Inner Circle charkhi.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Dilli is changing furiously. From a road bridge beside New Delhi railway station, you can look down and see how deep the change goes.

This sunny, smoggy afternoon, the footpath along the old red-brick bridge on Central Delhi’s Deshbandhu Gupta Marg gives you a clear view of the railway station’s redevelopment site. The bridge is outside the station. No platform ticket needed. A fence keeps you safely apart from the messy traffic.

The sight is eye-popping. An enormous pit has opened up beside the station, its walls sheer stretches of brown earth. You might be looking into a quarry. Far below, metal rods stick up from wide concrete bases. A heap of concrete blocks lies near the edge.

Usually, when Delhi builds something major, you get to know the barricades better than the work behind them. You read the warning signs. You take the dusty bumpy diversion. For months you frustratingly thread your way through it. Then one day there is a building or an underpass. But here, you are getting a bird’s-eye view of the work in progress.

A yellow excavator sits at the bottom of the aforementioned giant pit. Near a white-and-blue shed are stacks of rods, drums and metal frames. The men in the pit look small beside the columns of sariya going up. One, in a yellow helmet, is bending over his work. Far above, crane hooks hang against the pale sky.

On the other side of the barricades, train passengers are making their way to the station. The barricades hide the pit from them. A man is pulling a red suitcase (see right photo). Soon followed by a man carrying a suitcase on his head. Followed by a man carrying a tall cardboard carton the same way.

Beside the pit, the railway station’s familiar buildings are still in use. Look towards the platforms from the bridge and there is the same old station you know. Tracks curve and cross under a mesh of electric wires. The blue platform roofs run in long strips, some fitted with solar panels. Beyond them, the business towers of Connaught Place are barely perceptible in the afternoon haze (see left photo).

Indeed, you could spend a long time here, looking from the station getting through its afternoon life to the one taking shape slowly-slowly in the pit.

Come down the urine-smelling stairs at the side of the bridge and you are soon back to earth, facing a gate painted with warnings in Hindi and English. No entry without permission. Construction work in progress. Helmets, reflective vests and boots compulsory. Child labour prohibited. A woman is sitting on the ground right in front of the gate, an arm around a baby. Above these two citizens, in blue letters across the two halves of the same gate, are also painted the words “Project – Redevelopment of New Delhi Railway Station.”