From business hub to derelict city road

Rajesh Palta, Delhi’s oldest surviving typewriter dealer in Kamla Market, reminisces about Asaf Ali Road as the city’s most happening financial district in the 1950s to 1980s. “Every big business in old Delhi had a dream to open an office here. Those days it was the most sought-after corporate address,” says Palta, 71.“I know today it will be hard to believe so, considering its current derelict condition,” he says.

- Manoj Sharma

Today, Asaf Ali Road, located at the confluence of old and New Delhi, is a sorry picture of civic apathy and gross neglect of built heritage. Footpaths are broken, drains are overflowing, buildings are in disrepair, and as one walks its crumbling corridors, taken over by squatters, there is a sense of dereliction all around the place.

Palta is not exaggerating when he refers to it as once being the city’s most bustling financial district because before the office high-rises around Connaught Place came up in the 1970s, Asaf Ali Road was the place to be for corporate offices. It was home to Delhi Stock Exchange and some of India’s top pharmaceutical, engineering, insurance and finance companies, banks and typewriter manufacturers.

The history of Asaf Ali Road dates back to the 1930s when the Imperial government established the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT) to address issues of insanitation, congestion, and slums in the old city.

“The administration’s perception of Shahjahanabad as a dangerous, unhealthy space, which had to be kept separate from New Delhi, is best illustrated by the controversy over the city wall on the southern side. In the plan of the new city, a wide strip of land had been left vacant as a cordon sanitaire between the limits of New Delhi and the wall of Shahjahanabad. Proposals to dismantle the wall in order to free up more space, or even due to concerns of safety since the wall was damaged in parts, were vigorously resisted by the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC, a precursor to the New Delhi Municipal Council) which had been set up in 1927,” writes historian Swapna Liddle in her book, Chandni Chowk: The Mughal City of Old Delhi.