Living on the periphery
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COMMENTS 
Six thousand migrants who have been living in Delhi’s Jai Hind Camp for the last 15 years are struggling to retain their dwellings, kiosks and livelihoods as waste-pickers as land sharks try to oust them to cash in on the spiralling value of land. This story of callous displacement is being played out all over urban India today
Corruption in public life has been the focus of attention in India recently. It is the middle class’s encounters with corruption in governance which have been highlighted, but middle class India’s travails on account of corruption pale in comparison with those of informal labour groups in cities like Delhi, who have to pay bribes for living where they do, for the right to work, and for water and other bare necessities of life.
In Delhi's Jai Hind Camp, about 6,000 Bengali Muslim migrants from Cooch Behar in West Bengal are currently fighting for a road to their colony. Indeed, they are fighting a daily battle to survive in this settlement that is roughly 15 years old. Jai Hind Camp is an unauthorised colony situated in the rapidly developing area of southwest Delhi, with an airport development suburb and more malls being planned in the area. The picture below shows a Delhi Development Authority (DDA) crane sweeping away the last of the few small shops that were just outside the boundary of this informal settlement. In the last few months, Jai Hind Camp inhabitants have been subjected to all sorts of arbitrary harassment: They are not being allowed to sort their waste in the open space (a large percentage of men in the colony are waste-pickers), they are prevented from freely using the only gate that connects them to the main road outside, and they are not allowed to bring water tanks inside. It is almost as if the government is trying to browbeat the people into vacating the area as the value of real estate in this region soars. Many of the waste-pickers have in fact begun moving to other slums before their work is completely disrupted.
The official DDA map does not recognise their existence; this 15-year-old basti is marked as ‘market space’ on the board outside. This official invisibility is compounded by the colony's spatial shadowing by upcoming highrise residential apartments. Yet, the basti provides the necessary services in maintaining the sheen of the neighbourhood. Its inhabitants clean up and look after the nearby areas as waste-pickers, domestic workers and mall and parking attendants. However, they are not recognised by the government anywhere on paper, nor is the waste-pickers’ union, which has been active since 2003, paid any heed by the government, even though waste-picking saves the municipality up to Rs 12,00,000 every day .
Nazrul, who heads this union, reports how difficult it is to even mobilise people when the official response is always negative: “We take up the identity issue for waste-pickers all over Delhi, but in the absence of even palliatives, most of our hard work falls flat.” In fact the government benefits by keeping the area out of the ambit of the law as an 'informal' colony that the elite residential colonies benefit from, without providing any sorts of rights or welfare benefits in return.
The history of eviction and displacement of this area goes back to the 1950s, when the land of a number of villages in this area was acquired to build the airport. Soon after, the area became the hub of the construction industry with village-based quarrying being carried on here. As activist Anita Soni’s rich account of this transformation tells us, mining permits were issued to private parties led by the land-owning castes of the village panchayats. In the 1970s and 1980s, further waves of land acquisition followed, and by 1992, ecological concerns ostensibly led to the closure of the stone quarrying industry in the area, leading to the pauperisation of landless labourers and quarry workers. However, as Soni points out, subsequent developments revealed that it was not environmental concern but the lure of the real estate potential that led to the ban on quarrying: sprawling farmhouses began to dot the landscape, and later, the malls and residential complexes which now surround Jai Hind Camp began to be constructed . Between the end of that decade and today, real estate dealers claim there has been a hundred-fold increase in land prices.
Not everyone has been able to keep up with this march of urbanisation. The inhabitants of Jai Hind Camp have no voting cards and therefore no way to influence the government even by sheer numbers. Many people lost all their documents in successive fires from 2006-09 and due to low levels of literacy and confidence, they have not been able to secure the attention of local politicians.
Most of the men in this area have been involved in rag-picking for the last 15-20 years and almost all the women are in domestic work. Some from the younger generation have now found jobs in the proliferating malls, as salespersons, car repairmen and drivers, yet their problems are compounded by their migrant status.
