Facelift? CP dug-up,Chandni Chowk same as before

Dug-up lanes,huge mounds of rubble and waste,hanging wires,construction material and machines lying everywhere,rickety wooden planks placed over pits for commuting,closed subways and miles of barricades have turned the 76-year-old business district into a “no-go” area.

Officegoers have no option but to brave the “war zone”,as many citizens now call it,but number of shoppers have dwindled and traders say sales have dipped by 60 per cent.

New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) spokesperson Anand Tiwari says renovation is going on at full swing and the deadline of August 31 will be met. He,however,said he will not be able to give details of block-wise progress.

Tiwari also said the work of removal of construction waste is going on “simultaneously” and “most of it” will be removed by the August-end deadline.

Traders,however,are not so optimistic.

“It is not that NDMC is not trying. Work is going on round-the-clock. But completing by August-end doesn’t seem possible. A lot of work is left,none of the blocks have been fully completed. Apart from facade restoration,there are work related to middle circle,parking lot and subways too,” said Atul Bhargava,president of New Delhi Traders’ Association.

NDMC officials privately admit that completing all work may take at least till September 15. Bhargava only says traders are keeping their fingers crossed.

“We have been incurring losses for so many months. But we still hope everything will be okay before Games. After all,we are a country of ‘jugaad’ (fixing things by some means).”

Bhargava feels that renovation project was a good idea but work started late and proper planning was not done. “They (the civic body) had set over-ambitious targets,” he said.

On the other hand,in Chandni Chowk,the nerve centre of old city,traders say they had been hearing about revamp and facelift for some years,but finally nothing has happened.

They say only some footpath restoration work has been done in some areas,but otherwise it remains the same as it had been for ages — with traffic congestion,encroachments,crumbling facade of buildings and mesh of overhead wires.

The MCD has admitted that it will be able to complete only footpath upgrading and some other related work in Chandni Chowk before the mega sporting event in October and take up the rest of redevelopment after the Games.

“The redevelopment of Chandni Chowk was anyway never a Games project,” a senior MCD official said.