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 IHR Team and Basti Suraksha Manch on May 18, 2022
Read MoreClose 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 IHR Team on May 12, 2022
Read MoreLast 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 IHR Team on May 4, 2022
Read MoreThis 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 Emily Rains and Anirudh Krishna on February 23, 2022
Read MoreThe 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 MoreHow 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.
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