A Shadow On Chandigarh?

Badal reneges on a pledge. The Anandgarh project has villagers, planners and architects fuming.

By Manu Joseph, Navrattan P. Singh, Bhavdeep Kang

April 10, 2000

"Lakhs of people will be adversely affected and moreover, it will damage Punjab’s claim on Chandigarh...as for the farmers whose land is being acquired, who’ve worked day and night to make it fertile, no amount of money can compensate them."
- Parkash Singh Badal on the New Chandigarh project, June 29, 1995

DENIZENS of Chandigarh remember Parkash Singh Badal’s vociferous objection to the plan for a parallel township cheek-by-jowl with Le Corbusier’s model city. And they fail to understand why, five years down the line, he is determined to implement the very project he had so vehemently opposed. As opposition leader, he swore to scuttle New Chandigarh; as chief minister, he has virtually revived it under the name Anandgarh.

Architects the world over are against the idea of tampering with Chandigarh by locating a 10,000-acre urban sprawl right next to the city. Given the manner in which the project has been conceived, they say, Anandgarh will be a "dormitory town", dependent on Chandigarh’s already strained infrastructure and facilities. Overcrowding...