Gandhinagar and Mr. Mewada

This was actually from Sep. 18, but i forgot to post it:

I arranged to meet Mr. Deepak Mewada today; he is the son of Mr. H.K. Mewada who was the originally planner for the city. Now his son has taken his place as chief planner, and he went to CEPT as well.

Since the government owns all the land there are only two ways people can get property: through auction or allotment. An auction takes so long to process, they only have one every 4-5 years for maybe 30 plots.

Mr. Mewada had an additional little booklet on the city; he only had one so he said he would make me a copy later. But this book was talking about how the residential areas were based on the pols.

There are authorized and unauthorized places of worship. People build temples along the street and sidewalk like they do in other cities, but last year the city came and demolished all the unauthorized temples on the main roads. However people still build unauthorized temples in the open community spaces in each sector. Now there are 3 mosques, 5 churches, and many, many temples that are authorized. Within a sector 2 or 3 plots are given for religious purposes.

There are 4 levels of commercial development: city level – like the commercial sector, district level – along the main road corridor, 25-30 shops per sector in the common area, and the the corner shops in the sector. When people were displaced during the construction of the city, these farmers were given land for shops in sectors 16 and 21.

The government started selling their land in 1973. Of the land zoned for purposes, that for commercial, only 15% has been sold. Of residential for land, 70% has been sold. The land between the main roads and distributer road (ring road) in a sector is sold for private development while inside the ring road is government employee housing.

Now the Chief architect and planner’s role is quite small because the city is so static and land isn’t sold often, so within the city not much is happening. The architect and planner’s role is only to make detailed plans of sectors and areas and also the sale of land.

Planning of the city

There are limited access to each housing sector – only one road access per 1000 meters, so one per side of the sector square. It seems this is just one more contributor to the lack of social vibrancy here. As a result people have made their own paths into the sector from the main road and through the setbacks. If there is a wall built around the sector, sometimes they have made holes through to make it easier to reach their destination.

The original plan had called for completely separate bike paths; paths were supposed to go under main intersections, but perhaps it was too expensive, and they didn’t do it. There were also going to be bike paths criss crossing the central green spaces of the sector which they didn’t officially do, but it appears that they have emerged as footpaths from people walking them.

The sector size was planned so that from the center of the sector to the edge or main road, it would be a 10 minute walk.

One difference in Chanidgarh and Gandhinagar was that the capital complex was not centrally located in Chandigarh, and peons were located far away from the complex making it difficult to get to work. In Gandhinagar the complex is centrally located and closer for everyone.

Central axis is Road 4 and was meant to be a grand boulevard with vista like in Paris or D.C. Start at RR station and goes towards the river and the Gandhi memorial. Then the commercial axis is perpendicular to that on Gh Rd.

Economic development

In 1981-1995 the chief minister went to china and got the idea to develop an electronics light industry corridor in Gandhinagar. They tried to develop in the area between the RR line to the city boundary northwest of town, but it never took out and now most of the factories there are vacant.

There is also a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) planned, but it is also not working. An info city was planned in 98-99; the office is located to the left hand side when coming into the city from the highway. So far only around 20% has been developed.

The area to the north of town is designated as light industrial; however, they compromised and allowed a coal power plant to be built there. The power plant doesn’t even provide power to the city, but to north Gujarat. Gandhinagar gets it’s power from the Sabarmati. Allowing the power plant was the only way to get the railroad line to come through the city, otherwise it bypassed it.

The city doesn’t have a lot of buying power because the majority of the government employees are lower class. Only about 5% of government employees are high officials. So the majority of people don’t have a lot of buying power, so they are usually happy with the cheaper, lower quality goods they can find in the city. However if you need something slightly different or unusual, you have to go to Ahmedabad.

Reliance company recently bought land in the commercial sector because they wanted to develop a big shopping mall there. However they are in the process of selling the land back to the city because they realized the city couldn’t support a shopping mall like that.

Side note: Deepa Mewada doesn’t even live in Gandinagar but in Ahmedabad. I think he said he had family land there, so it’s quite possible his dad didn’t live in the city either. On the way home on the bus I was talking to a woman, and I asked her if she liked Gandhinagar. She said she worked there in the service sector, but she lived in Ahmedabad because she didn’t like the social aspect of the city.