Meerut on cusp of great socio-economic change

HT’s spotlight on lesser-known NCR towns, their rise to becoming cities in their own right, and the changes that have been brought within

“Meerut was once the most important city in north-west India after Delhi, and was home to a large European population,” says Dr Amit Pathak, a radiologist, who is widely considered an expert on the history of western Uttar Pradesh.

Meerut has always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit, has been home to diverse businesses and industries (Manoj Sharma/HT Photo)

Meerut sprang into prominence after the British in 1803 set up one of India’s largest cantonments in the heart of the city. More than half a century later, this cantonment town was where the first sepoys would start a rebellion which would give rise to the First War of Independence in 1857.“Even after Independence, this garrison city had great bookstores and its cinemas played Hollywood classics,” says Meerut-based Pathak, the author of books on the city such as ‘Revolution of 1857 and Meerut’, and ‘1857 – A Living History’.

However, the city became notorious as a crime, caste and communal cauldron over the last few decades. “The city began a downward spiral in the 1970s, before the 1987 communal riots pushed it over the edge. However, after five decades of a continuous decline, the city is finally turning a corner,” Pathak says.

Today, this city in the National Capital Region (NCR) --- a mere 75km drive from Connaught Place — is on the cusp of great socio-economic change, thanks to improved law and order, and better connectivity. The Delhi-Meerut Expressway has reduced the travel time between the two cities from around two-and-a-half hours to just over an hour.

Driving on the Meerut Bypass, which bypasses the city, one can see the new hotels, cafes, schools, engineering colleges, private universities and townships that have sprung up on the outskirts of Meerut.

The average land rates at newly developed townships in areas such as Modipuram, Pallavpuram, and Shatabdi Nagar have seen a massive spike. “Land prices have almost doubled from ₹30,000 per sqm to ₹60,000 per sqm in many new posh townships along the bypass over the past year alone,” says Atul Gupta, founder of the Apex Group, one of the city’s biggest real estate developers.

The upcoming Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS), a rail-based high-speed link which is expected to be fully operational by 2025, will likely give an even greater boost to connectivity with the national capital.

“Once the RRTS is fully operational, the prices are expected to touch ₹1 lakh per sqm. Many top NCR builders, who once were wary of launching projects in Meerut, are now desperately looking to buy land in the city, anticipating a huge housing demand in the next couple of years. Meerut continues to be an affordable housing market compared to neighbouring Ghaziabad and Noida as one can build a villa in a decent township for ₹1 crore,” says Gupta.

During the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown, thousands of working professionals in cities such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi and Gurugram returned to their home in Meerut. (Manoj Sharma/HT Photo)

Real estate agents in the city say the housing demand has so far mostly come from residents of neighbouring districts such as Baghpat and Muzaffarnagar who are moving to Meerut. “But once the RRTS is fully operational, the demand will be fuelled by young professionals from Meerut who are working in NCR cities such as Noida, Gurugram and Ghaziabad,” says Rakesh Singh, a property dealer.

One such professional is Sanjay Tyagi, a software engineer. “I currently live in Ghaziabad’s Indirapuram and travel to my office in Delhi every day, which is an hour-long commute. I was planning to buy a house in Noida, but have now decided against it. The RRTS will take me to Delhi in an hour, so instead of buying a flat in Noida, I’d rather buy land and build a house in Meerut, which would cost almost the same,” he says.

City of entrepreneurship

During the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown, thousands of working professionals in cities such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi and Gurugram returned to their home in Meerut. Some, such as Akshat Bharti, 24, never went back.In June 2022, Bharti started a café called The Kafee in the city’s cantonment area.

“During the pandemic, I realised that there are so many young people in Meerut who are working in other cities. Those in nearby Noida and Gurugram now return home almost every weekend thanks to the reduced travel time,” he says.

“Many intend to shift to Meerut and commute daily to Delhi and Noida. Some have already done so, they carpool or take chartered buses to the capital every day, which was not possible earlier as a bus would take almost three hours.”

