"Why so much of Delhi is illegal"

Well, I am not a big fan of the BBC. They are biased, and more often than not, condescending and patronizing. They still havn't taught themselves to treat us 'natives' with respect and equality. Well, this article, written by an Indian, isnt about all that, but about how the dismal real estate picture in New Delhi came about to be that it is today.
It also mentions the great Indian inability to think of sidewalks. Wide sidewalks just dont feature in the mind of a Governmental urban planner.

Housing, housing and housing. The one great failure of modern India that will keep us behind by decades. And yes such a seemingly simple and obvious solution. Aaah, it makes my heart bleed.

Why so much of Delhi is illegal

What do people do when their city's authorities do not keep apace with its rapidly growing population and fail to provide adequate homes and business space?

In the Indian capital, Delhi, people simply encroach public and private land, bribe authorities, build homes, and wait for local politicians to legalise the colonies (housing areas) in exchange for votes in the elections.

So a third of the city's people have ended up living in some 3000 colonies -more than half of which are illegal - and many of them don't have legal electricity or water supplies.

Vote bait

The politicians and municipal authorities don't seem to be enthusiastic about improving matters because illegal colonies mean that they can hold out the bait of regularising them in exchange of votes and money.

In 1972, the then Congress government legalised 800 such colonies. Five years later, it regularised another 567 colonies. And between 1989 and 2002, illegal colonies were regularised by the government of the day at least five times.

A fresh proposal to regularise 2,200 illegal colonies has been pending with the Delhi High Court since 1999.

"It is the pressure of the popular mob demand and politicians which has led to the regularisation of colonies. This emboldens investors and builders to keep on encroaching and building because they are sure they will be legalised some day," says Mr Dutt.

Politicians and builders take money from the poor and the middle-class and encroach on public land to build grotty unplastered red-brick homes that dot much of the city.

The rich buy farmland to build plush farmhouses that they also rent out for parties and marriages or set up entirely illegal colonies like the 161-acre Sainik Farms.

Some of the city's most talked about fashion designers brazenly open ritzy boutiques in illegal buildings and then feign ignorance.

Others convert or sell their residential buildings to make them business establishments by bribing the police and municipal officials. Business booms, and traffic clogs up residential roads.

Home and shop owners encroach upon the city's sidewalks parking their cars or hawking their wares there alongside openly menacing private warnings.

Today, Delhi's sidewalks have either been encroached or have shrunk as the authorities widen roads in a bizarre policy that is heavily loaded in favour of car owners. Pedestrians simply don't count.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), one of the world's largest municipalities with a reputation for corruption and sloth, seems so helpless that it has actually sought the "court's direction" to fix the problem of unauthorised constructions.

The way the MCD is run can be gauged by the fact that there are over 16,000 cases pending against brought by aggrieved citizens in the high court alone.

In the end, only political will, a clean administration and a sensible master plan can save the city from urban ruin, say planners.

A third master plan is awaiting sanction with proposals to accommodate an additional 10 million people that are expected to live in Delhi by 2021.

Critics say it pays little heed to the over 10 million residents who already live here.

In a sense, Delhi mirrors much of urban India's failure to meet the demands of a rapidly urbanising country as jobs dry up in the countryside - the country has a shortage of 22.4 million homes, 70% in the middle and the low income category.

It is a monumental failure which analysts say could easily snowball into a civil war of sorts over housing, water and electricity in the future.