KEY POINTS:
The developers behind Central Park, one of India's most expensive new gated communities, were elegantly lyrical in their promises of the luxurious existence awaiting new residents.
"When you buy into Central Park, you are not doing something as mundane as buying a flat, you are buying into a
lifestyle," the brochure read. The development would offer an escape from the dust, heat and pollution of Delhi, shutting out the bleaker realities of modern India, the slums and the squalor, with an unbreachable security system.
The residents' children would even breathe cleaner air than their counterparts outside the gates.
But the reality of the project, just outside the capital, falls so far short of the brochure's vision that this month its residents - members of a newly rich elite - began to take militant action. About 80 people, many of them leading figures within the Indian business community, CEOs and executives representing firms such as Coca-Cola, staged a protest in the empty swimming pool. Others picketed the developers' office and lobbied the minister for urban planning.
The tennis courts and playground remain unbuilt, the yoga studios, steam and sauna rooms are unfinished, and the bar and cordon bleu restaurant have yet to materialise.
"We were promised that we would wake up to the chirping of birds, step out to take a dip in the pool. We are very far from the promised land," said Sandeep Arora, an importer of Scottish whisky to India, in his vast, marble-paved apartment.
Outside the window of his eighth-storey flat is the looming skeleton of a vast shopping mall development, cranes swaying on the horizon.
Attracted by the booming economy, thousands of expatriate Indians have returned to take up high-paid jobs at home. After years in Silicon Valley or in European capitals, they are no longer willing to tolerate the power cuts and water shortages that most citizens endure without complaint.
Instead, they buy homes in American-styled developments (with names such as Malibu Town and Flamingo Heights) that offer on-site power generators and water plants.
Magazines are full of advertisements for such modern apartment blocks with tight security systems. Billboards selling fantasy housing complexes stand in the dusty wastelands on the cities' fringes.
Increasingly, however, those who do buy into the dream find that the promised refuge never materialises, and the real India manages to creep in.
The power fails, the air-conditioning switches off and the taps run dry. Unscrupulous developers fail to deliver, confident that they will never be prosecuted by India's slow-moving legal system.
In response to the protest, developers last week finally filled the pool but residents are still not happy. "This is very far from the dream we paid for," said one. "It is anger that has united us, and it could turn violent."
-Observer
