Inside the unpaved sewage-filled lanes of the village, one is surprised to find a green gated complex with 21 red-brick individual ultra-modern houses surrounded by thick green bushes. While all of these are not occupied yet, a handful of people living here include architects, budding artists and professors.
“Aya Nagar, for me, is a laboratory. I have been studying the process of urbanisation here. Most of the urban planners are unaware of how cities come up. I have seen people create a city here after having come from far-off places across the country. The population was around 50,000 then which has now increased almost four times. They neither have the means nor any government sanctions, but they relentlessly worked on developing this zone,” said MN Ashish Ganju, 71, an architect, who moved here in 1999.
Ganju said that one would find a unique social mix of cultures, communities and castes here. While one grocery store belongs to a Gujjar family, the other has a board in Malyalam. The colony has extended on what was once agricultural land, remembers Chaudhary, better known as Basant Pradhan in the area.
“All this land used to be agricultural while most of the place was a jungle when I was a child. We used to play by the johad (pond) which was surrounded by a lot of houses. There were no formal schools at that time. Since it had been a Muslim village, we used to learn Urdu and a little Mathematics at the village chaupal,” said Pradhan, also the vice -president of the Aya Nagar Vikas Samiti.
Having given up on farming and cattle-rearing now, for most Gujjar families, land is the major source of revenue. “I have built an apartment block on the land we had. The flats are mostly rented by young people who come from other states to work in Delhi. The apartments that have come up are no less modern. There are elevators and ample stilt parking space,” said Pradhan.
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