nothing more than a red light on their cars, are beacons of socialist virtue in comparison, as is the President with her relatively modest (and aborted) hopes for a retirement abode.