IT is everyone’s dream to have a home-sweet-home. That doesn’t just mean a roof over head, a floor beneath and walls, doors and windows around, it means a place where you and your family live with a good quality of life, with an ambience that grants some basic comforts, a good neighborhood and safe and satisfying community life at the price you can afford. In this issue of The DayAfter, its Think Tank takes a good look at this vital development issue and looking for a model of good life. We take a look at the new horizons of residential and community development in Gurgaon, the ancient town in Haryana, which is growing to be the most modern of Indian cities.

The DayAfter is also planning to take a view of other centres of development in other parts of the country to promote new thinking on modern paradigms of growth and development. The readers are invited to participate in this project by offering their response, comment and suggestions and sharing their dreams of life and experiences of urban and satellite urban life.

Delhi, the country’s first city, is troubled with problems of congestion, pollution, break-down of infrastructure and unplanned development. Despite the brave efforts of the government and the private agencies, the haphazrdisation of the development process by the tin hats of the so-called civic and development agencies has resulted in creating more problems of living than facilities in the first city of the country. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), the Metro Rail Corporation, the dear departed DESU and its successor agencies, the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam and its several private sector successors in telephone, that is more cacophony than smooth communication, are among those who have made the urban life a confusion.

Water, power, transport, health, education, sports and recreation facilities, security, safety, clean air and sewerage that works, affordable health-care, environmental protection, preservation of heritage sites and historic monuments, are all under the threat of damage and destruction, thanks to the bureaucratic rules and regulations and their anti-people and anti-biotic enforcement who suffer from the phobia that they are paid to rule and not serve the common people.

There have been numerous outcries from time to time that Delhi is dying, but only a few brave souls like Union Minister of Tourism and Culture Jagmohan and doughty Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit have dared raise their voice to call a stop to this pillage of Delhi. The DayAfter decided to take a look at the negatives at some later time, its first concern was to look around the neighbourhood of the Capital, in the National Capital Region to explore if there were any rays of hope in the satellite towns of Delhi. Our team took a first look at Gurgaon in neighbouring Haryana. In their first investigation into the quality of life and direction of development, our team discovered a ray of hope in the Gurgaon model and came out with the poser: Should we not go the Gurgaon Way?

The mad and deliberately encouraged unplanned and voracious growth of Delhi has resulted in reckless horizontal and vertical development. Living in Delhi is increasingly becoming an acceptance of life in a city with no parks, no transport, no water, no affordable health-care, no responsive civic and local bodies, no protections against DDA and housing authorities of various kinds working at cross-purpose and making the citizens pay more and more for providing less and less and punishing the citizens for every fault of the bungling bureaucracy by imposing fines, sending false bills and suppressing files and information which might go into the citizens’ favour.

The DDA residential properties are becoming notorious in being costlier than the properties being provided by private developers in new suburbs. As one old Delhiwallah grumbled, "They have turned our beautiful Delhi into the country’s costliest slum where life is packed with more pain and shame than comfort and pride". Is that the reason the wise and the discriminating citizens are now carefully shifting from Delhi to Gurgaon in quest of better life at comparatively lesser cost? The DayAfter took a look at the issue and came upon the next question: Should we not go the Gurgaon way?

Why are the residents of Delhi shifting to various residential sectors in Gurgaon, today? Because of the ambience and good quality of environment and infrastructure, housing facilities by private developers at comparatively lesser costs than poorer residential facilities in Delhi and New Delhi.

If you move into one of the newly developed residential colonies in the modern Gurgaon, you move into a residence which is fully backed by dependable infrastructure. Power supply is ensured with additional support facilities to what the state power system can supply. Good schools, hospitals, community centres, clubs, security, safety, swimming pools, eateries, golf clubs are all coming up there. For guests there are restaurants, middle-sized, small and good hotels, plenty of oxygen in the air to fill your lungs with healthy morning breeze. The quality of material and architectural design of flats and bungalow in the newer colonies give you a concept of comfortable living and not just owning a residential property for the sake of owning it.

Incidentally, the quality of development in Gurgaon is government-supported and not government-controlled as is the case in Delhi and many other urban and semi-urban areas of the country. Most of the residential and corporate property development is of international standards at compatible prices.

Gurgaon is close to the national highway which takes you out to major destinations in Uttar Pradesh and beyond on the one side and to the rest of Haryana and Rajasthan on the other side. It is quite close to the national and international Indira Gandhi airport terminals.

Many experts and commoners interviewed in Gurgaon and other NCR satellite towns by The DayAfter team felt that faulty NCR planning and its faultier implementation could learn quite some lessons from the Haryana model, if other satellite towns like Faridabad, Ghaziabad, NOIDA and Greater NOIDA, for example, had developed like Gurgaon is developing.

But can the wisemen of Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan put their heads together and decide to disinvest the housing sector which some of the governmental agencies have turned into a continuing mess. The agencies set up to aid development had become government-controlled nests of colonisers only. Their achievement over the years is creating inferior houses at superior prices on land acquired at throwaway prices from the people. Why not take a second look at the successes and failures of the so many "development authorities" which had blocked sane and sensible development over the years? Is that an impossible task? And if Gurgaon can do it why cannot others do?

There are both profit, progress and better quality of life if the bureaucratic parasites are told by planners to lay their hands off from the area of housing and stop misdevelopment like misgovernance. And one more question, which deserved to be tackled in the second look at the NCR plan for 2010 and beyond, is: Would the Metro train services go to other destinations in the NCR or confined to the areas covered by the Delhi vote-bank of the two major contenders, the-BJP and Congress?