With a free hand to draw as he pleased, Lutyen sketched out the flowing lines of New Delhi - the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House), the Parliament, the magnificent drive or Raj Path from the President’s house to the India Gate and the Canopy beyond for the statue of King George.

Offices of the British Resident, the North and the South Blocks, flanking the side of the Rashtrapati Bhavan melted into the buildings that housed the local administration. Deep set and overlooking the large greens dotted with small streams and fountains and planted with the saplings of the shade-giving and water-conserving Jamun tree, the gracious India Gate lawns were regal in their splendour.

It took nearly twenty years to construct these and the 112 bungalows, built beyond the President’s house, with pillars and porticos that provided shade during the scorching summer months. Truly it was the most beautiful city planned by the British. The city was completed in 1931.

Seventy years later, it is on the endangered list of 100 sites recently published by the World Monuments Fund, New York.

Gone or going are the shady trees and the green grasses, the sense of space and ambience that one would expect. Crowding them out are the tall skyscrapers, the monstrous modern monoliths that are completely at variance with the rest of Lutyens architecture.

Today Lutyen’s Delhi spans only 0.6 percent of the total area of the city that has overflowed its boundaries and gobbled up adjoining agricultural lands. Real estate prices are looking skywards and the land mafia in cohorts with unscrupulous elements in the local authorities has arrived on the scene, irreparably altering the skyline and razing down the old spacious bungalows.

Within the span of one generation, Lutyen’s dream appears to have been blown to smithereens and at the mercy of a vicious government-builder-politician nexus, which has literally left no stone unturned in destroying the unique architecture of the place.

Successions of urban development ministers have paid scant attention to protecting this heritage of India. Nearly 20 bungalows have been erased from the original plan in the last fifty years and replaced by concrete multi-storyed buildings of the The State Trading Corporation, Hotel Le Meridian, Hotel Kanishka and more recently the Indira Gandhi National Centre Of Arts (IGNCA) that rubbled six of these old bungalows. Beautiful monuments like the Jantar Mantar are overshadowed by the cluster of tall and unsightly office complexes that have enveloped it.

Says eminent conservationist and author Patwant Singh, " These high-rise buildings have not just ruined the sky-line of this area, they are so ugly that if this trend continues, then in few years the whole bungalow zone will be lost and in its place we will see huge, blocks of concrete and steel, staring at us from the skylines."

The Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone [LBZ], besides being historically significant has tremendous ecological value. With its huge green cover it acts as the city’s lungs, repairing air damaged by pollutants, giving Delhi the unique distinction of having an inner city area cooler than the outer edge.