Trees will be everywhere, in every garden however small it be, and along the sides of every roadway, and Imperial Delhi will be in the main a sea of foliage. It may be called a city, but it is going to be quite different from any city that the world has known (sic)…,” said Captain George Swinton, Chairman of the Town-Planning Committee, in his vision for the new capital of British India in 1912. Despite a World War and an exhausted treasury of his Colonial nation, some portion of this vision got translated two decades later. The trees are now being plucked to fish another Delhi from giant, dusty craters in the artery of India’s capital city.

“One of the Prime Minister’s dream projects is to reconstruct those buildings built between 1911 and 1927 like North Block, South Block, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament building,” said Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs at a public event of Delhi Development Authority in September 2019. This dream that Puri attributed to PM Narendra Modi is now called the Central Vista Redevelopment Project. It will overhaul the visual and spatial character of the space around the nearly three-kilometre-long road with the President’s House on one end and the India Gate on the other in Central Delhi.