Gurugram, Haryana: Along the market lines of Gurugram's bustling Sector 12 locality is the densely populated neighbourhood of Premnagar II, which contains within it a paint shop, several multi-storey residential buildings, and the Premnagar Basti, a slum also known as the Chick-Chataiwali basti.  

One of these homes, part bamboo and part brick, like an analogue for the bamboo and stonework artisans who live in them, belongs to a middle-aged man named Dharmendra.

For a living, Dharmendra, who goes by a single name, crafts silbattas: an indigenous grinding stone—essential to the Rajasthani kitchen. He hails from UP originally, but his family settled in the urban village of Premnagar in Gurugram in India’s national capital region 40 years ago. 

Since then, both the culture and the basti have become his; it is where his grandmother and his father died, and the place where his five children—two daughters and three sons—were born.

Three of them abandoned their education to pursue odd jobs to help the household. The older of his daughters, Isha, completed her schooling and is preparing to apply to college, while his youngest, Abhimanyu, 16, has competed at the all-Asia Judo championship.

Abhimanyu's medals take pride of place in Dharmendra’s house, which, for over a decade, has been threatened with demolition. Like his, at least 250 families in Premnagar Basti, as Premnagar II is known locally, fear of losing their home and the attached general store came true in early January this year. 

On 16 January 2025, a public announcement, via loudspeakers and notices stuck on walls, was made by the government of Haryana, said residents, informing them that the land would soon be demarcated and “any encroachments” demolished.

Since then, Abhimanyu's practice and Isha's college preparation have come to a stop. 

"What should they practice for if we won't have a home?" Dharmendra asked. 

Eviction Attempts

Two multistorey buildings also jut into the 1.5 acre plot, but neither of these have been demarcated for possible demolition, despite encroaching upon the same land, nor did any other property owners receive threats of demolition or the demarcation notice.

This is because the demolition announcement was made based on a high court order, from earlier the same day, in response to a writ petition by the local Central Market Welfare Association (CMWA), complaining specifically about the residents of the Premnagar Basti. 

Among the reasons listed in the petition, which was first filed in 2013, were items such as basti dwellers “creating a mess” and “adversely affecting the day-to-day affairs” of the market—nuisances of poverty. 

The residents of the Premnagar Basti had been encouraged by the high court, in 2014, after the eviction request was first filed by the CMWA, to apply to the Haryana government's Ashiana Scheme, a two decade old low-income housing project in Gurugram's 'premium' Sector 47 locality.

The construction of the flats had already been completed in 2010, and the extended delay in their allotment had already begun to raise questions in the media. 

Basti residents were left with little choice but to comply with the court's suggestion. The pressure of eviction led to hundreds of the basti's residents scrounging up documents and the steep Rs 8,000 application fee—one month’s rent for one of the 1,088 studio apartments spread over 20 acres.

Dharmendra is one of 1,570 residents who live below the poverty line in Gurugram and who, between 2010 and 2016, paid the application fee to the Haryana Shehri Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP), the Haryana government's urban planning agency, chaired by the incumbent chief minister of the state.

Of these applications 476 families were found to qualify for the housing, 204 of them from the Premnagar Basti.

Yet, 15 years later, not a single apartment has been allotted. Indeed, the HSVP has now decided to demolish these homes and resell the land for premium rates. 

In 2023, the Bharatiya Janata Party government of chief minister Nayab Singh Saini announced that the Ashiana flats would be demolished, the land they were built on auctioned for private construction and the flats would be reconstructed from scratch on new land in Sector 9, about 6 km away. 

"This land, about 18 to 20 acres, is very valuable and is adjacent to the district centre. A large IKEA mixed use commercial project is coming up there,” Vikas Dhanda, an estate officer with the Gurugram HSVP, told the Hindustan Times in July 2023, defending the decision to monetise the land, which he said was better suited for high rises and private residential projects. 

”The land will be auctioned for group housing and EWS allottees will be accommodated in the Sector 9 project,” said Dhanda. 

Nationwide Trend of Demolitions

According to a March 2024 report by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), a think tank and advocacy group, on forced evictions in India, more than half a million people were evicted from their homes in 2023 alone—the highest in seven recorded years. 

