Delhi’s last stand against SEZs

The 400-sq km Special Economic Zone is the kind of acreage that the DDA has not been able to develop in more than 50 years. With the city’s infrastructure already unable to take care of its 1.5 crore population, can it stand up to the avarice of the corporates?

By Omesh Saigal

The Regional Plan, prepared by the National Capital Region (NCR) Planning Board for the entire NCR area, is an important document. In the proper understanding and implementation of its land use plan might lie Delhi’s last chance for survival. Otherwise, the nexus of corrupt bureaucrats, politicians, unscrupulous builders and the land mafia will kill the city.

The Regional Plan, says Ghulam Nabi Azad in the Foreword, “is another milestone in the journey towards a balanced and harmonious development of the region.” And that may well be if it can even partly meet its main goal of “decongesting Delhi”. Already, we have a little less than a crore-and-a-half people crowding the city, with a substantial population living in deficient and slum-like conditions. By 2011, this figure could rise to more than two crore, of whom more than one crore people could be living in subhuman conditions in slums.

The NCR covers an area of 30,242 sq km, which includes the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi (1,483 sq km), and parts of the three adjoining states of Haryana (13,143 sq km), Rajasthan (4,493 sq km) and Uttar Pradesh (10,583 sq km). A spatial growth of the entire region will mean fewer people in Delhi and more in the areas outside. This will only happen if the growth is harmonious—and this is what the Regional Plan aims to do through the creation of physical and economic infrastructure in the entire region.

Ever since the export-oriented Special Economic Zone (SEZ) scheme was shoehorned into the economic pipeline, there has been a rush of people wanting to set up these SEZs. Most of them are less interested in SEZs than in raking in the pirates’ boxfuls of money from the recent real estate boom.

And since the area around Delhi has been particularly active in terms of land prices, is it any surprise that more than 100,000 acres are being tied up to develop SEZs—and that, too, in an area that is not even remotely connected to a seaport.

Normally, this should be a welcome development: more than 400 sq km of land coming up for intensive development that would attract thousands of crores of rupees in terms of direct and indirect investment should lead to a fast and accelerated development of the region. But matters are not that simple.

If there is a Regional Plan, should not all of this development be in accordance with the plan itself? If it is not, is it not a cause for alarm?

Surely it should be: in case such development was needed in the vicinity of Delhi, surely the Regional Plan would have provided for it. If it has not, it needs to be scrutinised a little deeper. The 400-sq km SEZ neighbourhood is the kind of acreage that the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has not been able to develop in more than the past five decades. It is evident to everyone that the infrastructure is still deficient. Can the SEZ-addicted corporates show better results, and that, too, in just a few years?

There is one question nobody is asking: Who is developing external infrastructure such as power, water, external road, rail and air links, solid waste management, and the disposal of liquid waste, to name only a few? Nor are the corporates bothered about the fact that the areas in which they propose to set up the SEZs are reserved for green belts or for agriculture.

If this is not a recipe for ecological disaster, what is? We must stop it—but can we? I personally think we can, notwithstanding the legal facilitation done by the Central and Haryana statutes. The Central SEZ Act no doubt overrides all the existing Central statutes, and the Haryana Act makes land use that was determined under the various town and country planning laws irrelevant. But do any of them override the NCR Act, 1985, and the Regional Plan that has been notified under it?

This is a funny Act: Central legislation on what is really a state subject. It could, therefore, be enacted by Parliament only after the four states (Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan) gave the Act their consent. This is this reason why neither the clause in the SEZ Act—“notwithstanding anything contrary to any other law for the time being in force”—nor the Haryana legislature’s overriding provisions for land use can override the Regional Plan.

Both the Supreme Court and the Allahabad High Court have decreed that the Regional Plan’s land use supersedes what the states might have decided. It now becomes the bounden duty of the NCR Planning Board and its secretariat to prevail upon the concerned state governments to stop this major attack on its Regional Plan. If its entreaties go unheeded, they must knock at the door of the apex court.

As it is, the mismatch between the Delhi Master Plan and the Regional Plan is considerable. But given that the Master Plan itself is observed more in its violation than in its observance (more than half the structures are illegal), the result is a blueprint for disaster. The recent tendency of the neighbouring states to more than match Delhi in violating the Regional Plan will make the situation worse than it already is.

It is time that we woke up and ensured that long-term interests are not sacrificed to short-term gains. Value-Added Tax (VAT) might finally bring some sort of uniformity in tax structures, and new technology has paved the way for uniform telecom facilities in the region. After long last, there is some movement towards integrating the rail and road transport network by implementing the Rail and Road Transport System (RRTS). Let us now remove restrictions on the interstate movement of taxis and autorickshaws.

There is a growing concern among planners about the blatant use of “non-urbanisable” areas for new projects, such as Dwarka Phases II, III, and IV, Narela Sub-City, PVC Market at Tikri Kalan, and even the Capital complex of the Delhi government on the extended bed of the Yamuna, which could have grave repercussions. Now, such concerns can well be extended to the areas just outside the capital. Where will this idiocy stop?