When my mother was growing up in Nizammuddin in the early 50s…
…she and her brother Jim could walk out of the house and into the woods and hunt parrots with a .22 gauge rifle…
…and no one would notice.
Even though the population after partition had doubled, there was still wilderness in the city.
But on the other side of town in those days, Nehru was feeling feverish about the proliferation of slums, or what he called 'colonial wounds'
Then, in 1956 reports of Jaundice began to show up. First one, then ten, then nineteen people died, soon 400,000 people were affected.
They discovered that the Najafgarh sewage drains had overflowed.
And so Delhi became the first city in history to have a major Hepatitis E jaundice epidemic…
…carried by its own drinking water.
The minister of health Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, a close friend of my grandfather, reached out to Doug Ensminger at The Ford Foundation, which was already very active in India.
She asked Doug to get Albert Mayer from New York, and some other American city planners to 'advise and guide'.
And so, more Americans arrived, Americans who, like my grandfather nine years earlier, came knowing nothing about India, let alone Delhi.
Teams ebbed and flowed and egos clashed, but, in 1962 The Ford Foundation had managed to sponsor Delhi’s first Masterplan.
The plan of the masters conceived of the city to be like a giant machine, with various parts taking on specific functions.
American concepts of zoning clashed against centuries-old habits of keeping animals and cooking over open fires.
Those who worked with their hands were pushed to the outskirts.
As a bellwether, the American planners labeled Shahjahanbad
the City of Poets
a slum.