www.sacw.net > Victims and refugees of 'Development', 'Nation Building' and Conflict in the Indian Subcontinent
India: Death of a School
by Jugnu Ramaswamy
[Op-ed, The Hindustan Times, June 24, 2002]The big bulldozer works fast. And this one is as mean as they come. It takes only a few minutes to annihilate 12 years of our life. Before you can say Ananth Kumar, itís all gone ó several classrooms and a kitchen where working children once learnt and ate, a hall that sheltered the homeless among them each night, and the only tiny toilet to boast of a commode among a squatter population of over 30,000.
This was once a school called Jagriti ó the first chance of a level playing field and learning opportunity that a few thousand street kids of a central Delhi slum ever had, the only space which had been their own. The date is June 12 and the Stateís apparatus is at war. The demolition of the vast ëillegalí jhuggi cluster of Motia Khan is on and the entire area resembles a battle zone. There are scenes of focused destruction everywhere. Roads cordoned off, traffic diverted, hundreds of riot police in helmets and chest pads, and at the centre of it all, the bulldozers, one big, two small.
The diesel engines rev and roar. But there is no enemy to fight back. The amalgam of brick, plastic, bits of timber and bamboo offers no resistance to the big steel shields and shiny pistons that pump back and forth. Only refugees fleeing Ground Zero, their home for over 25 long years. Their numbers have spilt over all the surrounding bylanes. They sit with their string cots and pitiful belongings under a blazing sun and watch their sordid, grimy lean-tos huddled in impossible congestion being excised to make way for development. There are no curious onlookers.
A lot has changed in the decade that has gone by since the idea of our school was born. We had built it together in the face of adversity ó the children and us ó way back in the late Nineties. First it was a tiny bamboo shelter no different from their homes that housed a single classroom. Then it was a discarded, larger, documentary film-set we reassembled on a cesspool of stagnant sewage painstakingly reclaimed by hundreds of children moving 60 truckloads of earth. When that collapsed in a duststorm we built it again, only to invite the ire of powerful local criminals. It was seen as a threat to evolved structures of authority, burnt down, teachers were beaten up and chased with knives in broad daylight within a stoneís throw of the Paharganj police station. We survived this and more, the enmity of local politicians, and rebuilt it once more.
In those days, the stuff of such struggles could still make it to the front pages of most national dailies. Today, after the latest surgical strike that has destroyed a school and rendered thousands homeless just a kilometre away from the gracious shopping arcades of Connaught Place, there is not a whimper. The boom city of Delhi, driven by the buying power of a middle-class riding high on a globalising economy, is tone deaf to the cries of the poor who have nowhere to go. Apparently, this no longer merits even a cub reporter.
But can it be any different when even heads of State of starving nations at the Food Summit in Rome are talking to the birds about level playing fields in a world where there arenít any left; when a frail girl from the Narmada Bachao Andolan was fighting a losing battle for her home and her life in a place called the Tin Shed in Bhopal?
There is only a sole photographer taking pictures from the rooftop of some high-rise DDA flats overlooking the slum. The flats are modern, duplex and unoccupied, their future owners the first beneficiaries of demolition. The photographer uses his mobile to give me a running commentary on the destruction. Amidst the rubble that was once Motia Khan, only four objects have survived. A single mulberry tree planted by us in the middle of the school courtyard that presumably signifies the DDAís unwavering commitment to a ëGreen Delhií; and three small Hindu temples that can only upset pseudo-secularists amongst us. The smallest of these stands bang upfront, primely located on the roadside. Its ëpromoterí, a canny and energetic garbage dealer called Pappu, has wisely decided to add two more rooms and move in.
Is this sounding like an argument for perpetuating urban squalor? Iím sure every single slumdweller will vote for a clean green Delhi that provides all its variegated inhabitants decent housing, clean air and drinking water, effective sanitation, good roads, adequate power and enough schools for all the children to go to, etc. etc. But before we slide into collective euphoria, letís digest a few hard facts.
The Motia Khans of Delhi are all part of the continuing saga of rural impoverishment fuelling urban migration, that is bringing in starving millions to increase slum populations in cities all over India. Already every fourth person you encounter in Delhi is a slumdweller and no amount of demolition is going to change this. The pressure of arriving numbers is such that every vacant piece of land inevitably gets occupied. Only then do our politicians get a chance to fish for advantage.
Some three decades ago, Motia Khan was a timber and iron market. A fire in the late Seventies destroyed the market but soon after the land was cleared, the squatters arrived. In that politically tumultuous time, a people outraged by Indira Gandhiís Emergency had just overthrown her regime in the 1977 general election. And her son Sanjayís brash programme of razing down slums and ëcleaning upí the city by throwing the poor to far-flung suburbs was too raw a memory to be repeated. So the squatters stayed and proliferated, their population multiplying 10 times in two decades! As their numbers increased, so did their value as a vote bank. And each time the population was earmarked for relocation, new elections brought fresh bounties.
As politics goes, this is all pretty unexceptional stuff. The real trouble lies in the Janus-faced mentality that the cityís haves share with the politicians. Both need the services, cheap labour and votes the urban poor provide; at the same time both are reluctant to legitimise their existence by giving them a fair share of civic amenities. Both profit from their presence, even as the fear of being swamped by the sheer weight of their numbers makes it desirable to keep them in a perpetual state of insecurity. This is the real, if unsavory, explanation of filthy drains, miserable overcrowded shanties, men and women defecating in the open, no drinking water, flies and mosquitoes buzzing everywhere.
The luck of slums like Motia Khan runs out when the commercial and political advantages of demolition outstrip its value as someoneís pocket borough. The DDA will tell you that the oustees are in fact benefiting from a resettlement plan offering subsidised housing. The going price is between Rs 1.6 and Rs 2.2 lakh, with a down payment of Rs 30,000 and monthly loan instalments of Rs 1,700 to Rs 2,500. What it wonít tell you is that a fair number of the 5,000 odd families are not eligible at all. Of those who are, few have paid up. Of those who have, many have already mortgaged their rights to touts operating right under the DDAís nose, with more sellers queuing up because the terms are beyond the reach of most daily wage earners.
As for the school, we too were offered land at Rs 10 lakh. Weíve chosen to leave Delhi instead. Jagriti now helps working children in a Murshidabad village in faraway Bengal.
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