‘Central Vista’: The £2bn project to transform central Delhi that even a pandemic couldn’t stop

India Gate is one of the South Asian nation’s most recognisable landmarks, and for decades the area has stood as a symbol of the country’s historical heritage, a place for residents to spend their evenings and a spot for some of the biggest protests the nation has seen, symbolising as it does the corridors of power.  

Yet a few months ago, when India’s devastating second Covid wave arrived in the capital city and brought with it apocalyptic scenes of mass cremations and overwhelmed hospitals, the view of the sprawling lawns stretching for 3km up to India Gate in central Delhi also changed. Craters in the earth and mounds of mud appeared in the front of the site, along with barricades stopping anyone from entering. 

As the rest of the city locked down in early April, this construction work was declared an “essential service” and granted permission to continue, so that the central Delhi residents are only now returning to as Covid numbers fall is very different to the one they knew from the start of the year.

The current mess is part of the dream project envisaged by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party party called “the Central Vista” – a vast redevelopment plan that will see the Lutyens area of Delhi, named after the colonial-era British architect Edwin Lutyens who designed it, dramatically transformed.

One of the centrepieces of the new project is a majestic prime ministerial residence to rival America’s White House or Japan’s Sori Daijin Kantei. Consisting of 10 separate four-storey buildings across a 15-acre plot, it is also one of the first stages of the project scheduled for completion.

The residence will sit opposite a new triangular parliamentary building, “future-proofed” to cater to as many as 1,224 members of parliament, almost double the current capacity, as well as an independent office for every MP on the same premises.

There will also be new buildings for various ministries and other government functions, all interconnected and with superior security arrangements, the government says. And the road down from the current president’s home to India Gate will be newly beautified, a reimagining of the 3.2km Rajpath (known as Kingsway under British rule).

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To make way for the new vista to be built, around 458,820 square metres of built-up area will need to be demolished, including several museums and buildings that currently house ministries. Many historic documents and artefacts will need to be found new homes, while other historic buildings currently being used for government work will be converted into museums.

The project has been dogged by controversy from its very inception, but this backlash has only grown louder in the last few months as India suffered the world’s worst Covid outbreak. Critics say its £2bn budget should be spent on vaccines and bolstering a woefully underfunded healthcare system, while the fact it wasn’t even paused during the worst of the second wave has led to questions about the government’s priorities.

Shashi Tharoor, an author and outspoken senior MP for the opposition Indian National Congress party, tells The Independent the project displays an almost “Mussolinian taste for the grandiose” and “characterises the ‘New India’ of the government’s fantasies”.

“A new parliament building is one thing, but they’ve got an entire revamp of [the] central vista, building row upon row of anonymous faceless government buildings on both sides of the Rajpath, so there is a fairly major makeover that’s taking place,” he says. 

“What they should have done is replace some of these bad old buildings with new ones, instead of having a complete desire to create something new.” 

Narendra Taneja, a spokesperson for Modi’s BJP, says that with the changes being made the country will finally have a modern central promenade “to make Indians proud”. 

“The idea to build a new and bigger house for parliament is very old – 20 years, if not more,” he says. “Anybody who has visited the buildings housing our key ministries like commerce, agriculture and even finance would agree that they need more space, better infrastructure. That is what is being done.”

Much of the criticism of the project has understandably focused on the decision to build a new residence for Prime Minister Modi. The BJP argues that his current home and office were only ever meant to be a temporary arrangement, adopted by Rajiv Gandhi in 1984.

 “The Teen Murti House [former home of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru] was designated as the prime minister’s residence, but then they converted that into the Nehru Memorial in the 1960s,” Taneja says. “India will now finally have a permanent residence building for the PM, just like they have in Japan and many other democracies.” 

But commentators also note that the place where the prime minister currently lives at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg (formerly 7 Race Course Road) is hardly a dive compared to other residences of leaders around the world. It is spread across 12 acres of land, with sprawling lawns where Modi is regularly captured in photos or videos, in his morning exercise or feeding a peacock. It is also only an eight-minute drive away from the current parliament. 

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“The PM occupies a series of buildings on Lok Kalyan Marg, one for his office, another for his residence and a third for his guests,” TN Ninan, an author and senior Delhi-based journalist, tells The Independent. “A fourth is used by his security,” he says. 

“It is true that, when built, they were not designed for their current use.” But does that justify creating a vast new complex with a new house for the prime minister? Ninan believes not. 

The decision to rush on with the project despite the second Covid wave, insisting upon completing phase one by November this year, has rekindled opposition. In a May letter to Modi 12 of the most high-profile opposition leaders across the nation, including Congress’s president Sonia Gandhi and the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, asked the prime minister to “stop the Central Vista construction and [use] the money for oxygen and vaccines”.

India, normally one of the world’s largest vaccine-producing and exporting nations, has notably struggled to procure and roll out enough doses to its population in the past 18 months. Only a little over 6 per cent of India’s 1.3 billion people is fully vaccinated, according to the latest health ministry data.

Another letter criticising the project was written by 76 public intellectuals from across the world, including writer Orhan Pamuk, and Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. They criticised what they called an “extravagant project [in the] midst of a devastating pandemic, endangering workers, and squandering scarce resources that could be used to save lives”.

And finally, a long list of former Indian civil servants also wrote an open letter alleging discrepancies in the way the project was being pushed ahead, comparing Modi to “Nero fiddling while Rome burns”.

They questioned the extent to which a heritage assessment was carried out on the buildings being demolished or repurposed, and allege that the “redevelopment plans were not substantiated by any public consultation or expert review”. “Instead a hastily drafted and inappropriate tender was rushed through in record time to select an architectural firm in what was an extremely flawed process,” the letter said.  

The BJP has previously dismissed criticisms of its tender process, and Taneja describes it as a “false narrative” that the Central Vista is being constructed at the cost of efforts against Covid. “The Biden administration is spending $2 trillion in new infrastructure projects in spite of the ongoing war with Covid-19,” he says. “In India, we have hundreds of big infrastructure projects which were planned before Covid emerged. The Central Vista is only one such project.”