For the past several years, a thousand persons are added each day to the burgeoning population of Delhi. Last week, the Washington DC-based Population Reference Bureau stated that Delhi has overtaken Mumbai as the most populous city in India. Out of the many impoverished men and women entering Delhi every day, often with children in tow, are those who escape unhappy conditions of hunger, unemployment and caste oppression in the villages of their birth. In the city, they toil on construction sites and in people’s homes, lift loads, pull rickshaws, recycle waste, work in factories and eateries and vend on streets, earning often just enough for survival. But as the report convened a few months ago by the professional support group and resource centre, Hazards Centre, ‘The Eviction and Resettlement Process in Delhi’ ironically notes, the new “world class” metropolis of Delhi is “being developed as a site of elite consumption for those who can afford it, and purged of those who build and service it”.
Along with Amita Baviskar, Bela Bhatia, Vrinda Grover and Kamal Chenoy, I was part of this fact-finding panel. Together we had walked over the mountains of rubble of the then recently demolished 7,000 slum tenements at Yamuna Pushta, where many residents had lived for more then 25 years. The report testifies to “brightly coloured clothes of children, kitchen utensils, and idols of gods” strewn amid this “unkempt graveyard of homes”. It was obvious that people had been evicted in great haste. All those evicted whom we could find in the resettlement colonies confirmed this. Their homes were set on fire, and two days later bulldozers and police appeared, beating those who desperately tried to salvage their few belongings before their homes were razed.
In the landmark Olga Tellis case in 1985, the Supreme Court affirmed that the right to livelihoods was inherent in the right to life, and that if the State chooses to evict pavement and slum-dwellers, it must do so only in conformity with procedures established by law, including sufficient notice and rehabilitation. But these obligations have been gravely diluted by recent judgments that are increasingly hostile to the urban working poor. The Delhi High Court held in the Okhla Factory Owners Association case in 2003 that displaced families are not entitled to any resettlement, as this would burden the state exchequer. The SC went further in the Almitra Patel case in blaming — even stigmatising — the victim by declaring that “rewarding an encroacher on public land with an alternative free site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket”.
There is little official data of the numbers of persons in slums or haphazardly settled informal, usually unauthorised tenements in Delhi. But it is estimated that at least a third of Delhi’s 14 million people reside in slums. These squatter settlements are encroachments on unoccupied land belonging to the government, arising because of the failure of the State to provide legal low-cost housing to its poorest urban residents. For instance, Hazards Centre estimates that the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) built only 34 per cent of the houses that it had targeted in the last 20 years. Even these were mostly to meet middle-class housing needs. There is, therefore, no recourse of survival left to the working poor except to buy or rent plots in illegalised slums.
The report notes that the Pushta residents were evicted as they were seen by officials to pollute the Yamuna, ignoring the fact that they contributed to less than one per cent of the pollution, whereas 19 big drains spew sewerage from middle-class colonies into the river. Compared with 100 hectares of the riverbed and banks under slums, 30 hectares are with Akshardham Temple alone, apart from thermal power stations and their ash ponds, the Asian Games structures and offices.