Delhi: On 30 April 2023, when bulldozers rolled into Bengali Colony in south east Delhi, Gandhari Jana was not at home. She was 1,400 km away, visiting family in her native village in Paschim Midnapore, West Bengal, four hours west of Kolkata city.
When she heard the news, the 36-year-old domestic worker rushed to Kolkata airport by road, after her husband borrowed money from his employer to pay for their air ticket.
“I had always wanted to fly, but not like this,” said Jana, a soft-spoken woman dressed in a faded woollen kurta, her manner heavy with the weight of loss.
By the time she arrived, her brick-and-mortar house tucked away in the labyrinthine alleys of Bengali Colony no longer existed. The 468 sq ft one-room living quarter she had purchased for Rs 900,000—partly with her hard-earned savings and partly from selling a plot of land she owned in her village—had been reduced to dust and rubble.
Like Jana, an estimated 200,000 people lost their homes in Bengali Colony, as a 25-acre plot of land—the size of 19 football fields—around the 14th-century Tughlaqabad fort was cleared over two days.
Most homes here had concrete floors, electrical wiring, cable TV connections, tiled kitchens and other markers of painstakingly built lives that were abruptly uprooted.
This slum was one of the many locations in the capital where forced evictions and demolitions took place between 2021-2023.
‘Left Like Animals In An Open Field’
The biggest surge in demolitions took place in 2023, when more than 1,600 homes were razed in the run-up to the 18th G20 summit in the capital city. According to think tank Housing and Land Rights Network’s (HLRN) report Forced Evictions in India: 2022 & 2023, approximately 293,205 people were evicted over this period as Delhi witnessed 78 eviction drives.
Residents alleged that the demolitions were often carried out at odd hours, without serving the slum inhabitants proper notices or giving them enough time to salvage their belongings.
For weeks after the demolition, Jana and her neighbours camped in an open ground by a garbage heap—no roof, no wall, only relentless rain and mosquitoes for company.
“Even flood and earthquake victims get relief,” said Jana, with a heavy voice, eyes brimming with tears. “But we were left like animals in an open field.”
Her words echo numerous court judgements in India: That the right to shelter is a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution, and that every Indian citizen, including those living on public land, has the right to live with dignity, and that the right to life enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution (guaranteeing the right to life and personal liberty) is not restricted to “mere animal existence”.
To understand the official policy on rehabilitation efforts in the aftermath of mass evictions between 2021 and 2023, this correspondent reached out to key government agencies including the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB).
We specifically sought clarity on whether any in-situ or alternative housing had been provided to those displaced, and whether allocations under the DDA’s Rs 583-crore slum rehabilitation budget for 2025–26 were made for these evictees. Despite multiple emails sent between April and May 2025, we received no response.
Landmark Order
In April 2025, a landmark Supreme Court judgement again put the spotlight on forced evictions. It upheld the rights of six individuals in Uttar Pradesh whose homes were razed without following due process of law.
The court ordered the Prayagraj Development Authority to make an initial payout of Rs 60 lakh towards the reconstruction of their homes, failing which it would attract an interest penalty payment of 6% per annum.
Despite these rulings by courts, several thousand evictees from nine sites in Delhi, including those from Bengali Colony, have been denied rehabilitation.
The authorities used provisions of the Delhi slum & jhuggi-jhopri rehabilitation and relocation policy, 2015 to deny them rehabilitation and compensation, rendering Supreme Court directives around humane evictions and the right to housing meaningless for thousands of poor in Delhi.
Court judgements including the April verdict hold important implications for people facing forced extrajudicial eviction and unlawful demolition in cities like Delhi, which has one of the country’ highest eviction rates in the country.
While India does not have an overarching law governing evictions and demolitions, the courts have time and again stepped in to enforce the Constitutional rights of displaced people, impacting millions of lives.
Two notable judgments passed by the Delhi High Court have been instrumental in shaping the rights of slum dwellers in Delhi: In 2010, in the Sudama Singh & Others vs Government of India & Others case, the court ordered that the government must provide alternative accommodation prior to demolition by any authority.
In 2019, in the Ajay Maken & Others vs Union of India & Others case, the court said that notices have to be served to slum residents before any eviction and that a proper survey of eligible beneficiaries must be carried out to ensure fair resettlement.
Yet, demolitions continue without due process and in violation of court orders, Constitutional provisions and local policies, as Article 14 has reported over the last three years (here, here and here).
Policy Bias
In August 2022, a Delhi High Court ruling overturned its own precedents by using the Delhi slum rehabilitation & relocation policy of 2015 as the legal basis to deny rehabilitation to a large number of forcibly evicted and displaced persons on grounds that their slum settlements do not figure in the official list of 675 eligible slums.
Basing its order on the 2015 notification, the single judge bench of Justice Subramonium Prasad was the first to reject relief claims filed by inhabitants of Shakarpur Colony in 2022-23, with other benches following suit.
