For generations of children who grew up in Shalimar Bagh’s BW block, the neighborhood park was much more than an open piece of land. It was the place where cricket matches lasted until summer evenings, football games continued until dark making it impossible to see the ball, and games of hide and seek turned strangers into friends. Residents who grew up in the area remember spending entire afternoons there, returning home only when parents called them back.
He says the park has seen children grow into adults. For the last one month, the same ground has been turned into a temporary parking lot.
The gate remains permanently open for entry and exit of vehicles. In many places, the grass has almost disappeared due to the weight of cars. Thirty-six-year-old Prahlad Saini, who has lived in the area since 2014 and runs a business in Azadpur, said the change began about a month ago when residents lost access to an informal parking space along the Western Yamuna Canal, where renovation work is underway.
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Saini said, “Earlier, cars could be parked outside next to the canal, but now with the work going on there, the local park has been converted into a full-fledged parking lot, which is of course a public space, for recreation and for children.”
A local guard, who requested anonymity, said, “There are some people who were vocal about using it as a parking lot. Then, there is a group that wants a place for their children to play.” The ongoing dispute inside this small neighborhood park reflects a larger reality of Delhi, where the fight for public spaces goes far beyond the traditional image of a hawker occupying a corner of the footpath.
From daily fights over parking to flower pots placed on footpaths and ramps spanning roads to garden fences and security guard cabins, the city’s common spaces are under constant siege. except leafy and green New Delhi The area, ironically the district with the lowest population density, is largely devoid of walkable footpaths in the city.
In large parts of the city, roads, drains, footpaths, even emergency access roads have gradually been subsumed into an illegal ecosystem of shop extensions, temporary structures, roadside parking, vehicle repair workshops and storage spaces. Delhi has a 33,198 km long road network – the highest among metropolitan cities – 25 million residents, 8.76 million registered vehicles, 250,000 street vendors (of which 75,000 are registered) and five million housing units. Together, they add up to a massive space crisis and, in the absence of fair and consistent enforcement, leave everyone fighting for it.
At the ground level, this results in congestion, clogged roads, delayed arrival of emergency vehicles and increased pedestrian insecurity. A study by the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) found that congestion on colony roads is not only due to increasing vehicle ownership but also due to the cumulative effect of encroachment, illegal parking and poor road management. In this, South Extension Part-I, Malviya Nagar, CR Park, Bhogal and Lajpat Nagar Part-IV were found to be the most congested areas.
At Maharshi Marg market in Malviya Nagar, researchers observed that roadside parking is a major problem and illegal speed breakers and damaged roads have further slowed down movement. A hotel fire that killed 23 people last week is barely 200 meters away from this area.
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S Velmurugan, former CRRI scientist, said, “Encroachment has increased in Delhi over the years, leading to increased safety and mobility issues. Much of Delhi’s congestion can be improved through effective implementation of land-use control policy along with traffic management measures.”
In a fire on March 18 Palam Colony Residence, Fire engines struggled to reach the spot due to cars parked on a large stretch of the road. An HT ground assessment using laser measurement equipment at eight locations found that, in many areas, barely half the width of the road is left usable – far less than is required for fire tenders to operate effectively. While the width of the original carriageway ranges between 4 meters to 10 metres, the encroachment leaves barely 1.5 to 3.5 meters accessible. This is much less than the required 6-7 metres.
In April 2018, the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs set up a 15-member inter-agency Special Task Force (STF) headed by the DDA vice-chairman to coordinate encroachment removal programs and action against illegal constructions. The numbers claimed by the STF are staggering but its impact on the ground appears to be minimal. According to the STF’s May 15 report, its anti-encroachment operations have cleared 1,086.06 km of road/footpath, 2,922 sq m of permanent and 524,623 sq m of temporary encroachment this year alone.
In its annual report, the STF claims that 3,748 km of roads/footpaths were cleaned in 2025, 6,916 km in 2024, 3,968 km in 2023 and 3,993 km in 2022. A senior municipal corporation official who oversees such drives said that although there is no clear definition of different categories of encroachment – temporary, semi-permanent and permanent – encroachment is anything but. Placed on public land without obtaining requisite permission or license from the municipality. “For items like temporary structures and vendor carts, no notice is required,” this person said.
Despite these claims, the encroachment reappears shortly afterwards. Chandni Chowk Sarva Vyapar Mandal chief Sanjay Bhargava said the 2006 Supreme Court order clearly states that if encroachments reappear after the remove encroachment drive, the local SHO will be responsible. “The order was not fully implemented. All these figures are meaningless if the problem keeps resurfacing,” he said.
Studies prepared for Master Plan Delhi-2041 show how this process has ruined neighbourhoods. In many unauthorized colonies and urban villages, roads that exist on paper as public infrastructure now function as mixed-use commercial corridors, where pedestrians, parked vehicles, vendors and moving traffic compete for the same shrinking space.
The findings of the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE), established as part of the MPD-2041 exercise, are clear. In one settlement surveyed, commercial establishments had effectively taken over public infrastructure. “The drains within the township along the main roads have been covered up and are being used by these commercial establishments as extensions of their shops,” the report said.
The same study found that mechanics are working directly off public roads and motor oil is flowing into drains, creating both mobility and safety concerns.
Atul Goel, who heads URJA United RWA Joint Action – a collective body of resident welfare associations – said the issue of ramps and stairs could at least be resolved by better planning. “People build new houses at higher levels to ensure that the rise in road levels can be controlled in the coming decades. Agencies should remove existing layers to ensure that levels do not rise,” he said. Goyal said people should be punished for parking outside their homes and putting up pots, chains and pillars to block pathways and the MCD as well as the police should be blamed for this.
There is also a problem of parking in Delhi with 80 lakh vehicles. MCD operates around 430 car parking lots with a combined capacity of 51,000 vehicles. Fights over parking spaces are common and often turn violent. Footpaths and green belts have to suffer due to lack of parking space.
Of course, Delhi already has a roadmap in place in the form of Delhi Maintenance and Management of Parking Spaces Rules. Despite the Supreme Court’s intervention, which led to the notification of Delhi’s parking policy in September 2019, key features of the plan have not yet been implemented.
Street vendors
Well-regulated street vending is also the key to solving the problem of encroachment. Generally, the largest share of items seized during encroachment removal operations and dumped in municipal yards are items from street vendors and carts, tables, goods. While the city has identified more than 70,000 street vendors and issued them COVs (certificates of vending), the lack of coordination and space allocation for vending still makes them vulnerable to such campaigns.
NASVI (National Association for Street Vendors) has argued that there are at least 2.5 lakh street vendors in Delhi and this is the first source of livelihood for the economically vulnerable migrant population. NASVI chief Arvind Singh said, “COV is not being respected anywhere. The Street Vendors Act was passed in 2014 and still the process of implementing it has not been completed. The designated vending places are not marked.”
The challenge, planners say, is to ensure that public space, originally built for movement, access and safety, remains available when it is needed most.
For residents like Saini and those with children in Shalimar Bagh’s BW block, it appears the struggle to reach their local park will be neither easy nor quick. However, like most people, access to such places is essential for Delhi’s sustainable development.
