Asiad Village is one of New Delhi’s more upmarket addresses. It’s near where I live, and on many mornings I have seen a car racing along the main road, a man engrossed in a newspaper on the back seat. As it nears a municipal dump (where in any case the garbage is more often than not dumped outside rather than in), the driver tosses a bag of garbage on the road, without even slowing. The plastic rips and spreads the pile of vegetable peels, chicken bones and eggshells on the street. The car races on.
Locking horns: The Chirag Dilli stretch of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor, which has earned the wrath of many and given rise to heated debate over the desirability of such a system. Madhu Kapparath / Mint
To say that the Indian middle class is pampered and spoilt is to make a statement of little value. Throughout the world, it is no secret that the middle class determines the quality of urban life. Its ability to buy or rent space, its capacity for consumption, its requirements for offices, schools, parks, recreation, shopping, and indeed, its needs for transportation, all set the tone for the city. Yet there is little in the actions of the Indian middle class that shows concern for citizens that don’t belong to it. It uses the city on its own terms, with a selfish emphasis on convenience, requiring unencumbered access to shopping, insisting on alighting and parking only at doorsteps, waging continual territorial wars over private space, and usurping all that belongs in the public realm. It grabs sidewalks, seizes airspace, cantilevers illegally and reclaims all that belongs to others for its own purposes. However minuscule a minority, the middle class has the power to hold the city to ransom. And it does.
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The Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, system has faced the direct ire of Delhi’s middle class. Connecting the city’s posh southern colonies to the working district around Connaught Place, the experiment cut room for itself on the centre of one of the busiest arteries, leaving little space for private vehicles. Unused to the mismatch of road space between the private car and the public bus, many have raised their voices at the most potent venue for debate: the cocktail party. In upper class drawing rooms, voices are raised in uniform condemnation of the new mode of public transport: “I spent 2 hours in traffic”; “I was stuck at the light for 45 minutes, yaar, this BRT just doesn’t work. Why don’t they scrap it?” The same people who will spend hours labouring on New York City sidewalks without a squeak, or carrying heavy packages in and out of the London Underground without so much as a groan, will mount a scathing offensive if made to walk on Mumbai’s Cuffe Parade or Bangalore’s Brigade Road. Without a driver waiting with an open car door at the kerb, no trip in the city is possible.