Of Housing Rights and Wrongs

Even as the human right to adequate housing and shelter has acquired acceptance in international human rights norms and Indian constitutional law, this normative development has been parallelled by a systematic onslaught on the urban Indian poor. As a report, prepared by Miloon Kothari and published by the National Human Rights Commission of India in 2006, more than 100,000 families were forcibly evicted from their homes in Delhi between 2000 and 2006. 

The trauma of such forcible eviction has been exacerbated by the absence of resettlement provisions. Even where people were resettled, such programmes have been marred by absence of basic amenities like water, education, sanitation, health care facilities, etc. Smriti Kak Ramchandran has this report on the condition of resettlement colonies in Bawana, Balaswa and Badarpur Khadar areas of Delhi.  

Settlers in these colonies have also been for long denied ownership rights over their dwellings. The lack of formal legal title has prevented the use of these dwellings as collaterals for raising loans, thus limiting the entrepreneurial freedom of the settlers. To use Hernando De Soto’s coinage, these dwellings in various resettlement colonies were thus locked as ‘dead capital’. This background puts in perspective the historic significance of the decision of the Delhi Government to grant freehold and ownership rights to residents of 45 jhuggi jhopdi resettlement colonies in the National Capital Territory. Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar has more on this.