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Ex-bureaucrats write to govt, say Central Vista project ‘hasty’
Addressed to housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Puri, the bureaucrats have reminded the government that the Central Vista is a heritage site.
In a letter to the central government, 60 former bureaucrats and diplomats, including former secretaries, have expressed “grave concerns about the Central Vista Redevelopment Project” and urged the government to see the “fallacy of the project and issue notifications to keep the work from going ahead”.
According to the letter, at a time when the government needs to step up its efforts to help boost the economy due to the coronavirus pandemic, spending Rs 20,000 crore on the Central Vista project is like “Nero fiddling while Rome burns”.
“When enormous funds are required for strengthening the public health system, to provide sustenance to people and to rebuild the economy, taking up a proposal to redesign the entire Central Vista at a cost of at least Rs 20,000 crore, a figure likely to escalate significantly, seems particularly irresponsible,” states the letter.
The signatories to the letter include Vappala Balachandran, IPS (Retd), former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, Meena Gupta and Tishyarakshit Chatterjee, former secretaries, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Aruna Roy, former IAS officer, and Harsh Mander, former IAS officer and social activist.
Addressed to housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Puri, the bureaucrats have reminded the government that the Central Vista is a heritage site and “construction and redesign on the scale planned in the redevelopment project will significantly affect the heritage nature of this precinct, and destroy it irrevocably”.
“The redevelopment planned will, moreover cause severe environmental damage,” states the letter, a copy of which was accessed by Hindustan Times.
A query sent to the ministry over the letter remained unanswered till the time of going to press.
“It is sad to note that approvals of empowered supervisory bodies like the Environmental Assessment Committee of the Ministry of Environment and the Central Vista Committee have been pushed through in great haste at meetings convened at short notice while the country is in lockdown due to the Covid-19 epidemic, and despite the absence of private members who expressed their inability to attend and advised waiting till the nation returned to normalcy. The clearances are being given despite the matters being sub judice. These bodies have, unfortunately, been reduced to mere rubber stamps with notes of dissent not even recorded,” the letter states.
According to the letter, the tenders issued for the project were “hastily drafted” and “rushed through in record time” to select an architectural firm in an “extremely flawed process”.
