By Gautam Bhan

Around 35,000 families have lived in Yamuna Pushta in Delhi for decades. Now they are being evicted to make way for a riverside promenade. Some who can prove their residency are being “voluntarily resettled” in Bawana, 50 km away. But a study of nearly 3,000 households in Bawana finds that there has been a systemic and clear impoverishment of those who have been displaced from Pushta to Bawana. It’s not a ‘shock’ impoverishment that the residents will be able to overcome; it’s a ‘permanent poverty’ that a whole generation will be unable to overcome

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Comments (1)

Written by Yogesh Jain, on 14-01-2009 09:58 This is a brilliant exposition of the issue. And it has been captured best in the penultimate statement that posits residents of a city as different from its citizenship. In fact this disenfranchisement within one's own country is a reality. Defining some of the people as officially poor (the BPL) and then targetting the social services, such as access to subsidized food grain and health care to them alone was one such attempt at disenfrachisement that people who were not lucky enough to be declared officially poor. The second such step is when these poor become refugees in a city, where even the BPL cards of their own state does not work.

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