For a brief moment inside Courtroom No. 1 of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, the debate over Chandigarh’s proposed Tribune Chowk flyover stopped sounding like a “heritage versus traffic” dispute and began reading like a page from Mirza Ghalib.
The Chief Justice’s court was drowning in maps, master plans, heritage clauses, traffic projections and urban design terminology, when Ghalib quietly entered the debate over the proposed flyover. Not physically, of course. He arrived through advocate Tanu Bedi.
Appearing before the bench, Bedi said: “Umr bhar Ghalib yahi bhool karta raha, dhool chehre pe thi aur aaina saaf karta raha.”
The courtroom fell silent briefly as Bedi paused after reciting the couplet. The punchline — aimed squarely at the flyover proposal — came as she travelled from poetry into policy. “Flyover is not a solution. We have to clean our face, not wipe the mirror,” she said, as the case about concrete suddenly acquired poetry, philosophy, urban planning, climate anxiety and Chandigarh’s existential crisis — all in a single hearing.”
After hearing Bedi and UT senior standing counsel Amit Jhanji for almost three hours, the bench reserved its verdict. Responding to Bedi’s plea to stay tree felling till the pronouncement of the verdict, Chief Justice Sheel Nagu said: “We will see”.
Bedi’s argument before the high court was simple in structure but sweeping in implication: Chandigarh’s traffic problem, she said, was being treated with the wrong medicine. The city, conceived by Le Corbusier as a low-rise, green, pedestrian-friendly urban experiment, could not cure congestion by continuously surrendering more space to private vehicles.
“A flyover only shifts congestion to the next point,” she argued, citing studies and examples from cities such as Seoul, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto, where elevated roads had either been dismantled or reconsidered in favour of public transport and pedestrian mobility.
What followed was excavation of Chandigarh’s own conscience through the pages of its Master Plan 2031. Page after page was read aloud to the bench. Bedi referred to passages speaking of Chandigarh as a “pedestrian and cycle friendly city”; recommendations prioritising cyclists, walkers, green corridors and uninterrupted contact with nature; and provisions insisting that the city’s “vistas” and views of the Shivalik hills were “inviolable”.
Bedi insisted that the Master Plan discouraged flyovers because they “impact the visual cityscape” and “cause inconvenience to pedestrians and non-motorised transport”. At one point, she described the proposed flyover as “a death knell to Chandigarh heritage”.
Steadily widening the arguments beyond traffic, she said the roads themselves were heritage. “The green belts were heritage. The mango orchards along Purv Marg were heritage. The ‘V’ roads — from V1 to V8 in Le Corbusier’s planning vocabulary — were not merely traffic channels but part of Chandigarh’s urban identity. Either the master plan exists or the flyover exists,” she submitted.
The argument repeatedly returned to a larger theme: Chandigarh was designed not around the speed of cars, but around the dignity of people. “In most advanced countries, the pedestrian is given due respect on the roads,” she read from the Master Plan. “Senior citizens, children and wheelchair users are able to move around safely and independently.”
The irony, she suggested, was brutal. A city globally celebrated for its urban planning was now trying to solve its problems by methods many global cities were abandoning. The flyover, she said, was not development. It was surrender.
Jhanji, on the other hand, argued that the Masterplan did permit flyover. Moreover, Sectors 1 to 30 in Chandigarh were recognised as heritage zones, and not the entire city.
