The parable of the blind men who visualise only the part of the elephant they can touch but never know the sheer size of the whole is an apt one for the Central Vista project.

By breaking up submissions into micro projects, no one can estimate any idea of the macro project itself or its collective impact on environment or heritage. The only people who know what the entire elephant will look like can be counted on one hand – essentially the architectural firm and the evaluation committee that chose it.

Every part of this project should have been submitted for approval to a standard list of required committees and agencies such as the Central Vista Committee, or CVC, the Heritage Conservation Committee, or HCC, and the Delhi Urban Art Commission, or DUAC. But submitting it in a million moving parts avoids easy tracking of what has been submitted, when or how.1

As citizens, the objective is to understand the cumulative impact of the Central Vista project. This objective is placed in trust with the expert committees and judiciary to steer it in the right direction on heritage, environment and by-law compliance. By salami slicing the project, information might emerge, for example that 2,000 trees are being cut at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. But no one has the information to calculate how many trees will be cut for the full project. It could be 10,000 or 20,000 but it does not exist as a collective figure of loss.

Getting this collective understanding seems impossible because the sanctioning process, expert committees and constitutionally empowered bodies like DUAC have been damaged beyond repair. Their independence and ability to provide professional inputs have been trampled upon so severely that their certifications have become a robotic exercise in meaninglessness. They no longer possess the ability to act as trustees of citizens.

This is obvious when the Heritage Conservation Committee declares without embarrassment in the Supreme Court that Vijay Chowk is not part of Central Vista! Because if the obvious truth had been revealed that Vijay Chowk has always been a part of Central Vista since it was made 90 years ago, the new parliament would then have been subject to skyline restrictions.

Clearly what lies behind the evasions, opacities and chaotic moving parts are distinct strategies to subvert these committees and urban institutions. It is instructive to see what these strategies are and how they were put together. To do that it is essential to revisit the past.2

The years 2016 and 2017 would emerge as critical years for the Central Vista project.

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• 1. This is why the new parliament has received environmental clearance as an “Extension of Old Parliament” but bizarrely applied for CVC approval as a “New Construction”. This is why the Rajpath lawns that have already been dug up have received CVC approval and heritage clearance but no environmental clearance. This is why only three of the new secretariat designs have been submitted and received CVC approval while all 10 have received environmental clearance. This is why the government has declared that the new parliament was somehow not part of Central Vista to avoid stricter environmental assessment. The list goes on.
• 2. In January 2016, an opinion piece was written on the need for a new parliament. This was possibly the first indicator of the government’s thinking on the project. Its author was architect Bimal Patel, favoured by prime minister Narendra Modi for several projects in Gujarat. To no one’s surprise, Patel would be awarded the consultancy contract three years later for the Central Vista project in a tender process riddled with enough improprieties to be challenged in the Supreme Court.