Since May 2006, more than 150 slums in Delhi, India, have been demolished under government pretenses of transforming India’s capital into a clean and more cosmopolitan “world city.” Home to the city’s laborers and working class, slum colonies have come under increasing attack by politicians and more elite residents who criticize the specter of poverty as leaving a black mark on the growing image of “shining India.” With the upcoming 2010 Common Wealth Games to be held in Delhi, demolitions have sped up to make way for sports stadiums and commercial centers.
Local organizations such as the Hazards Centre, a Greengrants grantee, are fighting for the rights and livelihoods of displaced slum populations. Despite the widespread media portrayal of India’s booming economy, organizations like the Hazards Centre are using research and activism to bring attention to the populations who are left out and negatively impacted by India’s effort to become one of the world’s largest economic powers. A recipient of Greengrants funds to document the health and working conditions of poor laborers in the city, the Hazards Centre has recently led a fact-finding team to investigate the livelihoods and human rights of displaced workers who become resettled after slum demolitions in the city.
The slum demolition process has resulted in dire human rights violations of India’s largest urban population, the working poor. Evicted from well-established squatter communities in the heart of the city, many poor families have been shipped out of sight, and often out of mind, sometimes disappearing altogether from the city. Squatters able to prove their right to resettlement—a difficult process that requires documentation of having lived in Delhi prior to 1998—are eligible to purchase a tiny one room home on the periphery of Delhi. Yet the amenities and conditions of poverty in resettlement areas are among the worst in the city, as many of these colonies lack basic water and sanitation infrastructure, nearby employment opportunities, schools, and medical facilities.
In Bawana, a resettlement colony started in 2004, residents complain of being out of work on an on-going basis, and struggling to find the means to have food and water on a daily basis. The most hard-struck within the community are a group of several hundred new residents who paid for one room houses, but have still not received an official plot from the government. Building makeshift homes out of straw in a nearby open space, they mourn the loss of their old brick (pakka) homes, water access, and livelihood opportunities in their previous slums. They express outrage to Hazards Centre staff that the government could take their money, but still leave them waiting months at a time to receive a home in the new colony. Because the city has over-filled the resettlement colony without providing adequate infrastructure, these groups face months of homelessness, waiting to see if the state will build and/or offer any additional plots.
The circumstances of women are particularly difficult. Every day they spend hours toiling in a neighboring forest to bring fuel for cooking and waiting in long lines to fill only a bucket’s worth of water from a tubewell, the only water source offered by the government. In addition, women and girls face compounded sanitation inequalities because there are no affordable public toilets in Bawana. Because they cannot pay to use one of about 10 public toilets servicing 50,000 people, women face ongoing safety and security problems as they are often harassed and even attacked while conducting their toilet in a nearby open field.
Many of the women used to have employment as domestic help and in small industries. Now in Bawana, the lack of affordable transportation to jobs along with their new struggles for basic food and water leave them to spend their waking hours just trying to get their families through the day.
The lack of infrastructure on such sites more closely resembles rural, rather than urban, life. As Bawana’s residents are mostly migrants from rural areas, they comment that even in small villages the water supply was better and easier to access than their current predicament.
The Hazards Centre conducted a press conference in February to disseminate information on the negative impacts of the resettlement process and to tell the stories of forgotten families. The Centre has worked extensively with resettled communities to document the loss of livelihoods and the physical and social costs of resettlement, including increasing illnesses and death rates. For the worst off who still lack homes, the Hazards Centre is gathering the receipts and demand letters of residents who have paid the state over $100 USD but are still waiting for plot allotments. They are informing communities of their own legal rights, and working as intermediaries to carry community complaints and legal demands to the government. Until the state recognizes that the working poor are critical to the functioning of the city, as builders, service providers, and domestic help, and are entitled to rights as urban citizens, organizations such as the Hazards Centre will continue to have much more work to do.
Greengrants provides small grants to citizen start-up groups and activist organizations like Hazards Centre who are creating movements for change in the Global South. What’s happening to the people in Delhi and Bawana is often overlooked. The role of our small grants is to support social and environmental justice by strengthening democracies around the world.
Yaffa Truelove, our guest writer, has been researching urban water issues in India for the past five years. This latest article was sent to us from New Delhi.