The Slumdogs Blog

Recent slum clearances in Delhi show how fragile the situation for homeless or slum dwellers is, and how thin the line between the two is.

Delhi is preparing for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and wants to spruce up the city for visiting athletes and press, so planning officials have decided to rid the city of encroaching slums by bulldozing them down. 

The technique is to turn up with bulldozers and get to work quickly before locals can protest or stop them. The government certainly owns the land, but then governments own most of developing country land and then say that they need the land for new roads.

The city says it will build new apartments for the slum dwellers and is planning a hundred thousand new apartments. Problem is only 6000 are being built and at the present rate it will be years before they are completed. In the meantime, the newly homeless have to survive on wastelands.

Outsider often see slum dwellers as itinerant, but this is far from the case. Many have been inhabiting the same dwelling for twenty years and there has built around them a thriving and active community, tho one without planning permission.  

Many are poor certainly, but they also hold down jobs and provide stable upbringing for their children, as well as a stable enviroment for community life. The solutions to slums is not to start by knocking them down but to develop them.

There is an economic problem as well. Slum can often inhabit valuable real estate in the centre of town. The unholy alliance of city planning and property developers would like to see them transformed into glass boxes. Solution move the slum dwellers to new locations. Those new locations are too frequently on the edge of town and far distant from the jobs that inhabitants have. 

For children, the trauma of losing home can so easily descend into family breakdown. The bulldozers knock down more than homes.