Country India | ||
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G.B. Road (full name Garstin Bastion Road)a road from Ajmeri Gate to Lahori Gate in Delhi, India, parallel to the railway lines. G.B. Road is the fifth largest red-light district in Delhi, India. It is an area with several hundred multi-story brothels and estimate over 1000 sex workers. It is lined with two or three-storey buildings that have shops on ground floor. About twenty of these buildings have about 100 brothels on the first floor that comes alive at night after the shops at ground level close. It is the biggest red light area in Delhi. The road's name was officially changed to Swami Shradhanand Marg in 1966.
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Map of Swami Shradhanand Marg, New Delhi, Delhi 110006
History
The old city of Delhi, Shahjahanabad, was surrounded by a wall. The wall had many gates and bastions. A bastion is an angular structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of an artillery fortification. It is called "Burj" in Hindi and Urdu. One such burj or bastion was named after a British officer of East India Company.
The history of G.B. Road can be dated back to Mughal era. It is said that there were total five red light areas or kothas (brothels) in Delhi at that time. Then came the British Raj, when a British collector consolidated all the five kothas in one area on this road. The road has about 100 brothels now.G.B Road has one of the few red light areas in India apart from Kamathipura(Mumbai), Sonagachi(Kolkata), Chaturbhuj Sthan (Muzaffarpur).
Market
This road is renowned as a hub for machinery, automobile parts, hardware, and tools, representing the largest market for these commodities in the National Capital Region. Due to its status as a commercial zone, the area is bustling with both vehicular and pedestrian traffic throughout the day.
The segment of the road starting form the Ajmeri Gate in the south until the small intersection with a street leading up to Farash Khana in the north has shops on the ground floor and kothas or brothels on the first and second floors.
The streets and houses at the back of the road are residential areas.
Crime
At night, the road is a dangerous place for the uninitiated. Mugging, snatching of wallets, watches and phones and other crimes happen quite often. A policeman on duty was stabbed to death by muggers just after midnight in September 2012 when a posse of policemen tried to save a man from a gang of criminals who had waylaid him on the road and stabbed him while he was going home from work.