They planned the city around the magnificent Acropolis consisting of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the two massive blocks of the secretariat, and superb vista with its broad sweep, stretching up to the memorial arch at India Gate. They also provided enough room for broadening the capital’s major roads which they knew must take place some day.
But the good points of the Lutyens-Baker legacy and balanced by the bad. They conceived New Delhi as an imperial city, apart and aloof from the other seven cities in Delhi that have been built side by side, not layer upon layer and this continues to be more or less the case even today.
Delhi is not integrated city in the sense in which both Calcutta and Mumbai are. And the
Obstacles to integration are not so much physical as mental. The British class system seems to have combined with the Indian caste system to create a kind of snobbery that continues to be the capita’s bane.
New Delhi is perhaps the only city in the world (leaving aside the even more horrid Chandigarh) where congestion increases as one goes farther away from the center. Small families of the top people live on acres of residential land, as costly as that in Manhattan and Mayfair, while the humble folk are crowed in distant hot –boxes that go by the name of Government flats.
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