The Delhi slum rehabilitation & relocation policy of 2015 was prepared by the DUSIB, the nodal agency for rehabilitating people affected by evictions in Delhi. The policy recognises 675 slums, which are made up of 306,521 smaller bastis, as slums are called locally, and where some 1.5 million people live.
No survey was conducted nor any clarifications provided on how these bastis were identified, but anyone living in bastis that do not fall in this list were deemed ‘encroachers’ post 2015, liable to be evicted at any time.
The DUSIB Act says that notified slums are entitled to alternative housing within a 5-km radius in the eventuality of their homes being demolished, but the government trimmed the list of recognised JJ clusters in 2015, before notifying the new resettlement policy.
According to DUSIB’s 2013-2014 annual report, Delhi had 685 officially recognised slums until 2014. About 10 bastis (each with many smaller slum clusters) were arbitrarily struck off the list that then formed the basis for the 2015 resettlement policy.
As a result, the number of authorised households reduced from 418,282 to 304,188. These 10 derecognised slums, comprising over 100,000 homes, became the main target of Delhi’s controversial demolition drive.
However, studies indicate that the official 2015 jhuggi list may have underestimated the actual slum population of the city.
Courts Side With Govt
The Shakarpur Colony court order generated widespread debate over its impact on fairness and justice.
In the Shakarpur case and in other similar demolition-related rulings, the Delhi High Court did not rule out rehabilitation, instead keeping the door open for evictees to challenge their exclusion from rehabilitation schemes such as the 2015 list.
The onus of showing proof that they were eligible for rehabilitation, including proof of residence before the cut-off dates (2006 for slums and 2015 for houses) was left to evictees who were now faced with navigating a complex and bureaucratic appeals system, most often with no legal aid.
Legal observers said that instead of assessing the merits and demerits of the 2015 policy, the court accepted, without evaluating the impact of eviction, that people living on public land could be evicted at any time without any relief benefits, violating the right to shelter read into Article 21 (protection of life and liberty) by multiple court rulings.
Human rights lawyer Kawalpreet Kaur said that court rulings have increasingly sided with the government line in recent years in cases relating to forced eviction from public land. No questions have been raised by courts about how the 2015 list was compiled.
“The courts do not engage with the broader question of slum dwellers' rights on public land,” Kaur said. “Their only concern has been whether a (slum) settlement appears on the list or not.”
Split Jurisdiction
Lawyer Anupradha Singh, who is representing evictees from Mehrauli in Delhi High Court, said the denial of rehabilitation does not merely amount to technical violations. “... it is an example of systemic repudiation of constitutional rights,” she said.
Singh said the lack of centralised data on slums of the city is the other problem.
At present, DUSIB as well as the several agencies that control land in Delhi, such as the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Public Works Department (PWD) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), maintain separate lists of authorised slum dwellings.
According to the 2011 census, about 10.8% of Delhi’s population lives in slums. An affidavit filed by Kaur on behalf of evicted slum-dwellers in April 2023 in the Supreme Court, in Shakarpur Slum Union Vs DDA & Others, however, said that Delhi had over 6,343 slums as per a survey conducted by the Delhi government in 2012, which are now under DUSIB’s control.
The 65th round of the National Sample Survey (2008-09) conducted by the National Sample Survey Office of the union ministry of statistics and programme implementation pegged the number of slums in Delhi at 3,133 slums, of which 1,058 are notified slums and 2,075 are non-notified slums.
Land-owning agencies are now trying to streamline their lists of slums by adopting the DUSIB’s list of 675 bastis, thus summarily evicting people from slum settlements not included in the list.
No New Survey
Many experts, including HLRN, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), lawyers such as Kawalpreet Kaur and Anupradha Singh, and housing activists such as Nirmal Gorana and Indu Prakash, have pointed out that the 2015 policy was notified without a fresh survey of Delhi’s slum population.
By announcing the 2015 policy notification without such a fresh survey, DUSIB created a new point of gap in data—following the demolition of a slum colony not included in its list, no data is maintained on how many more people are now displaced in Delhi. In the State’s view, these slums did not ‘exist’ in the first place.
In August 2024, the union minister of state for housing & urban affairs, Tokhan Sahu, told the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, citing “available records” on demolitions by various agencies, that only 20,643 slum dwellers were affected due to demolitions in the 2019-2024 period.
The same statement pegged the total number of demolitions at 30,843 demolitions.
These numbers are far removed from HLRN’s study that found more than 290,000 citizens forcibly made homeless in 2022 and 2023 alone. Aishwarya Ayushmaan of HLRN said a list of all evictions documented by HLRN was annexed to their report.
Ayushmaan said the report tracked instances of evictions based on the definition of ‘forced eviction’ provided by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights—“the permanent or temporary removal against the will of individuals, families or communities from their homes or land, which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection”.
Parliamentary records show that as few as 2,642 slum dwellers in Delhi were rehabilitated under the 2015 resettlement policy between 2019 and 2024.
Due Process Violations
Six out of nine demolitions that Land Conflict Watch examined were led by central government agencies—DDA at four sites, Archaeological Survey of India (one site) and the National Disaster Response Force (one site).
