January 25, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 05, 1428

NEW DELHI: Slipping westwards out over the rooftops and tree line of Indian capital is one of the city’s modern marvels: the metro.

Its smooth ride and clean interiors are proof that the country is on the move. At Janakpuri, a buckle on Delhi’s commuter belt, there are more changes: signs on the highway tell of the impending arrival of new malls and hotels.

This facelift is largely invisible to diplomats and journalists who live and work in central Delhi. But it is on the fringes that the city is being revitalised -- at some cost to the poor. The space required for new developments, say slum dwellers, came from their land.

According to activists, shacks and shantytowns have disappeared from the edge of the Indian capital to make room for shopping complexes and cinema halls. The law sanctified some of these steps; other acts appear simply to be at the behest of the powerful against the weak.

Earlier this month, bulldozers and riot police moved into the slum behind the colony of Shankar Gardens. The garbage-filled streets are home to 500 poor families who live without safe drinking water, proper sanitation or health services.

It was early afternoon and most of the men in the slum, who work on construction sites, were out. Those who were around were given bottles of drink, so that they would relax. The local residents’ association, which had long campaigned for the removal of the poor from their midst, came out with snacks.

By the time the authorities cleared a path through the slum, 200 huts made of bricks and galvanised steel were reduced to rubble. Puja had lost her home and her 12-day old baby son, killed in the demolition according to his parents.

“The big people do not care for us,” she told me. “We have been here for years and they just wanted to get rid of us to make Delhi look beautiful.”

When I went to visit the slum, displaced residents rushed forward with papers showing that the city had given tacit approval and basic services to the “illegal” settlement. The “survivors” point to photocopies of voting cards, ration cards and land titles that prove residence since the 1980s.

So far there has been no offer of alternative accommodation, although some officials have come back to check that no one is rebuilding. Families are now forced to keep their belongings under tarpaulin sheets spread across bricks. Children revising for public exams attempt to study in the bitter cold.

Local NGOs say that what has happened here is a failure of democratic principles in the world’s largest democracy. The authorities claimed the slum was blocking the public right of way and could be razed. NGOs say that any slum built before 1991 has been declared a legal structure and could not be demolished.

“Instead of this being resolved in court, the rich residents decided to use their influence and get the slum destroyed,” said Raveena Sood, an executive director of Indicare, an organisation which works with slum dwellers.

“Nobody stopped it. Somebody should have acted in the interests of the poor.”

Ms Sood says this struggle is one of the central challenges facing India’s booming economy: how does the world’s largest democracy bulldoze the homes of voters who are living in the way of progress?

“The problem for Delhi is huge because 32 per cent live in jhuggies (slums). How can you just bulldoze. Where will they put all the millions of people? What about their rights?”

These questions are not answered in India, where a lack of coordinated policy responses leaves little but disarray.Unlike the poor, powerful groups can mobilise to bring the government to heel. A recent attempt to seal thousands of illegal shops was halted by a coalition of traders who could vote the Congress party out of power in the Delhi municipality.

A view emerges from the United Nations human settlements programme. Its analysis is that “China is the only large country that has managed to urbanise without the creation of large slum areas or informal settlements”.

The ingredients for this miracle were “tight control over the economy, a central planning system and a populace eager to build socialism and therefore accept a more limited degree of personal consumption and property ownership than would be normal”.

In India, how far your property rights are curbed sometimes appears to be a function of your income. This is not to make the case for despotism, even if the ends are social improvement.

But India needs to quickly repair those parts of its much-vaulted democracy, upgrading institutions so that decisions are fair, equitable and socially digestible. At present in the world’s biggest democracy politics begins where it should end -- with the assertions.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service