Noida’s twin-tower ashes of shame
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, August 28: Noida hit international headlines for three successive events; a political thug abusing a woman, a woman lawyer abusing ‘Bihari’ security guards, and nine-second of thrills when over 100 metre long structures, the twin towers, came crashing down with the heat of the blast of over 3700 kgs of explosives.
On Delhi’s outskirts, the concrete skyscrapers rose in Noida and Gurugram or Gurgaon in the last few decades after the horizontal town planning of the national capital pushed the population to flow to the nearby areas in search for accommodations.
Supretech, the builder of twin tower, along with many of its peers in Noida and Greater Noida have been notorious with the home buyers for lapses – moral, professional and also legal.
But the builders of Noida have survived and thrived despite fleecing the home buyers.
Those who closely follow the politics of Uttar Pradesh know that the builders of Noida are the cash cow for the political parties in the state.
That explains why the twin tower rose to such heights in the first place.
Noida Authority is seen to be so alert that its inspectors swoop down on thela-wallah vendors near the high-rises since they violate the norms of Noida and Greater Noida.
Yet, the twin towers rose and stayed to great heights, while the people bought the flats, and the Noida Authority looked the other way.
Minutes before the explosives brought down the twin-towers, the erring builder claimed that the structures had bene built as per the approved plan of the Noida Authority.
The twin-towers were brought down on the order of the Supreme Court order, which pinned down the builder for raising the structures at a space which wasn’t meant for them.
But this thrilling spectacle is least likely to deter the builders from erring again with the blessings of the babus in Authority who want to take a quick ride to riches to fund education expenses of their kids abroad and build mansions with ultra-luxury amenities.
Such thug builders abound all across the country, and only a couple of them have faced the music so far, which also include the Amrapali, which was proudly endorsed by Mahendra Singh Dhoni for years.
Town planning must be an abstract art, for Delhi has to live with horizontal planning because of hundreds of compelling reasons, while in the neighbourhood the high-rises kiss the sky for another hundreds of compelling reasons.
Twin towers come and go, but babus live on, and they haven’t seen just decades but centuries on their sides.
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