About Central Park
It lies in the heart of the city, the inner circle of CP, and is popular with loungers, office-goers and tourists alike. Used as a short-cut by shoppers, it has a plethora of attractions for the tourist on the lookout for a taste of India. Snake charmers, messieurs, ear cleaners (better to give them a miss), food vendors, all can be found here. A downside is the persistent pestering by local urchins.

It would be a major tourist attraction with proposed revamp when METRO RAIL station comes up. Seventy-one years after it was built as the central business district of Delhi, the architectural marvel called Connaught Place finds itself at crossroads. By next June, lakhs of commuters would start using the CP Metro station being built right under the uprooted Central Park.

If the condition of all the circles and the facade of the crumbling edifice of heritage buildings here continue to deteriorate at the current pace, CP may also go the Chandni Chowk way — a dirty market around a busy station. Or if the NDMC finally wakes up from its slumber, the Metro station here would be Delhi’s equivalent to the Victoria Terminal in the well preserved Central London.

New Delhi Traders’ Association president Manoj Aggarwal rattles off a long list of problems — lack of parking, choked drains, illegal constructions, leaking buildings, bad public lighting, no uniformity in walkways, large number of beggars and hawkers… ad nauseum.

Thankfully, NDMC’s new chairperson Sindhushree Khullar realises these problems. “CP was built in 1933 and some buildings have become weak. The Metro is a window of opportunity, as we will now have to redevelop the place. That’s going to be one of the biggest challenges faced not only by NDMC, but also by the city,” she admitted. However, NDMC can begin its work only after it gets the inner circle and radial roads back from Metro. And that will happen only by next September.

Conservation architect Ratish Nanda has suggested many things for CP including pedestrianisation. So 2004 may be the end of CP as we knew it, or maybe the year of its Renaissance.