Walls, mud packs and monkey removal for Trump in India
23 February, 2020
US President Donald Trump makes his first official visit to India on Monday (Feb 24) and work has been going on night and day to spruce things up - to the annoyance of some locals together with monkeys.
The photography opportunity highlights of the 36-hour trip include a rally of 100,000 persons at the world's greatest cricket stadium and watching the sunset with First Lady Melania at the Taj Mahal.
A long wall has been hastily built, along the way in Ahmedabad in western India to the brand new Sardar Patel Stadium to be able, locals believe, to cover up a slum, although officials deny it.
Sardar Sarania, a resident of the slum, is disgusted at what he sees as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's try to conceal reality.
"So Modi has supposedly made everything good and there's development everywhere, right? But he's hid us behind here," Sarania told AFP.
"We're made invisible. Therefore the gutter we reside in, he (Trump) won't see us. That is why they're building this."
Scores of banners and hoardings with pictures of Trump, Modi and Melania Trump have been put up over the city, projecting the "Namaste Trump" rally as a historic event in US-India relations.
The route will be lined with thousands of folks - well short of the 6-10 million Trump says he has been told will attend - together with stages for performers and images of independence hero Mahatma Gandhi.
Ahmedabad officials are also keen in order to avoid a repeat of when then-US secretary of state John Kerry's cavalcade hit among India's ubiquitous stray dogs during a 2015 visit.
The neighborhood Cattle and Dog Nuisance Control Department (CDNCD) has constituted a crack team to remove dogs and errant cows - another common sight in Indian cities - in a 3km radius of the route.
An area NGO and the state forest department are also roped directly into keep birds and bands of monkeys out of Air Force One's way on the runway at Ahmedabad airport.
"During the past 10 days, we've caught 45-odd monkeys. They can be found in search of food," Raag Patel from the Nature Conservation Foundation said.
The captive monkeys are placed in cages with food, delivered to a "distant location" and released, Patel said.
MAKE AGRA GREAT AGAIN
Next stop for the Trumps will be sunset at the Taj Mahal in Agra, south of New Delhi, and here too personnel have already been busy making the world-famous Islamic mausoleum more beautiful still.
Back in the 17th century, some 20,000 labourers, sculptors, calligraphers and stone cutters, along with 1,000 elephants, took 16 years to construct the white marble monument.
Preparations are in full swing at locations just like the Taj Mahal for President Donald Trump's first official visit to India AFP/Pawan Sharma
Time, and also polluting of the environment, have however taken their toll, turning parts of the Taj Mahal yellow, necessitating several rounds of treatment with coatings of mud packs that are then peeled off.
For the Trumps, the replicas of the graves of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal - for whom the Taj Mahal was built - are getting the beauty treatment too, and for the 1st time.
"We completed the mud-pack treatment on Thursday," Vasant Swarnkar from the Archaeological Survey of India told AFP.
"It had been already planned however the treatment was brought forward for Trump's visit."
Authorities also have released vast volumes of water in to the Yamuna river flowing next to the Taj so that you can lessen the usual whiff of raw sewage and industrial effluent.
"This move may well not make the Yamuna's water fit for drinking, but could reduce foul smell from the river," said Arvind Kumar, an engineer from the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board.
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