Summitry and suffering

Govt must find out-of-city locations for its mega events

Over the past year and a half, residents of the National Capital Region have been at the receiving end of the government's penchant for summitry, the consequences of which reached a peak over the two days of the Africa Summit earlier this week. Photos of traffic snarls on major roads and crossings were one element of the crisis as the entourages of over 40 heads of government converged on the city. The wasted hours in terms of work productivity was another. Air pollution worsened considerably in what is already one of the world's most polluted cities as vehicles slowed to a crawl or waited indefinitely. Between big-ticket events like Make in India, Digital India, Swachch Bharat and similar VIP-heavy occasions, it is becoming increasingly clear that the capital city is no longer capable of hosting large events without putting its citizens through considerable hardship.

Yet New Delhi is not an outlier in terms of intensive summitry. Washington, Berlin and London regularly host mega events involving large contingents of VIPs. Recently, New Yorkers suffered when the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, when the heads of government of all member-nations gather, coincided with the visit of the Pope. Yet, traffic management on roads that are considerably narrower than Delhi's and excellent public transport system ensured that the inevitable inconvenience to the average citizen is kept to the minimum. Elsewhere, there has been pushback from civil society - such as in Pittsburgh when a G20 summit was held there in 2009.

In contrast, Delhi's civic authorities become a model of inefficiency whenever the city hosts a big event. Even basics like traffic advisories rarely follow the plan -roads deemed open are arbitrarily closed. The police mostly has imperfect information to offer harried commuters; and the limited reach of the vaunted Metro system - the saviour in almost every other major city in such times - is exposed. Delhi's particular problem is that the summitry venues and the five-star hotels hosting VIPs mostly intersect with some of the city's busiest traffic routes and business districts. Designating the roads radiating from, say, India Gate a "no-go" area for most of the day is absurd when several of those constitute the main routes to the east and north of the city and some intersect one of Asia's busiest crossroads.

All of this points to the urgent need for the central government to explore alternative summit venues away from the city centre. This is admittedly hard to do since cities have a habit of catching up with their peripheries. The Pragati Maidan complex is a case in point; the annual International Trade Fair began as an event in a distant city suburb; today, the area is the hub of government and private offices. An attempt to hold events in a suburb of Noida in Uttar Pradesh some years ago didn't work simply because delegates had to face long commutes from their distant Delhi-based five-star hotels to access the venue. Hyderabad experimented, with mixed results it must be admitted, with setting up a self-sufficient mega convention centre that encompassed hotel services and service apartments. This could be a good option to consider since it can minimise VIP movement in the heart of the city. The issue, as always, is the economics, especially whether hotels that depend on occasional events for business can be viable. As a short-term solution perhaps big events should at least be reserved only for the weekends; this will not faze this hard-working government and spare the National Capital Region's harried citizenry the angst.