The hundred years of New Delhi being celebrated seems to be somewhat premature because while the Town Planning Committee was appointed in 1912, the city actually was not ready until 1930. So who then took all these years to build the city? Was it the celebrated architects Lutyens and Baker; was it the notaries after whom Connaught Place and Brar Square are named; was it the contractors like Shobha Singh and Sujan Singh; or were there many other faceless functionaries? And what happened in the century in between as this ‘happening’ city expanded? Who fuelled and maintained the expansion? Was it the Gandhis and Nehrus, afterwhom many parts are named? Was it the national leaders and freedom fighters; the private developers and DDA; or a host of others who remain unrecognised and invisible? Three stories from that century may reveal some of answers to these questions.

The 1912 Committee, on the one hand, oversaw the acquisition of extensive areas to the south of Shahjahanabad (or Purani Dilli), for the construction of Imperial New Delhi, of lands belonging to the Jaipur royal family, and displacing hundreds of farmers who crowded into old settlements across the Kushak and Barapula Nalas, like Nizamuddin, Bhogal, Kotla Mubarakpur, and Karbala. At the same time, the Committee decided to completely demolish the high ramparts of Shahjahanabad and, this too, displaced thousands of artisans and workmen who lived outside the walls, and who were relocated across the Ridge in the Western Extension Area — now known as Karol Bagh. Curiously enough, it was this uprooted population of the poor who provided the army of cheap labourers that eventually “built” the new city.

One of these displaced groups was the Rehgars, traditional craftsmen of leather, who had provisioned the armies of the Mughals, and later, of the East India Company and the English Crown. They first got kicked out from Rehgarpura to the west and then, after the construction of New Delhi was over and Karol Bagh was developing next door as a middle class enclave, to Roshanara Extension in the north. All through they continued to provide the leather for shoes and bags, tongas and beddings, furniture and uniforms — all required by the growing city. Something similar happened to the homeless workers servicing the markets of the old Sabzi Mandi.They were first housed in the Mohtaj Khana next to the Mandi and then
forcibly moved out and thrown without any ceremony to vacant lands near what is now Shaktinagar.

This story of eviction to acquire new lands and then using the labour of the vulnerable to build new expansions is repeated several times in the history of this city. Thus, one of the groups hired to quarry and transport the stone required for constructing the shopping arcades, the refugee colonies and housing societies in the expanding city of the 1940s and 50s, was the Odhs from Rajputana.
   
They made their own homes in the forest near the Bhatti mines and, it is interesting to note, the government built a large veterinary hospital for their donkeys but would not provide a dispensary for them. After the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the mines in 1996, the Odhs were evicted to protect the forest, and they eventually became the energy that laid the optic fibres in the modern city.
   
Then there is the story of the games and the festivals that gave the city its present aspiration to be a ‘world class’ one. The first one was the Asian Games in 1982. As a prelude to that event, almost 1½ lakh families were shifted out to the periphery to places like Dakshinpuri and Nandnagari, Mongolpuri and Seelampur. This was a population of workers who serviced the rest of the city, providing it with domestic maids and cooks, shop assistants and rickshaw pullers, daily wagers and masons.

However, their departure also left a labour vacuum in the city, so another force of 10 lakh workers had to be imported to build the Asiad infrastructure and these were housed in the most miserable of labour camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. In a tragic repeat of history, the same thing happened in the period before the Commonwealth Games.

 As we hoist banners to welcome a century of urban growth, it is also seemly that we remember all those who actually created that growth.