• “A potential death sentence”: Impact Assessment of Evictions during the Pandemic in Delhi

    The making of the city of Delhi is characterised by perennial eviction at the legal and spatial peripheries of its urban landscape. Disturbingly, this character of regular eviction was not disturbed even during the time of the COVID–19  pandemic, when the world was facing a state of exception.

    By and on May 18, 2022

    Read More
  • Life in Baprola: Post Resettlement Stories of Inadequacy and Vulnerability

    Close to 900 families live in the ordered stacks of four-storeyed flats in Baprola in west Delhi. After being evicted from their informal bastis within the city, they were herded and resettled into these low-rise flats, each with barely enough space to house the families of four to five members. Pushed far from their places of work, with peeling plastered walls and water shortages, the residents lament about their state of residence, their grievances unheard and unseen, all but forgotten in the peripheries of the city.

    By on May 12, 2022

    Read More
  • Bulldozing Due Process: Motivated Demolitions of Informal Constructions in Delhi

    Last week in the area of Jahangirpuri in Delhi, residents watched as bulldozers arrived early in the morning, and started hastily demolishing shops and homes. Videos of the bulldozers in the area surfaced online, showing a large crowd gathered, and residents imploring the authorities to spare their homes. One of many resettlement colonies formed in […]

    By on May 4, 2022

    Read More
  • A Continuum of Living Conditions and Property Rights in Indian Slums

    This piece summarizes several key takeaways about property rights and informal housing markets from in-depth interviews with key informants, including housing brokers, in 35 slums in Bengaluru. The authors identified at least eighteen different official papers that have been given out to slum dwellers by one or another official agency at different stages in the slum notification process, constituting a tenure continuum. They find that although the legal process for a slum to become notified and for residents to access various individual housing documents is straightforward, ground realities are more ambiguous, and residents as a result misperceive the legal value of their housing status.

    By and on February 23, 2022

    Read More

Data Tales

  • Housing Policy Timeline: Part 1

    The Housing Policy Timeline is an attempt to understand and analyse the key policy shifts within this period. The timeline deals with the evolution of public policies on housing in India, and the consecutive Five-Year Plan wise allocation of funds towards housing schemes and policy initiatives. Across the timeline, the various schemes and policies initiated and institutions set up help in understanding the role of economic and political ideologies and priorities.

    Read More

Featured Resource

  • Kolkata Urban Archive

    How does civic action produce an understanding of the city at particular points in time? How can archival practices excavate and activate these submerged knowledges? These are questions that S. Bharat engaged with to create an archive of these narratives in a multiplicity of forms: letters, memos, reports, field notes, checklists, parliamentary bills and legal documents, newspaper clippings and articles, concept notes, press releases, circulars, reading lists, bibliographies and more, offering a close-grained look into the everyday dynamics of grassroots civic action, urban movements, planning and policy initiatives, and developmental activity in Kolkata.

    View Resource

Technical Reports

Reports

  • Assessment of quality of construction at the Baprola RRAY resettlement colony: A Report
    In keeping with its mandate to improve the quality of life of residents of JJ clusters, DUSIB constructed an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) Housing Society in Baprola Phase 2, approximately 25km from central Delhi. However, in less than five years from completion and relocation of allottees, issues of seepage, cracks in walls, peeling of bricks, overflowing drains have been reported by residents, including to DUSIB. The emergence and wide prevalence of these issues in such a short duration necessitated the need for a comprehensive assessment of the design, construction quality, and grievance redressal mechanism in this context.
  • Evictions and due process in Delhi
    In the absence of an enforceable substantive right to housing, communities living in slums and other informal settlements have mobilized over the years, using both courts and political advocacy to try and protect themselves from eviction. This has resulted in a series of judgments, policies, and some legislation, relying on Constitutional provisions and India’s commitments under international law, extending at least some procedural safeguards (and limited substantive rights) to these communities. This brief documents these processes and provisions in the National Capital Territory of Delhi.
  • In Search of Home: A Study on Migrant Workers’ Access to Housing and Land
    This study aims to document the living conditions of migrant workers, particularly their access to housing and land in Delhi—where they lived—and in their villages as well as the challenges faced by them during the COVID-19 crisis. While the lockdown has been lifted in India, in phases from 1 June 2020, lessons learned from this period can be used to frame land and housing policies and to develop low-cost social housing models, not only for migrant workers, but also for all those living in homelessness and inadequate housing in urban and rural areas.