In our building in Greater Noida, an all-woman yoga class is conducted every morning in the clubhouse — essentially just a room with glass walls in the centre of the complex. Outside, a couple of guards hang around, having been assigned (by rotation, so each day there is a different pair) to that part of the building. Like all guards are wont to do, they walk a bit or sit bored, pretending to be alert and alternately turning their head from one side to the other, in a most natural manner like anyone would do while, say, waiting for a bus. But their innocuous presence in the vicinity managed to annoy some of the yoga practitioners. They were convinced the guards were deliberately looking in their direction and that made them uncomfortable. And then the women began an almost comical habit of stopping the class midway and telling the guards to move away or gesturing wildly to them to vamoose. The guards would scurry away anxiously and probably a bit puzzled, and then the class would resume. A vocal guard once retorted, “So where are we supposed to turn our heads? We have to look somewhere!”

Cheek by jowl with the clubhouse is the swimming pool area, and in such a way that men and children splashing around and the women twisting themselves into asanas are both in plain sight of each other. On the other side of the clubhouse is a tennis court, which is always occupied at that hour by young men. None of these were problematic for the yoga women, because these men were residents, belonging to the same social strata. The guards, however, represented the “other” — rural and poor, so naturally inclined to objectionable behaviour.

This sharp class division is one of the defining features of the new towns that have emerged at the edge of our metros, whether it is Greater Noida, Rajarhat, Electronic City Whitefield, Cyberabad, Navi Mumbai or Gurugram — all cities that have been part of Urban Legend — the series carried on these pages in the past few months. Each of these towns, with their propensity for gated communities, has succeeded in creating exclusivity for the urban middle class who bought homes here attracted not just by the facilities of power back-up and swimming pools, but also because it ensured homogeneity. The rural unwashed remain outside of the high walls. Even the ones who are allowed into the citadels to serve as guards, drivers and domestic help are shown their place by the separate lifts and the paranoid surveillance systems.

The visible division of “us” and “them” is only one of the many common threads that run through the narratives of the cities profiled: Kolkata’s Rajarhat, Delhi NCR’s Greater Noida and Gurugram, Cyberabad outside Hyderabad, Chennai’s Velachery and IT Corridor, Navi Mumbai and Bengaluru’s Electronic City. These cities defy categorisation when taken as a whole, because among them there is always some exception to the commonly-used definitions of towns.

They are not all “satellite towns” because a satellite town must be self-sufficient and far away from the main city. It must have proper land-use planning with colleges, hospitals and residential areas for people working there. On that count, Greater Noida and Navi Mumbai qualify but Cyberabad and Chennai’s IT Corridor do not. Gurugram has these facilities but as an outgrowth fuelled by the ambitions of private developers rather than the vision of planners.

They cannot be labelled “dormitory towns” because that would mean people work in the nearby big city and only return at night to the town, which is not the case for most of them. In fact, it is quite the opposite; owing to the proliferation of IT companies, it is people from the parent city who come to work in these towns. Around two lakh people, for instance, commute from Bengaluru to Electronic City for work every day.

The term “new towns” is perhaps more pertinent as it describes self-sufficient, planned towns that are deliberately built to decongest the parent city. The idea originates from the movement to build fresh, new towns in the UK as a remedy to polluted chaotic cities that were a fallout of the Industrial Revolution. Here too, Gurugram would be an exception.

But the epithet that perhaps best fits is “peri-urban” town, because all of them have been carved out of erstwhile rural land and straddle the rural-urban divide. The cities resemble each other as close cousins do, in several other ways too.

Displaced farmers, degraded environment

Fashioned out of agricultural land, the underbelly of these towns hides the tales of displaced farmers. Gangaram, a farmer who once worked on fields which were swallowed up by Cyberabad and now has a pushcart selling snacks, spoke for all farmers in these new cities when he said, “We were all working on the fields together. Some sold land and made it big. Some others acted as middlemen in land transactions and made money. Those who worked on the fields are now doing odd jobs.” Rajarhat’s birth led to the near-destruction of the region’s pastoral agricultural economy, as farmers with small holdings and fisherfolk took recourse to temporary jobs in the informal sector. In Gurugram, tales of misappropriation of farmland for corporate interest, aided by the corrupt nexus between past governments and private developers, are so legendary that there are now WhatsApp jokes alluding to them.

Apart from farmland, fragile ecosystems have been trampled upon to birth these towns. The Pallikaranai marshland, a 230 sq km freshwater marsh just off Chennai’s IT corridor, was encroached upon extensively, as were many of the waterbodies along the stretch. During the 2015 floods, residents paid the price for this encroachment when the low-lying IT Corridor and Velachery became the worst-affected areas and army boats had to be summoned to rescue stranded residents. Filling up of waterbodies was again the reason why Cyberabad’s streets turned into rivulets when rains lashed the town last September. Chunks of Kolkata’s wetlands were filled up to raise Rajarhat. Citizen groups and environmentalists have been fighting to reclaim the lakes that were destroyed to make way for Bengaluru’s Electronic City.

Space versus Place

Wide roads, vacant open spaces, more greenery and less pollution than in the adjoining metro are the bright spots of peri-urban living — carrots developers dangle to potential residents. What they sorely lack, however, is a sense of “place” — that certain something that gives a town its uniqueness, maybe some character in the architecture or a showcase of the history of the place. If a foreign visitor were taken on a tour of peri-urban towns in India, he/she wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other given the sameness of the landscape: wide empty spaces, glass-and-chrome buildings housing IT companies, a scatter of malls and low density of population. For imaginative entrepreneurs, these cities could be hungry markets for cultural offerings.

Infrastructural inadequacy

Electronic City was left out of Bengaluru’s metro planning, while Cyberabad hopes for a metro rail connectivity in the future. Rajarhat and Greater Noida, built around the gated community model, are completely car-dependent though the latter is hopeful of metro connectivity by the end of 2017. But that will not solve the problem of having to drive down to the nearest grocery store, as there is still no plan for local, intra-city public transport. In both these towns, it is a chicken-and-egg problem — the low density is because of the lack of connectivity and absence of public transport. But transport services become financially unviable in a low-density town and private operators shy away from starting bus services. Traffic clogs Gurugram and Velachery while Mahadevapura in Electronic City recorded the worst air quality index in Bengaluru. Rajarhat was so plagued by the lack of potable water that many residents preferred to sell or leave their flats empty than live there.

Curious schizophrenia

Among the peri-urban towns, Navi Mumbai stands out as one of the most liveable cities in the country, perhaps because it came up when the rest were not even a gleam in their government’s eyes. Greater Noida could follow at some distance. The rest have grown on steroids, prioritising swanky malls before drainage systems, rushing along haphazardly, blindly creating social and ecological imbalances. All of them struggle to define their identity and all have somehow fallen short of expectations, failing their stakeholders in different ways. But equally, they have given middle-class India a new way of living — near the city and yet away. In Greater Noida there is a new mall, ambitiously designed on the lines of Venice with waterways criss-crossing the floor and a gondola ride offered for ₹300. There is a multiplex and international high-street fashion brands have announced their arrival soon. But the visitors to the mall are couples from the surrounding villages, in bright clothing, clicking selfies in front of the faux Renaissance sculptures that are a part of the décor. Life in these places is curiously schizophrenic — one face is urban, the other bucolic.

Vandana Vasudevan is an urban researcher and author of Urban Villager: Life in an Indian Satellite Town