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 The
union Territory of Chandigarh is the twin capital of
the northern states of Punjab and Haryana. Spread out over
114 sq. km. it has a population of about a million. The
principal languages of the city are Hindi and Punjabi. It
has big industrial undertakings as well as more than 2,500
small-scale industrial units. One of the few modern planned
cities in India, Chandigarh is divided into 47
self-contained sectors.
The town derives its name from Goddess Chandi Devi whose
temple stands 15 km form Chandigarh. There is a sense of
purposeful designing in Chandigarh with a rectilinear
alignment of streets, the neat geometrical design of
residential quarters, reinforced concrete structures and
self-contained area layouts. At the heart of Chandigar’s
designing are sectors, each of them with its shops,
academic, and health care buildings, places of worship, open
spaces, a green belt and, of course, the residential areas.
The essential ingredient in each sector’s planning has been
principal day-to-day functions of living, working, care of
body and spirit.
The initial plans were drawn in New York by Albert Mayer and
Mathew Novicki. When the latter died in an air crash in
1950, the work was entrusted to Le Corbusier, a well known
architect and planner. The city’s four major work areas are:
the capital complex, consisting of the Secretariat,
Legislative Assembly and High Court, in the north with the
hills as a background dominating the city; Sector-17, which
is the city and district center, with administrative and
state government offices, shopping malls, banks and other
offices; in the west, a zone for undergraduate and
postgraduate education, among them the university, and
institutions of engineering, architecture, Asian studies and
medicine and the industrial area in the east.
In the city of extravagant vision, it is not unusal to come
across something like a Rock Garden, which sounds farcical
unless actually visited. The result of the imagination and
devoted labour of Nek Chand the Rock Garden comprises
several areas of sculptures created from debris. Molded
rock, waste coal and other disposables have become immortal
sculptures in the shape of man and his environment. Fitting
into this scenario are museums and art galleries, a lake
with water sport facilities and the largest rose garden in
Asia. The hill torrents skirting the city were canalized to
form a large lake with a most attractive boulevard, along
which the citizen take the morning and evening air and watch
waterfowl which have made Sukhna Lake a halting place on
their migration from central Asia to India and vice-versa.
Chandigarh’s builders blessed it with a futuristic vision,
but work here is still not over. Phase two of the building
of Chandigarh continues, and the 21st century city may well,
in time, become one of the most modern and comfortable in
Asia. Here, in this almost ideal city, the new architectural
technique has found a sense of balance which is often
missing when it intrudes upon already existing, traditional
symmetry. In the years to come, city planners, architects,
students of art and visitors from around the globe will
gather to see what man an create out of a desert. The
creation of Chandigarh is a monumental triumph for India.
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