GK to Gurugram: A field guide to encroach like the rich (and never be called encroachers)

A few months ago, I was walking through a part of Delhi whose two letters, if said without context, still haunt unsuccessful UPSC aspirants. GK. Thankfully not General Knowledge, but Greater Kailash, one of the city's richest addresses.

In fact, Delhi has become so rich that after GK 1 and GK 2, it eventually needed a GK 3, perhaps to provide a unique form of EWS (Extremely Wealthy Section) reservation for the expanding rich.

I was waiting for my cab at one of the busy intersections and everything felt as if the city was in the middle of a war and residents were fleeing from a possible missile attack. Big SUVs rammed in from every direction. Cars jumping red lights. Blinkit boys riding through on electric scooters, racing to deliver ice and ethically sourced bamboo whisky glasses to house parties of people who on Instagram post in solidarity with gig worker strikes. Horns compete to make sure that the noise levels are in perfect harmony with the AQI levels of the city.

For five minutes I stood there wondering how one of Delhi’s richest neighbourhoods could be such a mess. In the popular imagination, this kind of chaos gets filed under what X now fondly calls “Dehati Mentality”. But the truth, I would soon realise, had less to do with money and everything to do with our relationship with public space. Maybe less of a relationship. More of a situationship.

Walk a little further into GK and you’ll reach cafes and bars that proudly announce themselves as being among Asia’s best. Step outside them and you’ll discover roads competing for Asia’s worst. The cafes have glass windows and outdoor seating, borrowing the European idea of people watching. Except here, instead of watching strangers stroll by, you watch boys in Thars and Fortuners treating lanes barely wide enough for two hatchbacks like Formula One circuits. The nouveau riche, whose fathers probably won a government tender to supply tiles, drive past with Karan Aujla blasting through the speakers (because Shubh has now been declared anti-national by their favourite right wing Instagram page).

From there, if you walk into the residential lanes you will realise that the blame for this mess does not belong to the authorities alone.

Cars are parked along both sides of the road, leaving barely enough space for two vehicles to pass. Outside many houses, concrete ramps spill onto public land so that luxury cars can glide comfortably into private garages. Gates, driveways and little extensions nibble away at the street. Sometimes they even make a security guard cabin outside their allotted area, which is also part of their creative ways of encroachment. 

And yes, by any honest definition, this is encroachment. Yet the word refuses to sit comfortably on these houses. We have been trained since childhood to picture an encroacher only in a certain way. This remained one of those encroachments that everyone could see but nobody could see. Then, recently, something unusual happened in neighbouring Gurugram.

Anti-encroachment drives finally reached the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. By then, officer R S Batth had already turned the demolition drive into a social media virality spectacle. Every confrontation, every argument and every bulldozer has its audience on social media, making him both a polarising bureaucrat and an unlikely internet celebrity. His successor, Amit Madholia, picked up where he left off. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat that made him look like a cricket umpire, he began sending illegal ramps, boundary walls and private security cabins back to the pavilion.

Recently, one of the Instagram reels showed authorities bulldozing a portion outside actor Chandrachur Singh’s house. I did not even know he lived in Gurugram, which tells you something about how well Gurugram guards its secrets. Singh, to his credit, seemed remarkably unbothered (moisturised but not in his lane), nodding along to the officials, trying to understand the process of demolition with the sincerity of an NSD actor taking notes from his seniors. He even happily posed for selfies with the very people demolishing his ramp. One top comment under the reel simply said: Chappa Chappa Bulldozer Chale.

It reminded me of another famous encroachment story from nearby Noida. In 2022, BJP leader Shrikant Tyagi made national headlines after allegedly extending his private territory into the common area of his housing society with flower pots and landscaping. When a resident objected, he abused and allegedly assaulted her, turning flower pots into primetime television. The debate, rightly, focused on his behaviour. But the main characters were beautiful flower pots that disappeared from the story.

It was a reminder that the rich have many ways of occupying public space. Sometimes through brute power. Sometimes through cute flower.

A similar conversation has unfolded in Bengaluru, where authorities recently launched a Safe Footpath Campaign to reclaim pedestrian space. JCBs, which provide both a literature prize and a demolition drive, made sure that whatever is on the footpath is removed. Illegal staircases, ramps, shop extensions, signboards, kiosks and other structures built over pedestrian space have been removed across several neighbourhoods. The campaign has also displaced many street vendors. In Indiranagar, one tech worker summed up the mood with an Instagram comment: Bro, my golgappa dealer is also gone.

Although it sounds perfectly reasonable to say that footpaths should belong to pedestrians, the public conversation often pretends as if hawkers alone stood between Bengaluru and a decent walk. Many people on the internet have already posted pictures of cars parked on those very footpaths. There are so many illegal ramps outside many offices, and in fact these footpaths are used by bikers as express lanes whenever traffic builds up. 

In fact, Bengaluru complicates the idea of how we understand encroachment even further. 

For decades, Bengaluru’s biggest encroachments were not just on footpaths but on its lakes. Lake beds were encroached upon and turned into layouts, apartment complexes and roads. In some parts of the city, people are living on what used to be a lake.

This is what makes our imagination of encroachment so selective. A tea stall on a footpath looks instantly illegal whereas an apartment complex built over a dead lake looks like urban development. The same apartment now has a swimming pool, which seems almost like a romantic tribute to the past. In fact, the irony is that somewhere in Bengaluru a lake disappears, and a few years later, an apartment named Zen Lake Apartment rises exactly where the water used to be, where people in their free time also discuss how the sabziwallahs are encroaching on the land. 

None of this is an argument against anti-encroachment drives or against reclaiming footpaths. I have complained for years that Indian cities are openly hostile to anyone without a car. Every city deserves wide, continuous footpaths and the basic dignity of being walkable without risking your life for it.

But if we are serious about reclaiming public space, we also need to be honest about who really occupied it. The absence of walkable cities is not merely the fault of hawkers or informal settlements. Maybe the first thing that needs to change is the image that flashes in our head when we hear the word encroacher. It should not only be a street vendor balancing a cart at the edge of a road. Sometimes it is the residents of apartments, passionately posting about walkable cities, furious about the plastic straw handed over by the nariyalwala, while sitting on a little more public land than was ever theirs to hold. 

Perhaps the greatest privilege wealth offers is to remove the memory of occupation. The poor encroach. The rich beautify.

But the truth remains that the poor occupy public space out of necessity. The rich, however, occupy it inch by inch for what can be called an “ancestral hobby.”

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