Despite being touted as the millennium city and the city of the future, it is a real shame that Gurgaon does not even have a basic administrative framework dedicated towards its development. While colonies such as DLF and Sushant Lok might boast of having some of the biggest and most expensive high-rises and swanky penthouses in their midst, residents still have to make do with canal water supply. Equally bad is the power situation with power-cuts that stretch into several hours being a common occurrence and the civic amenities, of course, are nothing much home to write about either.

What’s even worse is the fact that these problems are not there on account of the government not having enough money. In fact the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) is sitting on thousands of crores of rupees collected from developers decades ago for providing master civic infrastructure. What Gurgaon really needs is a single unified body that is in charge of the overall public welfare and infrastructure right from water to power to roads, everything.

At present, urban areas of Gurgaon are categorised into three types. One is under the Gurgaon Municipal Council (GMC), which takes care of the old town, some HUDA sectors and a few villages. Another is HUDA colonies taken care of by HUDA. And the third and latest is private colonies (also called licensed areas), which are governed by Town & Country Planning. While water supply and roads are managed by HUDA in HUDA sectors and private colonies, power is supplied by the Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam.

In this situation it’s become more of a blame game with all the parties concerned blaming each other for the problems besieging the city.

Various resident welfare organizations have also accused the state government of not taking a decision on floating an administrative authority on the lines of the Noida Development Authority due to its nexus with the builders’ lobby who are opposed to such a move. So much so that the Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda had made it clear that there would not be a Gurgaon Development Authority during his recent visit to Gurgaon. The reason given by Hooda for this was that floating a development authority for Gurgaon would lead to confusion with the overlapping of jurisdictions of various civic agencies such as HUDA, Town & Country Planning and Gurgaon Municipal Council.

Instead, he tried to deflect the issue and buy time for himself by suggesting the formation of an NCR Development Authority consisting of all Haryana towns sharing borders with Delhi, namely as Gurgaon, Faridabad, Sonepat and Bahadurgarh.

Looking at the shape of things to come, the denizens of Gurgaon don’t seem to be in for much of a relief anytime soon.