Metrocity Journal: Up, Up and Away

Consider the Blue Line, most noticeably filled with students of all ages. The stations along it look of a piece, rounded blue metal barns punctuating the brown landscape, whether into Noida or extending across the many sectors of Dwarka. The markers of the consuming middle classes are littered along this line: Haldirams, Spencers, Nirulas, Globus, and Big Life. Restaurants, hotels, hospitals, mid-rise apartment blocks, multiplexes, malls, and banks. The metro fits perfectly well with all of the activity that has flourished in west and east Delhi over the last 20 years: the coaching centres, universities, schools, and assorted metro-side institutes offering expertise in beauty, nutrition, and taxes.

As you approach Laxmi Nagar Station, bright billboards run parallel to the metro station for “Toppers Institute” and an array of chartered accountant prep schools. “Agur aap abcd jaanthay hain tho English bol sukthay hain” (If you know “abcd” then you can speak English) reads one sign written in Devanagari and Roman scripts. The metro in some sense goes along with the supposed democratization of English.

At 5:30 in the evening, as students leave coaching and other institutes en masse, there is a palpable energy to the place. In an alleyway adjacent to Laxmi Nagar Station, a group of lanky boys between the ages of 18 and 24 comes out of one of the accountant coaching centres. They buzz down the alley towards the main road like a small swarm of bees. A spontaneous poll reveals that about half are headed for buses and half will get on the metro.

At the next station, Nirman Vihar, a ramp from the station leads to the East Center mall. Inside on a mid-week, late afternoon, it’s nearly empty. The real activity is on the street, where a number of vendors sit or stand with their carts near the station exit. One of them, Chaan Babu, who says he must be at least 21 years old, stops his cart full of coconuts at four places during the day –two schools, another shopping area, and here at the metro station.

“There’s always a crowd here,” he says.

Does he ever take the metro?

“Yes, to Anand Vihar,” the large bus depot a few metro stops away on the same line, and to “go here and there,” he says with a sheepish smile. He lives nearby and doesn’t need to take the metro every day. He likes the metro because you can travel comfortably and you don’t get stuck in traffic. But on most days he is in proximity to the metro, not on it.

At the end of the other branch of the Blue Line – Noida City Centre – the scene is more subdued. The station lies adjacent to a two-kilometre plot under construction, a huge crater filled with dirt where just a handful of laborers are scattered. The area is being developed into the Wave City Centre, where we are told on the hoardings that line the area: There will be time to “play” and “indulge,” but it will also be a place for “ambition” in the multi-use commercial and residential space, where “times have changed.” But at the moment there is no “there” there. Unlike along Vikas Marg, here the development is coming to meet the metro and is aiming to attract its wealthier riders.

From Noida City Centre to the Yamuna Bank Station, the metro line runs parallel to the river after the botanical gardens. As you approach the Akshardham station, you get a clear view of the perfectly landscaped entrance to the temple of the same name (a complex of buildings and ideas that sociologist Sanjay Srivastava has aptly termed “Disney Divinity.”) Unlike other monuments all over the city that need protecting from the construction of the Delhi Metro, Akshardham goes with it perfectly. You could say they were made for each other.

If many of the Blue Line stations seem to punctuate if not accentuate the city’s upwardly mobile aspirations, other stations seem to stand out as they strike more of a contrast between the metro and what lies beneath it.

At Okhla Station on the Violet Line connecting Badarpur to Central Secretariat, the curve of the metro line creates an arc around the area, as it marks a line between Harkesh Nagar and Okhla Industrial Area. Once outside, the station is imposing from the distance; it is a big, yellow, rectangular warehouse, with an empty field in front and a garbage dump in the back.

In the station’s far foreground, a white BMW SUV honks down the lane as it passes “Sophistica Industries” and opposite, a sign that reads “No Child Labour.” Two young boys stand next to a fruit-seller eating bananas; a man sells green grapes, and fabric sellers stack reams of black, brown, and grey cloth on cycle rickshaws. Not far from some pakora sellers, Dharanvi, 30, stands next to two circular racks of clothes. He outfits the workers in the various industries in the area, but according to him, they don’t take the metro. But he does, from Old Delhi to Okhla everyday. “It’s more expensive [than the bus],” he says, but it has made his commute “faster and easier.”

Further along the path, alongside industries, and leading to a low-income residential area, a group of women sits on concrete steps at the entrance to a narrow lane. A group of men stands next to them around a fruit-seller’s cart. Two streams of conversation about the metro, which is in full sight across an empty field, ensue.

One of the men says, “Many houses were destroyed to make the metro. It is for big men not small men.”

One of the women says that she’s heard there is a metro colony where the dispossessed were offered houses: “Give me a free house there,” she says in a slightly taunting voice.

Another woman looks up to the metro line and simply shrugs, “I wish it would all go away.”

The metro does equalize the experience of getting around (by allowing greater access to the city) for many sectors of the working and middle classes, but for many it represents a divide. Sometimes this divide can be as stark as the metro line running above your head.

In these essays, I have been positing the metro as a new kind of public space, urban technology, and as part of the city’s landscape — as a way to think about the politics of urban design and the everyday practices of people in relation to the metro.

There was a lot of opposition to the metro from the city’s urban designers initially. They saw the metro as something obtrusive, especially since most of it was to be built above ground. People thought it would be “one more failed project.” Elites said, “We’re going to ride in our cars anyway.” “Greens” and other activists pushed for a more comprehensive and better bus system, rather than an extremely expensive and energy-guzzling metro system.

Then the metro gained an almost mythical status as a successful project that the city could be proud of. All you had to do was get on board.

And yet, the metro’s ultimate use and worth is about where it can take you and how it can connect you to different places. In this respect, the “people” factor in the metro – how passengers would move between the metro and other places whether on foot or another mode of transport – was never a top priority as it was being constructed. The metro was not about planning and designing urban spaces, but rather it was, especially for former metro chief E. Sreedharan,“a railway project.” There was a singular focus on the construction and engineering aspects.

Even Tripta Khurana, the chief architect of the Delhi Metro, when asked (in an interview with the Delhi-based Journal of Landscape Architecture) how this interface outside stations might work, responded that the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. “has the mandate to construct the Metro and therefore cannot be expected to take up the planning issues.” Instead, she said, “It is hoped that the concerned city authorities that have expertise and authority will formulate proper plans and policies to deal with it.”

Mr. Sreedharan’s vision, some say tunnel vision, may be what allowed him to steer the project to completion. But, as a result, there are many loose ends in terms of how the metro integrates with the city. How and whether those are tied up is key to its long-term success. This of course has to do not only with the DMRC, but also with how it is able to work with a host of other city government entities. Which is to say it is partly a question and problem of governance.

It is now a given that new metros are coming up fast all over the country. Other cities including Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai are not only getting metros constructed but are doing so “the Delhi way.”

If the metro gives Dilliwalas a new way of looking at their city, of regarding it, and perhaps even having a critical distance or new appreciation and understanding of what it is, it might also be that the metro gives people not only a greater sense of ownership over their city but also – and I would say, hopefully – a sense of what is at stake in it.

Rashmi Sadana is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, both published this year. She is currently writing a book about the Delhi Metro.

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