Ironically, there are some experts who'd like to 'densify' the city with more poor people. This flurry of concern for the poor provoked varied responses from seminar participants. But once the government allotted vast stretches of land for them, the mushrooming of slums stopped. This could be done in Chandigarh, too. The city, in fact, keeps seeing demolition drives as the authorities first turn a blind eye to encroachments and then go about pulling them down without providing alternatives.
Constructions encroach into nearly half of all roads, with extended gardens and kiosks.
Even illegal housing blocks had to be razed to the ground after they were allowed to sprout complete structures. This was one problem the British couple, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who did most of the sector lay-out work under le Corbusier, faced even then. The civil servants wouldn't let their simple ideas translate into the structures and the houses that were constructed in the first phase. Sectors 1-30, as a result, differed from the original plan in a significant way. Le Corbusier's plan, too, was riddled with flaws.