Down Under trip for DDA babus

HT Correspondent

New Delhi, June 6

A team of senior bureaucrats of Delhi Development Authority (DDA) is going abroad thanks to the Commonwealth Games village planned on the banks of Yamuna.

DDA vice-chairman Madhukar Gupta and one official each from engineering, planning, architecture and landscape departments are scheduled to fly to Australia next month to study games villages there. Officials said that the vice-chairman and his team will be visiting the Commonwealth Games Village being developed in Melbourne for the 2006 games and the Olympics village in Sydney to study different aspects of the villages and their management.

The Commonwealth Games village will be single largest project that will be taken up by DDA for the 2010 games to be hosted in the city. Till date only the site — spread over 100 acres next to the Akshardham temple, off Nizamuddin Bridge — has been earmarked.

Even the modalities of the design competition are yet to be worked out. An official said that the outgoing Lt. Governor was of the opinion that there should be just an architectural design competition for the modern games village