280,000 of this half a million were rendered homeless in the national capital territory alone, the highest of any location in the whole year.

The HLRN reported a 131.6% increase in forceful evictions, land seizures, and violent demolitions in India in 2023, compared to the previous year. 

This trend has also been reported by international advocacy organisations such as Amnesty International and The Polis Project, largely due to the phenomenon of ‘punitive demolitions’, where the State bypasses due processes of the law to demolish the homes of those guilty or even accused of crimes. 

Often, these ‘punitive demolitions’ have little to do with enacting justice, and more to do with the economics of discrimination, and often target marginalised communities, such as Dalits or Muslims, as Article 14 has reported (here, here and here)

"Despite protections in the Constitution of India and in national laws, Dalit and tribal communities continue to face forced evictions for a variety of reasons, including infrastructure projects, ‘beautification’ projects, and ‘encroachment removal’ drives," said the HLRN report. 

The Supreme Court criticised such demolition in a landmark judgement in November 2024, deeming punitive demolitions “totally unconstitutional”. 

"It is not a happy sight to see women, children and aged persons dragged to the streets overnight,” said the Supreme Court. “Heavens would not fall on the authorities if they hold their hands for some period.”

Forced eviction and displacement in urban India tend to occupy one of two broad classes: punitive demolitions, as described, and slum rehabilitation projects worth thousands of crores, frequently made in partnership with private construction companies, which also frequently end up being long, excruciating, and expensive dead ends.

According to HLRN, nearly 60% of evictions belonged to this second category—the same one under which marginalised communities are disproportionately targeted—carried out through court orders. In a startling 82% of these cases, no rehabilitation effort is made. 

Though the residents of Premnagar Basti have officially been given notice, they have not been provided with a rehabilitation plan other than the Ashiana flats, which are set to be demolished.

Article 14 sought comment from Gurugram HSVP estate officer Vikas Dhanda via email on 25 April 2025 and via telephone on 28 April 2025. There was no reply. We will update this story if there is.

Other evictions in the country have been carried out without hearings, notices or translocation opportunities—violating court judgements and state and union laws, as Article 14 has previously reported (here, here and here) 

The battle over the Premnagar Basti, which has quietly raged away from the public eye for the better part of the last two decades, is an intersection of both issues. 

The Property Dispute

The 16 January court order made no mention of plans to sell the Ashiana flats at premium rates to private entities, or their continued vacancy. 

The omission of such details, or even the unauthorised multistorey buildings encroaching upon the plot in question was one of many red flags in the demarcation order, raising questions about the demolition's legality and intent.

Contrary to the claims of both the plaintiff—the CMWA—and the HSVP, the land in question was not in fact owned by the government when the petition was filed in 2013. 

The matter of the property's ownership is far from straightforward. Land deeds from the tehsildar's office show the convoluted ownership status of the property. 

The HSVP had been contending ownership of the land since 1985 in the high court, and since 2008 in the Supreme Court.

The collective understanding in the basti, where most cannot read or write, the property on which the small urban village stands belonged to a man named Ramesh Nagpal and was donated to the forefathers of its current occupants over four generations ago. 

Nagpal is one of the listed owners of the property in the four decade old legal dispute between 17 of its original owners and the HSVP. 

Since the purported Nagpal agreement was verbal, there is no documentary evidence of it, with documents supposedly lost in a fire in 2008, the cause unknown. 

Much of the basti was destroyed in that fire; Ajeet, wrongly reported at the time to be 13 years old, was only six when he died that day. 

In 2014, the high court put an end to the property ownership dispute and to HSVP's acquisition attempts "for the regulated development of Gurgaon City", by declaring that the original owners could, after a year, could use their land freely.

In 2015, the HSPV (formerly the Haryana Urban Development Authority or HUDA) told the high court, in the CMWA’s case seeking the demolition of the basti, that “the entire acquisition of the area in the dispute has been set aside, and now the land is no more under the ownership of HUDA”.

