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print version(Published earlier in Mail Today)
If your maid does not come in for work, the dirt hits the floor, and stays there. If your driver, or cook, is deported along with the maid, then you are homebound; but a home without a kitchen is just a house.
The domestic- employing elite are understandably outraged. They feel it is unjust to target the poor and throw them out of Delhi just for the Games.
But it is more selfishness than sympathy that prompts this defense of the urban under- class.
It is not as if the Delhi beautification drive is a Commonwealth Games creation.
It has been around for a long time and always with the encouragement of the city’s elite. They fully endorsed the many brutal slum evictions in the name of civic hygiene and pure optic pleasure. Consequently, the slum re- settlement sites, where many of their maids and cooks lived, were miles away from the city. So what if their domestic help had to spend half their living wage, and a good part of the day, in just getting to work! Delhi had to be prettified, and that was the big ticket item.
But now that sections of the slum population are actually being deported and sent to their “native†villages, our domestic life and tranquility are threatened. This alone explains the sudden surge of support for Delhi’s poor.
Slums
Till the 1960s the idea was to find alternate houses for slum dwellers in the capital itself so that Delhi’s residential areas would have a class mix. But after 1990 this pretence was dropped without a backward look. The earlier provision for in situ up- gradation of shanty clusters was abandoned as well. The emphasis now is almost entirely on relocating slum dwellers so far from the city that their property never becomes valuable one day.
This is a quick assessment, but there are at least 11 resettlement colonies that are 20- 35 kilometres outside the boundaries of Old Delhi and five which are clearly 15 to 20 kilometres beyond New Delhi’s perimeters.
The rest are closer but not by much.
Most of them are more than 10 kilometres away from New Delhi or Old Delhi, whichever is closer.
It is an established fact that wages decline the further one goes from the city.
Eventually, it is a toss- up. Should the worker come to Delhi and get more money only to spend much of it on transport, or look for a lower paying job closer home, but away from the metropolis. In most cases the latter option is a less remunerative one which forces them to make the long trudge to Delhi on a daily basis. As that works well for us, we don’t worry about the rest.
It is true that places that were once slums are now prime urban property. The land mafia, commercial agents and many politicians have made a killing out of this. Yet, there are still many demolished sites which have not been developed for years. What purpose then did those evictions serve? Of course, Delhi’s slum dwellers have grown hugely. In 1981 they comprised 8.6 per cent of the population, but today it is around 27 per cent. A three- fold increase in less than thirty years! Yet, it is never population but the quality of people that make the numbers unbearable. As slums offend our senses, we see them everywhere, though they occupy only 6 per cent of the land.
Policy
The destruction of the Yamuna Pushta shanties in 2003 is a case in point. Who can contest that the rivers should be clean? Yet, in the euphoria to shine Yamuna’s waters, nobody paid attention to a simple, overwhelming fact. The combined waste of the three lakhs living on the banks account for only 0.33 per cent of the total sewage discharged into the river.
The law too turned a blind eye to this dirty fact. The judgments issued on the Almitra Patel case, as well as on the one filed later by the Okhla Factory Owners’ Association, endorsed the destruction of Yamuna Pushta. That its residents were sent miles away to places like Bawana and Halami Kala did not bother the judges, or the rest of us.
To make matters worse, the eligibility criterion for re- settlement requires the evictees to prove their residence in the now destroyed slum since the year 2000. As most of them did not have the requisite papers to establish this claim, about 88% of such families are still looking for a fixed address. After circling around the city for months they eventually find another empty spot to fill out. A few years down the line that area attracts a developer and out they go. This is the cycle of existence for a large section of the slum population. The Commonwealth Games has intruded midcycle in some places, and that is why some of us are suddenly running out of maids.
Quite often we are tempted to believe that slums were forcibly cleared only during the manic years of Sanjay Gandhi. The records, however, demonstrate that demolition of slums peaked in 2001, and has continued ever since. This has been consistent government policy for a long time.
The usual impression is that the administration is weak and unwilling to politically offend slum voters, but the truth lies elsewhere.
Votes are fine, but money is better.
When the price is right, near permanent slums are gone without a trace; or else they can linger on for years.
Villages
It is not just slums; even settled villages have often been re- classified as “encroached†area and their population driven out. This has happened to some old villages around Yamuna as well in places like Nangla Dawat, which is near Palam. It is not as if this was all then; it is happening even now.
In order to build a road to the rifle range for the Commonwealth Games, Kadarpur village in Haryana is threatened. Residents in this hamlet face eviction today even though many had been granted state compensation when some of their lands were acquired earlier. So this property is legally theirs, yet they have to leave now for the Commonwealth Games are coming.
A community destroyed because it is in the cross hairs of a rifle range.
While slum dwellers had to always reckon with administrative high handedness, the Commonwealth Games have raised the baton power of the police.
These officials are now deporting them from the city by wielding the 1959 Bombay Beggary Act. So if your maid, cook or driver has a temporary roof in Shahpur Jat, Rangpuri or Masoodpur, or in some other place that falls along the frequently to - be - travelled route of Games’ officials, then be prepared for another fortnight of inconvenience.
Once the Games are over, the maids, drivers and cooks will be back. After so many days our house will be a home again.
With time, our pinch- nosed horror of slum dwellers will also return. But right now we miss them so much!
The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
