Is it Time to Tear Up Lutyens Delhi?

Altaf Qadri/Associated PressThe Rashtrapati Bhavan, or President's House in New Delhi, designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens.

Wednesday marked the 101st year since New Delhi was designed on a radial plan by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and for many historians and urban planners, it's time to eliminate this elite zone, where 2,800 acres of land in the heart of Delhi are occupied by a few hundred ministers, politicians, judges, bureaucrats and defense personnel.

Like New Delhi, other Indian cities, including Kolkata and Chennai, have preserved their colonial areas, but only in the Indian capital is this zone rese rved for the elite. The historian Sohail Hashmi said New Delhi is still the way the British had conceived it, in concentric circles, with the most important authorities in the center and the working class in the periphery.

“There were the four-acre buildings for the viceroys and generals and then the two-acre buildings for civil servants and so on, and finally the peons lived in single-room houses in Sewa Nagar or Aliganj,” he said. “In an independent country that claims to be a socialist democracy, such a division is shameful.”

Courtesy of Roli BooksAn aerial view of centra l Delhi, parts of which have been designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens.

He also noted that central Delhi in particular enjoys a privileged status when it comes to basic amenities like water, electricity and other infrastructure.

While most of the 1,000 bungalows in Lutyens's Delhi are occupied by government servants, 65 are privately owned. Those owners include the steel magnate Laxmi Niwas Mittal, Samir and Vineet Jain of the Times Group and the industrialist Ram Prasad Goenka. All the houses have high fences and are hidden from the road.

Those who are pushing to make central Delhi more egalitarian are in the minority, however, with conservation officials and longtime Delhi residents contending that the area is a part of the city's history and should be left alone.

“Just as we should preserve the Mughal monuments, we should also protect the British colonial architecture,” said Sir Mark Tully, a former BBC broadcaster who has lived in Delhi for more than 40 years. “India is too mature a country to not live with its colonial past. It is history and should not be erased.”

New Delhi is actually the eighth city of Delhi, according to the government. Many dynasties like the Lodhis and Khiljis had ruled Delhi for many centuries before the British. “The British were the final and the greatest of Delhi's conquerors,” said Ranjana Sengupta in her book “Delhi Metropolitan â€" the Making of an Unlikely City.” The British wanted to build the imperial capital to rival ancient Rome and Constantinople, she said.

Both Lutyens's Delhi and the walled city of Delhi, once called Shahjahanabad, have together been nominated as Unesco World Heritage Cities. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization will make a decision on the designation in the next few months. If they are declared World Heritage Cities , they would largely be protected from alterations.

“As a developing city, Delhi is facing the binary problems of development and conservation,” said A.G. Krishna Menon of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, who was instrumental in nominating the cities to Unesco's program. “They are mutually compatible.”

Mr. Menon said that the Sunahari Bagh area in central Delhi had 11 bungalows until earlier this year, but with careful planning, city planners are making 11 more in the same area. “This is possible, if the basic value and the look of the place are conserved,” he said.

Courtesy of Roli BooksA sketch of the Viceroy's House, now the residence of the president, known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan, made by Edwin Lutyens in the early 1900s, from the book “New Delhi: Making of A Capital.”

But Mr. Hashmi said the additions will not eliminate the class divisions inherent in the center's layout. “They are not low-cost housing for those who actually work to keep the economy running. They are all bungalows being built to accommodate government servants and the elite,” he said.

The government does not release figures on how much it spends to maintain Lutyens's Delhi, which occupies less than 1 percent of the city's area, but both the conservationists and those lobbying for changes agree that the cost runs into the millions of dollars.

Mr. Hashmi said the government could use this money to create low-cost housing for the poor, espe cially as Delhi has not addressed the housing needs of migrants.

“The Delhi Development Authority earmarks 22-yard plots for an entire family in resettlement colonies across the river Yamuna, where the working-class families largely live with no civic amenities,” he said. “If these 2,800 acres were released, imagine how many 22-yard plots there could be to accommodate the economically weaker sections. Shouldn't a democracy rethink the way its cities are planned and not rely on its colonial plans?”