GURGAON Vs NOIDA

A few days back I was in Gurgaon. I was very impressed with the straight roads and carefully planned buildings along these roads. Being from a city like Hyderabad where buildings seem to come up almost anywhere and the roads are as curvaceous as the African bananas. Though one’s got to accept that Hyderabad wasn’t built in a day! Gurgaon sets the example for a modern day planned city! well is it? Not exactly, told my brother-in-law and why? Let us analyze why that’s not the case.
When Gurgaon was becoming a satellite town next to ever expanding national capital New Delhi, the Haryana Government was rushing into selling the land in Gurgaon to these big builders like DLF, Vatika, UNITECH etc. In fact DLF was the biggest buyer. These builders were responsible for setting up the required infrastructures in the satellite town. Each one now turned to it’s piece of land and turned it into a township with sky reaching buildings for accommodation and then these corporate offices. The construction and development work was completely outsourced to these big builders. In fact the entire piece of land was given away to these builders and very meager part was left for the government. Now here is where the problem actually took off. The builders developed their part of the township leading to unbalanced development in the whole city. What happened now was that in spite of the development within the township, there had to means to take the sewage out of each township and channelize it to the proper place. Now the builders had limited accessibility to the land outside their allotted township. Moreover this was the problem with almost all of them. They did not address this problem leading to large amount of pollution and environmental hazards. Next the Government had to buy back land from these big builders to actually re-plan the entire sewer system, drinking water supply, roads, etc. thus the government’s hasty decision led to a very unbalanced growth of the city where each developer developed only his own township and gave a damn about the impact on surrounding areas and environmental and architectural problems.

New Okhla Industrial Development Area right that’s NOIDA; while Haryana government was trying to gain maximum mileage by making it’s full use of being a satellite to Delhi, UP government was losing no ground to do the same. Only thing that made the difference is that it took the land allotment plan for the entire township under it’s control. Planning the passage for basic amenities like drinking water and at the same time passage of sewer and waste out of the city. The government allotted the lands in phases and led to rapid development by careful planning unlike Gurgaon where each builder developed his piece of land and then hung up.
So one could see that NOIDA is a more carefully planned city than Gurgaon.