Seven-and-a-Half Million Cars Trigger Parking Wars in Delhi

Courtesy of Vishnu Varma Cars parked inside a residential block of Defence Colony in South Delhi.

NEW DELHI â€"India’s capital, Delhi, has seen many a great war. But the latest one is being fought in the most unlikely of places - the residential colonies in the city. Roadside parking spots have become the battlefield as the number of cars in Delhi has surged over the years.

Behind the gates in Defence Colony, a posh south Delhi neighborhood, where plush residences loom large and the streets are lined with expensive sedans, the battle rages on between residents and the “outsiders.”

Residents have declared their right to every inch of parking space in the gaed neighborhood, demanding that the curbs be protected from nonresidents and their cars at all times. Houses in the colony all have driveways that allow for one or two cars, but that’s not enough for households that may have as many as five cars.

The foot soldiers in these parking wars are the security guards charged with not just manning the gates, but guarding expensive cars and their almost equally cherished parking spots. Bishram Chowdhury is one such guard.

Courtesy of Vishnu Varma

“I work 12 hours a day, and I have to see to it that no one else parks their car in front of the house,” said Mr. Chowdhury, who oversees the three luxury cars owned by his employer.

More th! an 7.4 million cars fill up Delhi roads, according to the 2012-13 Economic Survey of Delhi, and 1,200 more are added every day. The number of cars in Delhi exceeds the number of cars in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata put together.

The congestion on the roads has spilled over to neighborhood streets, and the quest for parking space in residential areas has taken the form of ugly turf wars not just in Defence Colony but in many upscale neighborhoods, like the newly prosperous colonies of Rajouri Garden and Punjabi Bagh in west Delhi.

Most neighborhoods do not have designated parking spots, and the city has no regulations on residential parking. “Roadside parking is the norm in residential colonies,” said Anil Shukla, additional police commissioner for traffic. “Usually there is an informal arrangement, where vehicles ae parked in front of the owner’s house.”

The problem is that “informal” systems are subject to interpretation, and one person’s interpretation may clash violently against another’s.

In Defence Colony, “parking disputes and unnecessary brawls are a regular feature,” said Mr. Chowdhury.

Courtesy of Vishnu Varma A sign board in Defence Colony in South Delhi.

Signs warning nonresidents to park at their own risk are a common sight in most affluent neighborhoods, like Green Park and Lajpat Nagar. Residents often seek police help in towing away the cars parked by nonresidents, said another security guard in Defence Colony, who did not wish to be named, but the polic! e don’t! necessarily come when called.

“Often, people react in the heat of the moment,” said Kuldeep Singh, an officer at the Defence Colony police station. “If a person reacts extraordinarily, then we get involved. People do all sorts of things â€" they puncture the tires or deflate them, break windows or wipers, scratch cars.”

Anuj Dewan, 33, a resident of Vasant Kunj, received the “outsider” treatment when he visited an acquaintance in Saket, another of Delhi’s well-to-do neighborhoods. “I came back and found that my car’s tires had been slashed,” he said, even though he had not parked in front of anyone’s property.

But Mr. Dewan acknowledged that he isn’t just a bystander in the parking wars. “I am involved in frequent fights even with my neighbors over parking space,” he said.

The most shocking illustration of the aggression arising out of the paucity of parking spaces and clogged roads in Delhi was an incident that occurred two years ago in Khan Market, an uscale shopping market in central Delhi.

In January, 2011, a parking brawl resulted in the death of Rajeev Jolly Wilson, the owner of an Italian restaurant who had happened to graze another car, owned by Vikas Aggarwal, a Jet Airways pilot. The scuffle resulted in Mr. Aggarwal reversing his car and accidentally knocking out Mr. Wilson and going over his body. Mr. Wilson was declared dead when brought at a hospital.

Residents in some other areas have found their own ways to make room for their cars, not all of them entirely legal.

“Due to the growing number of cars, parks have been informally converted into parking spaces in some residential colonies,” said Mr. Shukla. And traffic snarls are a common sight in the middle of residential colonies like Greater Kailash as parked cars eat into walkways and driveways.

At Rajdhani Nikunj Cooperative Housing Society in east Delhi, ! which has! designated space to accommodate cars owned by the 90-odd families that live there, the residents’ association started imposing surcharges on additional cars after the first one a few years ago.

While this might be a feasible solution in relatively new colonies, where builders design houses with cars in mind, and tony apartment complexes that have parking structures built in, in the older parts of Delhi, which includes most of central and south Delhi, urban planning has not kept up with the burden of millions of cars.

The city government is well aware of the parking crunch. The Delhi Master Plan 2021 noted: “Over the years a large number of the residential areas have been experiencing severe problems of vehicular congestion and shortage of parking space. Most of the parking is, in fact, being done on the road, which significantly reduces the carriageway width.”

But the focus of the most recent measures to tackle Delhi’s parking problems has been on commercial areas, not residentialcolonies.

Even when the city does propose a solution, residents aren’t eager to sign on.

Earlier this year, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi issued a circular that directed contractors to build 2.7-meter-high (nine feet) covered parking spaces for plots measuring more than 100 square meters. But resident welfare associations opposed the measure, saying that the requirement would inflate construction costs by almost 20 percent.

The one solution the city government isn’t considering is limiting the number of cars in Delhi, and that is precisely what the city needs, said P.K. Sarkar, a professor of transport planning at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi.

Tokyo, for example, registers vehicles only if the owner is able to sh! ow proof ! of access to a parking space, which has a prohibitive effect on vehicle ownership. While a few cities in India, like Aizawl in Mizoram and Jaipur in Rajasthan, have experimented with similar rules, there is no such legislation in the capital.

In addition to curbing the number of cars, Mr. Sarkar emphasized the “need for full-scale development of mass transit vehicles and vast improvements in the public transport system.”

In fact, encouraging people to stop driving is the only practical way to end the parking wars, said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the Centre for Science and Environment.

“Taking into account the annual increase in registration of new cars in Delhi, we would need at least 310 football fields every year to satisfy the growing demand for parking space,” Ms. Roychowdhury said.