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Imagine being parachuted into Gurgaon. From the sky, you would see a shiny highway that runs from Delhi to Jaipur, tall glass buildings that house the biggest names in business, a Metro train that runs in a closed loop, well-appointed apartment blocks and fashionable eateries where the young and moneyed party relentlessly. If the wind is strong, you may land in that part of Gurgaon nobody wants you to see: slums and working class ghettoes. These are occupied by men and women who enable the fashionable to go about their beautiful lives, yet do not have proper homes to live in: drivers, servants, gardeners, guards and maids. Here, in extremely unhygienic conditions, reside the workers of the thousands of small factories and workshops in the city —Gurgaon was an industrial town before it became an upscale residential hub. If builders sell Gurgaon as India’s Millennium City, their existence will take you back to the dark ages.
At the ground level, these slums are almost invisible, tucked away behind high-rises. In a slum cluster in the Nathupur village, 32-year-old Supriya from West Bengal lives in a 10x10 shanty with her husband and four children. The aluminium sheet on top has turned the room into a furnace when I enter it on a hot summer day. There are no windows, only a small fan attached to the ceiling; since there has been no electricity for four days, the air is gnawing, cloying with claustrophobia. Her husband is a driver for a Babu, while Supriya cooks and cleans for another family in a kothi nearby. A drearier existence would be hard to find in a city that claims to be a Singapore in the making. Her neighbour, 30-year-old Sunita from Sitamarhi in Bihar, is dispirited. She calls the city pardes (alien land) where nobody comes out to help others. Scuffles over basic amenities are not uncommon here.
Supriya and Sunita are among the 200,000 migrant workers who live in and around Gurgaon. These numbers are guesstimates: the authorities don’t know the exact size of this floating population. The Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon had started a survey of slum clusters in 2012 after the Union ministry of housing and poverty alleviation pointed out that there is a high percentage (approximately 28 per cent) of uncanvassed households in urban areas. (All told, the population of Gurgaon is 1.5 million, according to the 2011 census. A private study says the numbers could explode to 5.8 million by 2031.) Apart from Nathupur, there are two other large slum clusters that host the support staff of Gurgaon: Chhatarpur and Sikanderpur in Delhi. Slums have also come up near many of the 291 villages that fall within the city. Since the villagers don’t let them squat on their land, they build makeshift homes wherever they can. Neighbourhoods like Kapashera empty out every morning as the menfolk leave for work in Gurgaon.
Planners fear there could be grave social consequences of this neglect, which is not a phenomenon unique to Gurgaon. “Every unchecked economic project seems to have a social fallout. When there is such disparity between lifestyles — from sheer luxury to utter poverty — it leads to growing resentment and crime,” says Sanjukta Bhaduri, professor of urban planning at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. Indeed, the miserable living conditions of underpaid factory workers is known to have contributed to the frequent industrial unrest in and around Gurgaon. This is not the only social divide in Gurgaon: a chasm exists also between the the original farmers and landowners and the new settlers. Separated by a deep cultural divide, there is no give-and-take between them, save the occasional friction.
The slums have come up because there aren’t enough homes for the poor of Gurgaon; few builders, it seems, want to build houses for the economically weaker sections (EWS). It’s not that the government is totally oblivious to their plight – the Haryana Apartment Owners Act of 1983 says that all builders have to construct 15 per cent of the sanctioned apartments for low-income buyers and another 10 per cent for the service staff. So, if a builder is constructing a 300-apartment complex, he needs to develop another 45 for the poor and 30 for the service staff, which are to be allotted by the government.
Most planners say, and some builders admit, these numbers are grossly inadequate. Most homes have at least one servant. The tonier apartments have up to seven. Some of them live in the servant’s room in the flat, but a large chunk has to fend for itself. Even these rules, many say, are openly flouted. “While the rules for construction and allotment of EWS houses are being flouted in various degrees, there is no provision for the housing of service staff at all,” says B K Dhawan, president of Silver Oaks Emeritus Society. Many builders who have built low-cost homes have chosen to locate them at a distance. The result is that they are not integrated with the main condominium. The unsustainable growth, with civic infrastructure lagging miles behind, has led to the phenomenon known as United States of Gurgaon. The condominiums are all self-contained entities and have their own power substations, sewage treatment plants, private bore wells, security guards, complete with clubs, gymnasiums and swimming pools.
The only places where land prices are low enough to construct such homes are towns at a distance of 30 to 40 km from Gurgaon. But the absence of mass rapid transport hampers such an idea. Quite a few builders say one way out is public-private partnership: let the government acquire the land and hand it over to builders to develop low-cost apartments. But the Land Acquisition Act has made that difficult by pushing up the land prices. Some migrants point out that the low-cost houses are of little use for them because these can be allotted only to below-poverty-line families that are domiciles of Haryana.
Builders find it a prickly subject. Many refuse to get drawn into a discussion. A few talk privately. Only DLF is prepared to respond formally. “In all our group housing projects, the required number of such units has been provided. While service units are attached to the main unit, the units for the EWS have been provided in a separate tower within the complex,” says Saif Misbah, a spokesperson for the country’s most valuable developer. He adds that the government does not offer any incentive to build low-cost houses.
Atul Sobti, former CEO of Ranbaxy and now editor of a weekly newspaper called Friday Gurgaon, is of the opinion that most of the chaos stems from the fact that there is no single government body in charge of planning and maintaining the city: the responsibility gets divided between the Haryana Urban Development Authority, Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon and the Town and Country Planning Department. In an effort to obtain a response from the Gurgaon civic authorities, I am caught in an unending game of passing-the-parcel between the top bureaucrats of these agencies. Gurgaon, then, seems to be the orphan child, the Gotham city of India, where it is both a model and a cautionary tale.