Most of the men involved in waste-picking make about Rs 6,000 per month. The women who work as domestic help earn about half that amount. Of a family’s earnings, Rs 1,000 is paid for each jhuggi to the thekedar who then passes it on to the land mafia from Masoodpur. The thekedars in turn pay bribes for every water tank and for the ‘illegal’ electricity that provides one light source per home (government agencies disconnect the illegal connections time and again). Apart from local doctors who administer medicines for common illnesses, there are no proper health services in the area, and almost all deliveries happen with the help of nearby women, leading to severe infections in some cases.
The thekedars also pay bribes to the local policemen every month so that they do not disrupt their gains. This practice has brought an end to the active harassment they faced by the police who used to pick up people in the night alleging they are Bangladeshis to intimidate and extract money from them. Though the harassment in this colony has decreased over the years due to repeated protests by the people and the reportage of such events by local NGOs, it continues in other neighbourhoods of Delhi populated by poor Bengali Muslim migrants. Such acts of ‘cleansing’ the city are scaled up for grand events like last year’s Commonwealth Games, which saw a spate of arbitrary arrests on grounds of ‘illegal migrant’ status , as well as the forced displacement of more than 250,000 people living in ‘illegal’ colonies like Jai Hind Camp .
In the last few months, DDA has also closed down a large area in the front of this settlement, where rag-pickers used to sort out waste. Waste carts are denied entry during the day on the pretext that sorting waste brings a lot of eagles and other wild birds to the area which endangers the airplanes above. It is intriguing that it is only 15 years after the setting up of the colony that eagles have begun to obstruct air traffic, say the locals. They claim this is yet another excuse to drive inhabitants off the land as land prices soar each passing year.
In case a notice is issued for eviction, the case can be taken to court. In some cases, people get rehabilitated, and this depends on the ‘perception of legality’ of each claimant. Indeed, according to the Economic Survey 2002 , no more than a third of the inhabitants of Delhi live in settlements that meet basic legal and planning standards, thereby validating Solomon Benjamin’s claim that the question of absolute legality arises but rarely – instead, cities are constituted by ‘occupancy urbanism’ in which higher perceptions of legality imply greater tenure security . Thus, the more documents inhabitants possess to prove their stay and status in Delhi, the greater is their chance of being recognised as citizens with a claim to legality.
Given the situation in Jai Hind Camp, further marginalisation seems to be looming on the horizon, as their ‘perception of legality’ progressively weakens.
In millennial Delhi, as Gautam Bhan points out, the ‘aestheticisation of poverty’ has led to the poor being represented as no more than inhabitants of slums. Emptied of all their interiority, the slum is just a ‘flattened image of its built environment’. The failure of policies that led to the creation of the slums in the first place, as well as the lack of political will in recognising the right of all citizens to the city, is overshadowed by the image of filth and squalor that is associated with the slum. The flattened image of the ‘ugly’, ‘illegal’ slum also glosses over the brutality of the eviction of those who live there . Thus, the intersection of development and democracy that may have spelt some hope in other contexts does not hold much promise here, and what remains to be seen is how far the government can go in its offensive in pushing the people further into the margins.
(Rashmi Singh works with AMAN Trust. She finished her Masters in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011. Kriti Budhiraja is pursuing her MPhil in Political Studies from the same university. The field work for this research was conducted in the course of this year.)
Endnotes
Shriya Mohan, “Throw Me a Little Piece of Your Heart,” Tehelka, 04 April 2009.
Anita Soni, ‘Urban Conquest of Outer Delhi: Beneficiaries, Intermediaries and Victims’, in Veronique Dupont, Emma Tarlo, Denis Vidal eds, Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, Manohar Publishers, 2000.
See, for instance, Twocircles.net, ‘To Make Delhi Clean for Games: Bengali Speaking Muslims Being Disturbed’, September 2009.
Housing and Land Rights Network, ‘Forced Evictions Due to 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi’, October 13, 2010.
Quoted in ‘What is a ‘slum’?’ in Kalyani Menon-Sen and Gautam Bhan, Swept Off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi, Yoda Press, 2008.
Solomon Benjamin, ‘Occupancy Urbanism: Ten Theses’, Sarai Reader, 2007.
Gautam Bhan, ‘This is No Longer the City I Once Knew: Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2009.
Infochange News & Features, October 2011