The HSVP nonetheless kept fighting in the Supreme Court to claim the property, while the CMWA continued to argue for the demolition of the basti in the high court.

The 2014 judgement was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018.

The ownership of the land is still under dispute in the Gurugram district court, where the basti dwellers themselves are pursuing a permanent injunction since August 2018, after the Supreme Court ruling.

There is another red flag in the January 2025 order: the absence of mention of any compensation or rehabilitation of the displaced population—only a statement of the court that it “hopes” the 476 qualifying families have been rehabilitated in the Ashiana flats.

The rehabilitation, which has not taken place, is a constitutional requirement of urban demolitions processes under Indian law, and especially poignant following the 2024 Supreme Court judgement. 

Article 14 sought comment from HSVP regarding rehabilitation for the residents of the basti via email on 25 April 2025 and via telephone on 28 April 2025. There was no reply. We will update this story if there is.

Between 1985 and 2022, the HSVP had already made repeated unsuccessful attempts at clearing the slum and taking over the land, each dismissed by stay orders from lower and higher courts, with the matter being still under legal dispute.

Quasi-Legality Of Urban Demolitions

Gaps in the Haryana government’s paperwork are not so much one-off mistakes but a consistent pattern nationwide when it comes to urban demolitions, especially in states ruled by the BJP, again, overwhelmingly targeting the marginalised and vulnerable. 

The demolition of Jai Bhim Nagar or JBN, a slum in western Mumbai, in June 2024 had the same tell-tale signs of violations disguised as procedure, as reported by Article 14. 

“As the Supreme Court noted—the law is undermined [in such demolitions]: notices, even when issued are either backdated, cursory and issued as little more than a formality in a manner meant not to uphold but subvert the law and due process,” we reported. 

“On 3 June, JBN residents said, two BMC notices were pasted on the doors of a toilet and a storehouse, ordering the residents to vacate their homes within three days, since the land [whose ownership is in fact disputed] belonged to the Hiranandani Group.”

What happened in Mumbai is almost identical to the so-called process being implemented by the HSPV at Premnagar.

In one instance, a HUDA official was held in contempt of the Punjab and Haryana High Court for falsely submitting a one-month notice for demolition of the slum in the court's name, when no such order had been passed.

"HUDA seeks to fire the gun from the shoulder of the Court by misquoting the orders, which is not permissible," said the 19 February 2014 order. "We, thus, dismiss the application but simultaneously issue notice of contempt to the estate officer-I, HUDA, Gurugram, to explain why he should not be proceeded against for wilfully misrepresenting the orders of the Court."

More than a decade later, little has changed. 

Public notices are sent out to thousands in one go. On 12 April 2025, HSPV officers set up an impromptu camp using locally sourced tables and chairs to ask people to line up and announce their names to them, allowing the government, locals alleged, to fulfil the legal requirement of individual notification—without verification of identity, residence, or state domicile.

At Powai or in Gurugram, steps of the ‘legal process’ are undertaken where visible, and skipped where they are less than so.

"It's any day now that they might raze it," said Muskan, a 12th-grade resident of the basti, who wants to be an engineer and goes by one name. 

For the past weeks, she has been writing her exams fearing she might not have a home to return to when they are done. Hundreds of children younger than Muskan commute to nearby government schools from the basti, all of whose education will be disrupted, if they are evicted or their homes demolished. 

"I don't want the basti to be broken. What else would I say?" asked Manisha, who goes by a single name. Manisha, in her early twenties, was one of the first from the basti to complete schooling and attempt further education, though she was married off under family pressure before she could complete it. 

Manisha and other adults in the basti have given up on the government's promises of rehabilitation, or even getting back money sunk in the Ashiana scheme. To them, it was clear that education is their and the younger ones' only ticket out.

"We aren't criminals," said Prem Pal, a bamboo chick maker based in the basti, looking on at a few of the children playing nearby. "The city is our lifeblood.”

“We've made a home here, the kids are in school, and there's a hospital nearby,” said Pal. “What'll happen to them if we have to leave? Will the government ensure that they stay in school?”

(Mouli Sharma is a journalist based in Delhi and a scholar of religion.)

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