Delhi border mess is an early warning sign for all cities

• Districts adjoining NCR have reduced access to prevent covid
• While the exact scale of Delhi’s border woes may not have been quantified before, the issue has drawn the attention of everyone from the high court to the Supreme Court

NEW DELHI : On 20 March, the last “normal" weekday before life in many Indian cities came to a grinding halt, roughly 1.5 million people shuttled between Delhi and one of its four satellite cities—Gurugram, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Noida.

Those figures, based on the digital trails left behind by Facebook users, plummeted to a mere 100,000 a day by 30 March—some accounted for by migrants—as one of the world’s strictest nationwide lockdowns went into effect. This week, when the lockdown has supposedly begun to ease, about 300,000 people travelled between Delhi and its satellite cities in a day, 20% of the usual flow.

“Some of it could just be goods traffic," said Olivier Telle, an urban health geographer at the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities who has been studying people’s movement patterns using aggregate Facebook data. “It is indeed very low."

While the exact scale of Delhi’s border woes may not have been quantified before, the issue has drawn the attention of everyone from the high court to the Supreme Court, which issued a notice to the Centre on Tuesday.

Delhi may just be the first in a long line of Indian cities to grapple with hard questions about what happens at an arbitrary municipal or district boundary. The fundamental flaw is that India has picked the district as the unit for its pandemic response, said Mukta Naik, a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. “The red-orange-green tag has become a competition. All the districts adjoining the national capital region (NCR) are terrified of getting the virus."

In the absence of a more coherent strategy, a similar phenomenon may play out within state boundaries too—between, say, Mumbai or Chennai and their neighbouring districts. “Every district is looking inward and doing its own thing," Naik said.

While such a mindset might be administratively convenient, no city can ever function based on this logic, said Nitin Bathla, an architect and researcher with the Centre for Research on Architecture, Society and the Built Environment. “For instance, the stretch from Sonipat all the way up to Chandigarh functions like one city. Even in Chennai and Bengaluru, the metropolitan area spreads out for hundreds of kilometres and acts as one economic unit. Using satellite night-lights data, you can literally measure the extent," he said.

Due to the non-recognition of this basic fact about cities, daily wage workers who turn up at the Kapashera border (on the Delhi side) to go to work in Udyog Vihar (in Gurugram) are turned away, Bathla said. “This is happening every day. We can’t do this city by city. That simply wouldn’t work."

For now, Delhi’s impasse at the borders is set to continue, even as it offers crucial lessons to other cities. “There is no plan as to how long the borders will remain sealed," said Jasmine Shah, vice-chairperson of Delhi’s Dialogue and Development Commission, a government think tank. Neighbouring states have taken a “unilateral decision" and “unless they show a willingness to change their stand, there is no discussion", he said.

One way forward, Bathla said, could be a define a larger NCR zone (slightly beyond Delhi) for a year—where people coming from outside the zone can be monitored but greater movement will be allowed within. “This seems to be the strategy that Tokyo and London metropolitan regions seem to be adopting while opening up," Bathla said.

Subscribe to newsletters

* Enter a valid email
* Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.