A gaggle of girls is engaged in an animated discussion inside the café. One of them is Priya Tomar, 20, who studies in one of the city’s many private engineering colleges. She says that after graduating, she does not wish to leave the city.

“Meerut is a city of many elements — there is the noisy, crowded old city; there is the vast and verdant cantonment with its colonial clubs; and now there is the Meerut of new townships,” she says.“The city is now truly a satellite town of Delhi. Our family now often travels to Connaught Place for lunch or dinner, and my relatives in Delhi, who used to visit us only once or twice in a year, now drop in every couple of weeks.”

Bharti’s is not the only café in town. Over the last year, more than 20 new trendy cafes have come up in the city, including Ebony — a French-style boulangerie and cafe, which is a match for high-end cafes in Delhi and Gurugram. The founder, Annika Garcias, 29, is originally from Goa but moved to Meerut three years ago after marrying her classmate, the son of a local industrialist.

“When I told my family that I was in love with a classmate from Meerut and wanted to marry him, they were horrified. Meerut had a certain reputation and they knew about it. But when I first came to Meerut, I realised that the city was not what it was made out to be — it has lots of well-heeled people who have travelled all over the world,” she says.

“I was particularly impressed by women here — they are confident, fashionable, free-spirited, and many of them run successful businesses.”

Some of the country’s biggest sports goods companies sprang up from Meerut’s Victoria Park Sports Colony. (Manoj Sharma/HT Photo)

But then, Meerut has always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. The city has been home to diverse businesses and industries such as musical instruments, sports goods, jewellery, scissors, and the publishing industry, among others.

The Uttar Pradesh government set up the first industrial area, Partapur Industrial Area, on the outskirts of the city in the mid-1960s, where the earliest factories produced power equipment such as electric transformers, chemicals, and processed food. Over the next three decades, the government set up two more industrial areas, Udyogpuram, and Sports Complex, which are now dominated by sports goods manufacturing units.

Some of the country’s biggest sports goods companies sprang up from the city’s Victoria Park Sports Colony.

“At least eight big sports manufacturers started in this colony, all set up by refugees from Pakistan. It was an area where part of our houses served as factories,” says Trilok Anand, 77, director of Sanspareils Greenlands (SG), whose father and uncle founded the company, which is now one of the country’s biggest cricket bats manufacturers and continues to have an office in the sports colony.

Similarly, the Meerut bullion market is more than 200 years old and the city has over 2,000 jewellery shops that attract wholesale and retail buyers from neighbouring states.

“For twenty years, the fear of loot and extortion was so high that most of our clients refused to come to Meerut, and we had to sell our jewellery through jewellers in Delhi. Now, both wholesalers and retailers come to Meerut because of better connectivity with Delhi, and an improved law and order,” says Pradeep Kumar Aggarwal, president of Meerut Bullion Traders Association.

Not many know that a large number of brass wind instruments — trumpets, euphoniums, bugles, cornets, clarinets — used by wedding bands across the country, are also made in Meerut.

Many industrialists complain that over the past 25 years, no new industrial areas have been set up by the government. “Lack of land, law and order and connectivity issues may have been the reason for it. The government is now encouraging private developers to set up industrial estates,” says Deepak Meena, the Meerut district magistrate.

One such private industrial estate is the Vishwakarma Industrial Area, which is spread across 50 acres and is the state’s largest gated private industrial estate. “We buy land directly from farmers and develop roads, offer power backup and facilities, and take care of maintenance,” says Kamal Thakur, who developed this industrial area.

According to Meena, upcoming infra projects such as the RRTS, a ring road, a dedicated freight corridor and the Ganga Expressway, which will connect Meerut to Allahabad, will be a game changer for the city’s industrial development.

Nipun Jain, president of the Partapur Industrial Estate Manufacturers Association (PIEMA), says that the end of the extortion mafia, which terrorised local industries in the past, will ensure that the city will now attract more investment from outside.

“Meerut was a city where, despite immense wealth, you would not find luxury cars on the roads as people did everything possible to hide their prosperity. Some even shifted their families to Noida, while their businesses were here,” says a businessman, not wishing to be named.

