The arrests so far include the owner of the basement, the coaching centre’s CEO and coordinator, and also, bizarrely, the driver of an SUV who purportedly drove through the waterlogged street, contributing to the Centre’s gates breaking. (File Photo)
What is it that a big city offers? Economic opportunities that promise a better life for the innumerable hopefuls who crowd its streets; and the infrastructure to keep pace with the changing landscape of aspirations. This is the seductive promise, too, of the central government’s Smart Cities Mission.
This is what had drawn UPSC aspirants Shreya Yadav, Nevin Dalwin and Tanya Soni from Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Telangana to the national capital to study at Rau’s IAS Study Centre in Old Rajinder Nagar. Their deaths by drowning in the Centre’s basement can be laid squarely on the abject failure of the Capital’s civic governance, in a shambles owing to a deep-rooted institutional apathy and pervasive and unchecked civic irregularities across the city.
The aftermath of the tragedy points to a predictable script, and a deeper systemic malaise. The political blame game drowns out the anguish of the bereaved and the protests of the vulnerable, offering only a token justice as consolation: A handful of coaching centres operating in violation of rules have been sealed, encroachments over drains bulldozed and a high-level probe committee set up.
The arrests so far include the owner of the basement, the coaching centre’s CEO and coordinator, and also, bizarrely, the driver of an SUV who purportedly drove through the waterlogged street, contributing to the Centre’s gates breaking. There are wider complicities.
The inadequacies of urban planning to accommodate a growing city and the failure of civic authorities to ensure, for instance, that storm drains are desilted or building by-laws adhered to. Across Delhi, a flourishing basement economy recklessly flouts by-laws and fire-safety norms; illegal constructions capitalise on the vulnerabilities of the desperate and the collusion of the middle class, and survival and greed make room for each other in cramped unsafe hovels.
It is a story true of most of urban India, and the anomaly is made sharper in the national capital where the structure of governance is further subverted and distorted by tussles between the ruling AAP and the Lieutenant Governor appointed by the BJP-led Centre, making it harder to fix accountability.
According to the World Bank, India’s cities and towns will house 40 per cent of its population by 2036. By 2041, Delhi’s population alone is expected to reach 28-30 million. It will mean that thousands of hopefuls such as Yadav, Dalwin, Soni and Nilesh Rai — another UPSC aspirant who died by electrocution on a waterlogged street in South Patel Nagar just a week before the Old Rajinder Nagar tragedy — will continue to make their way to the capital to chase their dreams.
It will require not a ruinous, decaying civic apparatus but a purposeful overhaul of the physical, institutional, social and economic infrastructure to welcome them in. In Delhi, this would mean greater devolution of power, stricter lines of accountability, more attention to changing needs and contexts in urban planning, beginning with the Draft Delhi Master Plan, 2041, that came out in 2021 but still awaits notification. What it cannot allow for is further complicity in the death of young dreams.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 31-07-2024 at 07:15 IST
