City beautification : the utmost priority?

Scottish-born American author, John Muir once said “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” If his words are to be believed, then India's lavish spending on city beautification has little relevance. For a country where the number of people living in slums is projected to rise to 93 million in 2011, beautification of the nation has different connotation. Beauty is not defined by lavish parks, but by the degree of safety in and around a particular place. Even the transport system of the national capital, New Delhi, is insufficient and unsafe for women. Metro, in spite of providing meager relief rarely covers all the important areas. As per the Delhi Development Authority, there are 1,40,000 homeless people. India has about 10 million street children especially in the urban areas. About 25 new homeless children migrate to Mumbai every day. Still, these incidents fail to influence the national priorities of India.

Feast on this. Australia spent $1.444 billion to host 2006 Games as against the budget estimate of $1.442 billion. On the other hand, India estimated to spend over half a billion but actually ended up spending Rs.60,000 crore ($13.32 billion) aiming to provide healthy environment to 8000 athletes and officials. What is shocking is that Delhi has spent Rs.60 lakh during the last 10 years for providing shelters to the homeless while it had a budget of Rs. 4 billion for beautification for 2010. Moreover, the budgetary allocation for important national schemes like the Indira Awas Yojna and Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana was a mere Rs.10,000 crore and Rs.1,270 crore during 2010-11 respectively. To complete the picture, begging is given the status of crime in Delhi without taking stiff action to arrest the issue. As per a research conducted over 2006-07 by Centre for Equity Studies, among the primary reasons for arrest in Delhi, 15 per cent of the abduction was for living on the streets, 14 per cent for begging in contrast to the 5 per cent abduction rate for living on the streets in Chennai followed by Madurai with 7 per cent and Patna with 7 per cent. However, Delhi is not the only example. Mumbai has recently spent Rs.70 lakh to upgrade one of the five gardens that it has planned to beautify.

Definition of a beautiful state emphasises on how safe, healthy and happy people are. A clean road gracing street children begging money, a lavish park housing homeless people sleeping at nights or skyscrapers overlooking slums and Indian destitutes does not evoke the beauty of a city. Thus, it is imperative to set out priorities judiciously. Unfortunately, these are yet to become the priorities for our elitist policy maker.