The Joys of an Indian Monsoon
Hello All!
I am back after a lengthy and hectic, travel-wise, hiatus from this blog. The 2 months of summer holidays allowed by the school to escape the Delhi heat is not quite sufficient as the heat doesn’t follow the same calendar!! Instead we returned to the Northern Monsoon, slightly lower than 45 Celsius temperatures but high humidity and a complete lack of breeze. The threat of rain gives you constant hope for some relief but doesn’t deliver very often. This is particularly true in the NCR, where the construction boom has added to the dust levels in an already dry region. A word of advise to those coming to live here…….if it rains steadily for 30 minutes don’t bother venturing out into the streets unless it is absolutely unavoidable. The lack of drainage on the roads turns them into canals of murky sludge, and you have no idea how deep the ruts are as previously level ground collapses into insufficiently filled areas where pipes etc. have been laid. I saw a number of 2-wheelers suddenly disappear till only their handles were visible, pedestrians stranded on the kerb/pavement unsure of where to step onto the roads. Cars don’t fare much better, with the occasional BMW and Merc looking woeful in their new personas of partial submarines alongside the local cheaper models.
Growing up in Jamshedpur, I have nostalgic memories of the monsoons. The perfume of fresh rain on parched earth and taking hour long walks through empty streets in balmy downpours. Most commuters had sheltered under trees and watched in disbelief as my sisters and I enacted our version of Singing in the Rain.
It used to take about 3 hours of rain to block the drains on those roads and cause any flooding. Within the Jamshedpur city limits civic infrastructure was maintained by Tata Steel and continues to be done so today. Even with this example in its neighbourhood the local government in Jharkhand would prefer to try and coerce Tata Steel into funding & taking over the civic responsibilities in Ranchi(capital) than emulate it themselves despite a fully staffed PWD Public Works Department.
What the Tata Steel model goes to show is if each city council or MCD actually took the initiative, these bodies could make more money by imposing and collecting fines for littering, organising regular inspections, garbage collection, and any number of other civic functions which could be charged to all the end users, commercial, government or private.
It would of course require some degree of integrity and drive to make something like this work.
Development in Gurgaon (including DLF) is of the type where the numbering of the Sectors is based on when a development was built/sold, not on an overall plan already assigned with consecutive Sector numbers. This means that if you want to get from Sector 30 to 31, please stop and ask for directions or consult a map as they are not likely to be adjacent. With such ad hoc growth where is the thought to organising and implementing centralised civic amenities? Development is undertaken as a short-term endeavour, where the developer tries to sell as much off the plan as possible and then is not accountable for any shortages in power/water/civic supplies. There is currently a legal battle going on between the developer at Central Park (one of the better developments to live in) and the apartment owners. The bone of contention is the Club House (gym, pool, tennis courts etc.) which owners were originally lured with as part of their purchase in to the development. Now that the project is nearly finished, the developer wants the owners to pay more before they will make the Club House accessible and they also want to open it to public membership, making a mockery of the security gates which are supposed to afford privacy to the inhabitants!!! The losers, other than the owners, in this are the many tenants who were promised a club house with facilities by assorted rental agents and moved in there instead of somewhere else where their kids might have had access to a pool.
$42,700 a year for primary school education...hmmm sounds like a bargain! If 2 kids in a family spend 12 years in American school, they would have spent over a million dollars on their schooling alone. another million or two on their ivy league undergrad and grad education. and then their job will get outsourced to someone in Gurgaon who earns $500 a month :-) just kidding..
You should check out St.Columbus and Jesus & Mary in Connaught Place. Annual expense is unbelivably low (something like Rs.10,000) and the quality of education is really good.
Posted by: spongebob | August 29, 2007 at 09:24 PM