Delhi gets a G20 Summit makeover: All dressed up with somewhere to go

The LG is up and about at 2 am and IAS probationers oversee cleaning of drains as Delhi gets a G20 makeover

When Delhi witnessed its worst flooding of four decades in mid-July, nightmares from a monsoon 13 years back revisited the city’s top civic officials. In less than 60 days, the national capital was slated to host the Group of 20 Summit, its most significant marquee event since the Commonwealth Games in October 2010.

As in the run-up to CWG 2020, a public relations disaster, an uncharacteristically heavy monsoon and the consequent flooding and waterlogging devastated several key stretches of roads near Bharat Mandapam, the summit venue inside Pragati Maidan, and multiple government agencies with a penchant for working at cross purposes seemed unprepared. The flooding and waterlogging either undid months of work or slowed its progress, substantially damaging completed works.
 

On July 19, as the city recovered from the floods, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena set up district-level monitoring committees, or DMCs, consisting of senior officials from each of the national capital’s districts, such as district magistrates, district commissioners of police, and top officials from other civic agencies.
 

The DMCs, coordinated by senior IAS officers and bringing decision-makers from the city’s myriad civic authorities on the same page, were tasked with “gap analysis of shortcomings” towards preparedness for the G20 Summit in their jurisdictions. The objective was to have inter-agency coordination.
 

Over the past five weeks, these committees have updated “action taken reports’ at regular intervals on an e-monitoring mobile app after undertaking site visits, posting pictures and videos of “before and after”.
 

Their nightmares are now that of Saxena paying a surprise visit at any time of the day or night — in a recent instance, he visited a spot at 2 am — to check the authenticity of the “before and after” evidence.
 

The Lieutenant Governor’s office has identified 61 stretches of roads that will see the movement of over 30 G20 delegations of the visiting heads of states and governments, the city’s diplomatic enclave, and environs around the 23 hotels reserved for these delegations.
 

“As we walk from one location to another, uneven sidewalks, open manholes, uncovered drains, waterlogged ditches and well mouths in disrepair are common sight on the roads. Trying to fix these also on a real-time basis,” Saxena posted on X, the social media platform earlier known as Twitter, on Thursday after another of his umpteenth inspections since the first week of July.
 

For the Lieutenant Governor’s office, the New Delhi Municipal Council, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and others, the immediate importance has been to put in place, as Saxena said, a “contingency plan to deal with situations emerging out of heavy rainfall in the run-up to and during G20 summit put in place at identified locations.” They have identified 10 locations and deployed the latest machines to prevent waterlogging. But the larger objective has been to learn from the mistakes of CWG 2010, and not just in flood management.
 

The CWG created two kinds of public infrastructure — one that served the immediate needs, such as improving roads, and the other that were assets, such as stadiums, meant for athletes.
 

“It did not create the infrastructure that the public, the common woman or man, could use. Our effort has been to make parks, street furniture, food streets and art installations accessible to the common people,” an official who didn’t want to be named told Business Standard.
 

Nearly 20 monuments have been revamped, and some, such as the Purana Qila, a 16th-century monument near the summit venue, will soon have food streets. Workers are giving finishing touches to delicately sculpted tiered fountains. Art installations have come up across the national capital, from a winged unicorn on Mathura Road, which leads up to the main venue — Bharat Mandapam — to birds and animals representing the G20 countries, such as a puma representing Argentina in the Chanakyapuri area. Most of these installations have been made using scrap, such as automobile junk, gas cylinders, iron bits, and construction rods, in keeping with one of the key issues on the G20 agenda: sustainability and climate action.
 

The committees have taken up the defacement of walls, poles and metro pillars, either by commercial entities or political parties “by putting up posters and graffiti”, which are termed a “persistent problem”. The committees were asked to deal with this “with a heavy hand and zero tolerance”.
 

At a recent meeting, the committee noted that hoardings and posters were yet to be removed from outside the headquarters of a national party in Lutyens’ Delhi or that an “illegal tent-like structure” outside a star hotel was an eyesore or the problem of waterlogging outside the embassy of a G20 member country.
 

For cleaning of roads, civic agencies have deployed 50 Mechanical Road Sweeping, or MRS, vehicles mounted with machines to clear clogged drains and sewer lines, and at work round the clock in 12-hour shifts. Though these vehicles have their operators and a group of workers travelling alongside to help with clearing debris — 100 tonnes of waste is being cleared daily — more than a dozen IAS (Indian Administrative Service) (IAS) and DANICS (Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Island Civil Service) probationers from the 2021 batch are tasked with overseeing the work.
 

The committees have kept an eagle eye on encroachments of roads and pavements around the summit venue and hotels, ensuring that vendors stay away from these areas in the run-up to the event and during September 8, 9 and 10, when the substantial parts of the city will be out of bounds for the common people, citing security reasons in the face of protests from activists and concerned citizens against the loss of livelihood for thousands.
 

The Delhi Police will seal the borders of the city for the duration of the summit and deploy 450 Quick Response Teams near the key locations, such as hotels, Delhi airport, and shopping areas delegates and their spouses might visit, such as Jaipur House in the heart of Delhi and the Indian Agriculture Research Institute. In the eventuality of a parking crunch at the Delhi airport, the aircraft of the visiting delegations could be parked at the airports in Hindon and Agra.
 

The CWG 2010, despite its difficult preparation period, was a success, and officials hope so would be the G20 Summit.

New Delhi to host 30 foreign delegations

- 23 hotels in Delhi and four in Gurugram booked

- Planes to be parked at airports in Delhi, Hindon and Agra

- 61 roads being spruced up
- 10 waterlogging points identified

- Heavy-duty pumps, suction machines and spray jets deployed
- 52 Mechanical Road Sweeping vehicles to ensure cleanliness
- A dozen IAS & DANICS probationers oversee cleaning and repair

- 450 Quick Response Teams, 50 ambulances, 40 fire tenders at the ready

- 7 disaster management teams in 7 strategic locations

- 100 tonnes of construction and demolition waste removed daily

- 130 pillars on Airport Express Metro line cleaned, painted with murals

- 30 mobile teams of Delhi Pollution Control Committee to check polluting

- 20 monuments, including Salimgarh Fort and Purana Qila, cleaned 

- 60 Deputy Commissioners of Police looking after key areas

- All Delhi borders to be sealed, cops to watch social media posts

- “A heavy hand” to deal with posters and graffiti

- 83 varieties of plants in 675,000 pots to dot Delhi’s landscape