6 yrs on, taj corridor has become a graveyard

Darpan Singh, Agra

The place was once supposed to remind one of Mumbai’s Marine Drive. However, bones, skulls and filth today greet visitors. The Rs 175-crore Taj Corridor Project, that proposed to build a heritage corridor between the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort some six years ago, has now become a huge heap of mud and garbage with the site being used as a graveyard to bury dead bodies and for depositing animal carcasses.

Nobody today in the Uttar Pradesh government is willing to come on record regarding the incomplete project even as the issue has been extensively used to settle personal scores and take political mileage. A Pollution Control Board official admitted, “The site has today become a source of pollution in the Yamuna which flows behind the Taj.” Surprisingly, he said it was the responsibility of the AMC to set things right. A recent visit to the site revealed that it is being used to dump solid wastes which, during rains, find way to the river that is already saturated with pollutants. Though experts say the dry riverbed is a serious threat to the heritage monument, the Government is yet to act.

Ever since its inception, the project drew flak from all quarters, as experts believed any construction on the riverbed might alter the course of the Yamuna and would lead to ecological problems, posing a threat to the Taj Mahal, a world heritage site. “Work on the project began but was immediately stopped in 2003 after judicial and administrative interventions,” recalled an official in the Tourism Department.

Even as the matter has been in court for long with Mayawati facing corruption charges, the site has turned into a graveyard. Surprisingly, despite a court order prohibiting construction around Taj trapezium (the area in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal that has many historical monuments) without proper approval, the project took off.

The project was to come up along the Yamuna, on a platform raised from scooped silt of the river. There was a plan to construct an amusement park, malls, commercial shops, and walkways through dense wilderness to allow tourists take a leisurely stroll in moonlit nights. The corridor was to begin right from Khan-e-Alam, close to the Taj Mahal, and end two kilometres towards the city behind the Agra Fort. It was to be extended later to allow tourists to reach Etmauddaula and Ram Bagh on the other side of the river.

Rs 17 crore was spent, as hundreds of tractors, earthmovers and machines worked round the clock for three months to dig out silt and deposit it on the riverbank to create a new platform, which was laid with Rajasthani stones. But after a hue and cry from conservationists that the corridor would endanger the monument and allegations of large-scale corruption in the project, the central government suspended it in 2003. The filling of the riverbed, experts felt, would narrow the Yamuna, which might put the Taj's foundation under threat. Environmentalists now demand the site be cleaned and greened.

The project is now defunct, and plans are being made to remove the partial construction near the Taj Mahal site and replace it with a low tech forested greenbelt. Even as there is no official word regarding the fate of the project, ASI sources doubt if the Supreme Court would allow anyone to take up the matter of starting construction at the site again. Interestingly, there have been no serious objections to the corridor from the ASI, which oversees all ancient monuments in India. In an order, the SC, however, did not direct the authorities to dismantle the corridor project but called for greening it.

The project was not only a risk for the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort but it had violated the rule prohibiting construction within 300 meters of monuments as it was found the construction work had almost touched the wall of the Agra Fort. Consequently, the heritage status of the Taj Mahal came under threat when the Unesco said it might put the Taj Mahal under 'World Heritage in Danger' list, if it found the new complex would affect the authenticity and integrity of the site and would have a negative visual impact.