Why was Chandigarh necessary?

It has been pointed out that the city of Chandigarh was conceived amid the crisis and confusion accompanying the birth of the nation.¹ The state of Punjab was divided and Lahore, the former capital, found itself in Pakistan. The decision was to start afresh with an entirely new city as Jawaharlal Nehru explained ‘free from existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions’. Thus the standard was to build a city ‘unfettered by tradition’. For Nehru and Le Corbusier the machine age held the promise of liberating individuals and improving society. Nehru who had served as the mayor of Allahabad was only too familiar with overcrowded Indian cities. According to Nehru:
We want to urbanize the village not take away the people from the villages to the towns. However well we may deal with the towns, the problems of villages of India will remain for a long time and any social standards that we seek to introduce will be judged ultimately not by what happened in Delhi but in the villages of India.

The underlying dictum was: modernize your house and the rest would follow.