Hey folks,

Do you realise what a terrible monster of a city Delhi is? Why am I hurling nasty abuses at the capital of India? The media is buzzing with the Delhi government’s grand Master Plan 2021.

So the estimates of the amount of water, energy, and land Delhi now consumes, and how much more it plans to gobble up in the future are in front of me. And I can only call it a hungry, drooling giant. Then I look at the volume of waste it generates and I am ready to throw up.

Delhi sucks 800 million gallons of water per day, eats up tens of thousands of tonnes of food, materials and fuel to maintain its health. Then at the end of the day it vomits out 6,000 to 6,500 metric tonnes of garbage, and several hundreds million gallons of untreated sewage. Let us not also forget the huge quantities of dangerous gases and suspended particles it pumps into the air.

City planners predict that by 2021, Delhi’s appetite will swell twice over. It already extracts 170 per cent of its groundwater; has turned the Yamuna into a sewage dump. The rural habitat around it is disappearing under its enormous bulk. The size of Delhi’s footprint on the environment around it can already match that of Godzilla’s…
I am not looking forward to 2021!