AHMEDABAD • US President Donald Trump makes his first official visit to India today and work has been going on around the clock to spruce things up - to the annoyance of some locals as well as monkeys.
The photo opportunity highlights of the 36-hour trip include a rally of 100,000 people at the world's largest cricket stadium and watching the sunset with First Lady Melania Trump at the Taj Mahal.
A long wall has been hastily built along the route in Ahmedabad in western India to the new Sardar Patel Stadium. Locals believe the wall was erected to hide a slum, although officials deny it.
Mr Sardar Sarania, a resident of the slum, is disgusted at what he sees as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attempt to conceal reality. "So Modi has supposedly made everything good and there's development everywhere, right? But he's hid us behind here," he told Agence France-Presse.
Scores of banners and hoardings with pictures of Mr Trump, Mr Modi and Mrs Trump have been put up across the city, projecting the "Namaste Trump" rally as a historic event in US-India relations.
The route will be lined with thousands of people - well under the six million to 10 million Mr Trump says he was told will attend - and stages for performers and images of independence hero Mahatma Gandhi.
Ahmedabad officials are also keen to avoid a repeat of when then US Secretary of State John Kerry's cavalcade hit one of India's ubiquitous stray dogs during a 2015 visit. The local Cattle and Dog Nuisance Control Department has constituted a crack team to remove dogs and errant cows in a 3km radius of the route.
A local non-governmental organisation and the state forest department have also been roped in to keep birds and monkeys out of Air Force One's way on the runway at Ahmedabad airport. The monkeys are put in cages with food, sent to a "distant location" and released, Mr Raag Patel of the Nature Conservation Foundation said.
The next stop for the Trumps will be sunset at the Taj Mahal in Agra, south of New Delhi, and here too workers have 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 took 16 years to build the white marble monument. But time and air pollution have 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.
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 first time.
"We completed the mud-pack treatment on Thursday," Mr Vasant Swarnkar of the Archaeological Survey of India told AFP. "It was already planned but the treatment was brought forward for Trump's visit."
The authorities have also released vast volumes of water into the Yamuna river adjacent to the Taj to lessen the whiff of raw sewage and industrial effluent.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
