Experts call for ban on forced eviction of slums
The demolition drive carried out by South Delhi Municipal Corporation and the DDA came a year after the forced eviction of residents of Shakur Basti.
The recent demolition of 300 shanties in Kishangarh village in Mehrauli area of South Delhi indicates constant failure of the state to assure the right to live and right to decent livelihood to the urban poor, experts told The Sunday Guardian.
The two-day demolition drive carried out by South Delhi Municipal Corporation and the Delhi Development Authority was exactly after one year of the forced evacuation of Shakur Basti in national capital. The Shakur Basti demolition last year in December, which left more than 1,000 families homeless, was condemned by the Delhi High Court. The court observed the act as “inhuman” and in violation of the Supreme Court directives, which mandates the authorities to provide one-month intimation to the residents and give high priority to resettlement. However, none of the directives were followed this time when DDA and SDMC razed the shanties.
“Around 9 am the officials came down for the demolition. I was called to the police station, where DDA and SDMC officials were present, to produce the papers. I went there and was made to sit near the lock-up for the entire day. In the meantime they razed the homes. We have been fighting for this land since 1972 and in 2011 we got stay orders. The case is still in the Sessions Court of Saket and the next hearing was in January where DDA and SDMC had to present their arguments. We have papers but still they keep coming after us,” owner of the land Narendra, who had leased out over 300 semi-pucca rooms to migrant workers, told The Sunday Guardian.
While the forced evacuation of Shakur Basti and Kishangarh might be the present talking point, the phenomenon of demolition of such informal settings isn’t new, claim public interests’ organisations. They argue that due to continued lack of political will, the selective application of laws and policies, and disproportionate housing market, nothing substantial has been achieved to address the chronic vulnerability of the economic migrants.
“These people come to cities in search of jobs. They are street vendors, hawkers and sweepers and earn a meagre livelihood. They cannot afford renting houses legally and thereby dwell in temporary settlements with negligible basic services like health, hygiene and sanitation. Lack of sensitivity and vision to accommodate such a formidable workforce which runs cities, has led to the constant violation of their constitutional right to decent living. They live every day with the fear of being swept off the cities, said Mukta Naik, senior researcher at Centre for Policy Research.
Three decades ago, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in Olga Tellis & Ors v Bombay Municipal Council case, ruled that the authorities must provide alternate accommodation to slum dwellers if their shantytowns were demolished. Similarly, the SC, in Uttar Pradesh Avas Evam Vikas Parishad v Friends Co-operative Housing Society Ltd., observed that the right to shelter is a fundamental tight being part of Articles 19(1) (e) and 21 of the Constitution.
However, in the absence of any automatic right to resettlement under Indian constitutional law, local governing agencies often succeed in securing demolition orders. While the SC had made intimation and resettlement necessary, the demolition is at the disposal of the state, provided they support they substantiate their demolition demand with evidences that the land is for public purposes.
However, in many cases the judiciary has observed slums as “nuisance” and “illegal”.
In 2,000 the then Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court Amrita Patel observed slums as “illegal encroachments.
According to D. Asher Ghertner in “Analysis of New Legal Discourse Behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions”, this order gave technical traction to the new discourse of seeing slums as illegal by designating a program of slum removal capable of reinscribing Delhi’s landscape according to the moral grid of filth and nuisance.
Experts believe that due to this paradox, which on one hand mandates the authorities to provide alternative accommodation to the displaced slum dwellers and on the other rules in favour of the demolition of slums for “city development”, the urban poor have struggled to be a part of formal urban housing landscape.
“The laws are selectively applied on a particular kind of people. In our current urban imagination, the rules, norms and procedures can often be set aside when the rules are applied to the poor. The slum is not an illegal or criminal act; it is an act of survival when no other mode of habitation is possible. It is not land grab, it is a neighbourhood where people who run the cities live,” Gautam Bhan, researcher and a faculty member at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, told this correspondent.
Despite the large canopy of schemes like Rajiv Awas Yojna, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission ( JNNURM), and Housing for All, slums continue to grow due to the absence of the affordable housing.
According to the National Institute of Urban Affairs, as many as 22% of Indian urban population lives in slums and their earnings are under the urban poverty line.
Industry experts told this newspaper that slums are the byproduct of livelihood opportunities and scarcity of space to accommodate the urban poor. They suggested that regularising the housing market through appropriate taxation is must for formally accommodating the urban poor in the cities.
Taking the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation’s 1:5 rule — that a household can afford a house five times its annual income— Gautam Bhan asserted that the disproportionate housing market is one of the major causes of the mushrooming of informal settlements.
“Our definition of Low Income Group (LIG) housing starts anywhere from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh. This is a joke. Bastis comprise people involved in informal works with an average annual income of around Rs 2 lakh to Rs 3 lakh. They can afford houses anywhere within the bracket of Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh and in no Indian city, other than slums, you’ll find housing in this bracket,” noted Bhan.
Experts also believe that demolitions and resettlements have its own challenges and hence the focus should be on inclusion of the urban poor in the legal housing landscape of the cities.
“Eviction doesn’t destroy a slum, it destroys the life of a worker. Say if 20% live in slums then a city master plan should be such that at least 5% of the land is reserved for their accommodation,” Bhan added.
“By resettling the slum dwellers on the peripheries of the cities we deprive them of economic and social resources. More often these places have negligible to no basic services. Displacement is not the solution. The polices should instead focus on in-situ development, notification of the slums, and upgrading the living conditions,” said a Tamil Nadu based social researcher who didn’t want to be named.
Social researchers unanimously told this newspaper that slums should not be seen as illegal encroachments, instead as the failure of the state in designing cities that assure “housing for all”. They called for a holistic approach like creating affordable houses and in- situ development rather than radical steps like demolition.