By Manuwant Choudhary
Not the dams or a Ram temple at Ayodhya but shopping malls are the temples of modern India but recently a TV channel IBN 7 ran a story suggesting 75 of the 76 malls in New Delhi are illegal.
Illegal? But why?
The TV channel announced grandly `Kanoon meri jeb mein'....the malls have not taken the clearance from the pollution control board.
And a builders association representative spoke about red tape and how there is just no time frame for such approvals and that is why builders are forced to go ahead with their projects without approvals and later to regularise them they pay a penalty.
Delhi chief minister Shiela Dixit on the program seemed coy and sheepishly replied that they should take permissions.
Its quite clear that governments have totally failed in India and even in a place like India's capital there is no electricity and in the summer months every ordinary citizen takes refuge at the malls which are air-conditioned to beat the heat.
Or even when they do not have water at home they visit the Malls.
Now that is a governmental failure the TV channels should be talking about.
Its precisely because of red tape that India's manufacturing sector is suffering and so malls now have more foriegn goods than Indian.
Malls are the real temples of modern India and not the dams that Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about. Malls provide jobs without taking away farmers lands.
If anyone, politicians and TV channels should take a pollution test for polluting our minds.
1 comment:
The problem of the mall is also associated with the lack of clearly defined property rights, and various land use restrictions.
I will not be surprised if one finds that almost every building in Delhi has violated some rule or the other. These are rules meant to be broken, so that an industry grows up trying to find a solution for every violation. But there is a price!
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