Citizens of the country have mostly bad thoughts about interacting with Government bodies; a lot of them come across officialdom who are not responsive and caring about their needs (as an example, making them come repeatedly even for small errors in the red tape process), and so on. There are babus (officials), who are friendly, but most are like hard faced officials, unwilling to come across as caring people. It would be nice for people to live in a gated community (and self-sufficient place) where one would not have to interact with the Government bureaucracy, but that is living in an ideal world. However, there are cases when official responses are such that you would be horrified to read about such cases, and wonder as to how the official structure of the country could be so insensitive to the problems faced by citizens, that too when the situation is due to a fault of the agency themselves. The Delhi Development Authority however has been roundly criticized from time to time over its openness, caring nature (lack of it), and inability to care about what citizens go through. Read this article for more information:
Today, the 29th of May, 2008, was a day that a lot of people would have had a lot of worries about. Delhi and the whole NCR region has seen the effect of the Gujjar agitation when it last took place in 2007, and at that time, the lathi wielding and stone throwing members of the mob forced the major intersections of South and East Delhi to come to a standstill - traffic at major points such as the Noida Link road, Badarpur, Loni, etc was totally jammed, and demonstrators did pretty much what they liked. At that time, what was depicted in the media was that the police were essentially not taking any action and letting them burn buses and other public property.
Keeping this in mind, there was a lot of worry and concern about what the day would turn out like. The whole of Delhi and NCR region sees a lot of cross traffic with people moving on a daily basis from Delhi and other regions such as Faridabad / Gurgaon going to offices in Noida on a regular basis, and similar movement. For such people, the news of this Gujjar called bandh was a time for decision. Would you want to try this movement on this particular day and risk getting caught in violence, or stuck in a non-moving traffic jam for long periods of time. As a result, there were a large number of companies that actually declared a holiday today. Even where I worked, most people from places that were more than 10 Km away did not come, in many cases because their family persuaded them not to go.
For decades, the Indian Government and the legal system has been lopsided in favour of tenants, with the Rent Control Act being one-sided to protect tenants. The Act has reduced property rights, not letting landlords get their property back when they need the property for their own use, and not letting them raise rents in accordance with annual inflation trends. The Rent Control Act has scared landlords so much that there are many property owners who cannot envisage letting out their currently vacant properties for fear of not getting these properties back, or who let out properties on 11 month leases and get them vacated within 2 years so that properties do not get tenants who refuse to let go.
This situation had prevented the healthy growth of the market for tenancy and led to an artificial scarcity; so there was a great jubilation among property owners when the law was weakened some time back; the change allowed landlords to get their property back when they could demonstrate that they needed the property for their own needs, however, this was only for residential properties. Commercial properties were excluded. So you had the case where prime properties in commercial centers such as Connaught Place were on rent for decades old rentals of Rs. 100 per month; the landlord could only watch as their properties were used by tenants to make big money and they themselves got a pittance as rent. This would lead to a situation where the landlords would not invest anything on maintenance for these buildings. Finally the Supreme Court has corrected this, letting owners of commercial properties evict their tenants when they could prove that they needed the building:
For 50 years, tenants in shops and commercial premises in many prime areas of Delhi have had the upper hand over landlords. They lived without fear of eviction and paid a paltry rent as they were protected by laws that froze the amount negotiated decades ago. This special protection was because the law said that a tenant could be asked to vacate only residential premises, and not commercial property even if the premises were required for personal use. But all this has changed.