Encounter capital of UP

Once upon a time, crime lords reigned supreme in Meerut, and cases of murder, loot and extortion were commonplace. Apex Group’s Gupta, for example, was left wheelchair-bound after a failed assassination attempt. “22 years back, I was shot in the chest by some goons on orders of a business rival. Luckily, I survived the attack but have never been able to walk since,” he says.

Now, however, the law and order situation has improved tremendously.

One reason for this, many in the city believe, is the number of encounter killings. According to government data, till March this year the Uttar Pradesh Police had killed 179 criminals in 10,814 encounters since chief minister Yogi Adityanath came to power in March 2017.

The Meerut zone has the highest number of such incidents — 3,152 encounters in which 63 criminals were killed and 1,708 were injured. Last week, dreaded gangster Anil Dujana was also killed in an encounter with Uttar Pradesh’s Special Task Force (STF) in Meerut.

To give some perspective, the next city on the list — Varanasi — was a distant second with 20 criminals killed in encounters.

“The police have launched a concerted campaign to root out the mafia from the district,” says Rohit Singh Sajwan, Meerut’s senior superintendent of police, reading out the list of criminals jailed or killed over the past few years.

A comparison of crime data between 2019 and 2022 suggests that there has been a reduction in various crimes in Meerut. The number of cases of loot has gone down from 96 to 46; the murder cases from 169 to 125; the attempt to murder cases from 169 to 125, and vehicle theft from 1,528 to 798.

“The police have also shut down Sotiganj,” says SSP Sajwan, referring to the infamous stolen auto-parts market in Meerut, which was shut after a police crackdown in 2021.

However, two areas which have not seen a significant change are abduction and rape cases. The number of abduction cases has dropped from 99 in 2019 to 95 in 2022, while the number of rape cases has dropped from 393 in 2019 to 391 in 1922.

Citizen matters

For the past few years, Meerut’s residents — industrialists, architects, urban planners, doctors, and engineers, among others — have met at a house in the city’s Saket area under the umbrella of Meerut Citizens Forum, a non-profit foundation that they started in 2017 to find a solution to the city’s many civic problems.

“Waste management, the depleting groundwater level, and air pollution are some of the biggest problems in the city that need to be tackled on a priority basis. The idea behind the forum is to improve the quality of life in the city by offering suggestions to the administration and local municipality,” says Ram Pal Verma, a retired civil engineer, who is a member of the forum.

In 2018, the forum launched a pilot project for waste management in five wards of the Meerut municipal corporation. The project, which involved experts from a company responsible for waste management in Indore and cost ₹6 lakh, was bankrolled by one of the founder members.

In October 2022, the forum engaged a former economist to the Government of India to conduct a study and “develop a strategy for an accelerated growth of Meerut’s GDP”, says Gaurang Sangal, secretary of the form.

“This is a district-level initiative to help contribute in achieving Uttar Pradesh’s goal of $1 trillion economy,” he says.

The notice board in his office has posters of the various initiatives that the forum started, including the IChangeMyCity App and an essay competition titled ‘If I were the Mayor of Meerut’ with a cash prize of ₹10,000.

“The idea was to engage citizens to generate ideas for the development of Meerut,” says Sangal. “After all, they are permanent owners of the city and directly affected by the quality of governance. And so, they need to assume the responsibility and team up with administrators and political leaders to sort out the city’s problems. But so far, the forum’s efforts have not paid off due to the lack of interest on the part of local authorities”.

Celebrating Meerut’s history

Over the past few years, Meerut’s residents have also worked to spread awareness about the city’s rich history, especially its role in the First War of Independence. Pathak, for example, conducts tours, and has published books on the subject. He, along with other local historians, has been part of several private and government-led history projects, including the renovation of the Government Freedom Struggle Museum in 2021, and putting up sandstone markers of landmarks of the rebellion.

“The number of visitors has increased five-fold after the renovation,” says Pataru Maurya, curator of the museum.

“Local residents, including young people, are now taking a lot of pride in their city’s rich past,” says Pathak. “Now the city has a bright future too.”