These included Bengali Colony in south east Delhi, Shakarpur and the settlement of low-lying brick homes named Kasturba Nagar in north east Delhi; Priyanka Gandhi Camp and Mehrauli, bordering a 200-acre lush park in south Delhi and Gyaspur Basti in south east Delhi.
The Delhi government’s PWD led demolitions in slums near the Dhaula Kuan flyover and Janta Camp near Pragati Maidan, housing labourers who built the capital’s biggest convention venue. At least 130-150 homes were razed, affecting at least 850 people.
Only one of the nine sites—Rangpur Pahadi Basti, stretched out along forest land in South West Delhi—was spared demolition, pending a court decision. Falling under the jurisdiction of the Delhi forest department, this locality had already seen large-scale demolitions in 2014 when 900 homes were razed. The residents of those homes were never rehabilitated.
Different benches of the Delhi High Court have noted that state agencies have not served notice prior to demolition, that notices were pasted only hours or a day before the actual demolition.
Demolitions, in some cases, also took place on weekends when courts remained closed. The court had also noted that demolitions were carried out at odd hours—at 3 am in Priyanka Gandhi Camp, at 6 am in the Dhaula Kuan settlement, when most residents were asleep.
While the Delhi High Court had in some instances issued interim protections to the slum dwellers, and even reprimanded state agencies for violating its own statutory acts, legal observers said these pronouncements came too late to prevent damage. Invariably, the final rulings upheld the demolition.
With allegations of due process violations rising, the Supreme Court had in November 2024 laid down procedures for state agencies to follow on a “pan-India basis”.
While considering a suo motu case on demolitions in Uttar Pradesh, the Supreme Court said that officials cannot take “arbitrary and excessive” measures to forcibly evict people.
“If the demolition is found to be in violation of the orders of this Court, the officer/officers concerned will be held responsible for restitution of the demolished property at his/their personal cost in addition to payment of damages,” the court said.
Bulldozer Justice
In light of the Supreme Court order quoted above, Article 14 tracked the developments leading up to demolition of Gyaspur Basti, where more than 100 homes were bulldozed in 2022.
The DDA had razed 30 of the 100 homes by only orally informing the residents. The Delhi High Court stayed the demolition, but the DDA returned a week later to demolish more homes, defying the court order.
While disposing of the case, a single judge bench of Justice Sachin Datta said that a bamboo park, on a 15-hectare plot on the Yamuna floodplains in East Delhi, was part of the compensatory afforestation plan to offset the felling of 35,000 trees for the construction of the Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transport System.
The judge, while dismissing the petition, observed that “even if the petitioners have argued from a position of sympathy, and even if justified, it cannot be allowed to turn colonies developed by the government into a slum.”
A probe into the demolitions at Priyanka Gandhi Camp, a basti behind diplomatic enclaves and embassies, threw up another surprise—this colony appeared in an ‘additional list’ of 82 bastis. This list emerged in DUSIB’s internal documents and was acknowledged in court filings.
While DUSIB said that these 82 bastis “do not enjoy the same rights” as the 675 notified bastis”, the high court ordered for eligibility reassessment. By then, 97 homes had already been destroyed to make way for setting up, ironically, the National Disaster Management & Restoration Centre.
Satellite Imagery Drawbacks
Singh said the court’s reliance on Google Earth images rather than on live testimonials to establish the existence of colonies posed a challenge.
In the case of Gyaspur Basti, for instance, residents claimed to have been living in the area since 1995. “But the courts used images from 2004 and 2006 to decide that they have not been living in the area since 2006,” Singh said.
As a respite from the demolitions, the Delhi High Court had ordered the government to shift the slum inhabitants to shelter homes or temporary shelters.
But the court orders for relocating entire populations from several city sites came at a time when the government, along with meeting its targets for demolishing unauthorised slums, was simultaneously razing shelter homes.
Urban affairs researcher and activist Aravind Unni said while it is, in principle, considered progressive for a state agency to have a formal policy on slum rehabilitation, in practice, policy loopholes have been left unaddressed. “… even when alternative housing is offered, it often lacks basic services, transport, or infrastructure, making it unlivable,” he said.
The quiet removal of 82 slums from DUSIB’s site, erasing communities from official protection, and the use of GIS mapping as a planning tool without field verification or citizens’ participation are evidence of the policy being used as a tool for exclusion, he said.
“The rehabilitation policy needs urgent revision starting with land reservations for economically weaker groups and an institutional change to address better coordination between land-owning bodies like DDA and DUSIB,” Unni said.
“Informal settlements must be recognised, surveyed, and planned as legitimate parts of the city.”
Exclusionary Housing Rules
The paradox, said Kaur, is that while evictees are denied alternative housing, they also cannot access other government housing schemes.
In 2015, the Narendra Modi government introduced the ‘Housing for all by 2024’, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–Urban (PMAY-U) scheme. About 29,976 units were built in Delhi between 2019 and 2024.
But eligibility of this scheme is tied to owning a clear land title and having already been living in a pucca or permanent house. Many evictees could thus not qualify despite possessing water bills, electricity bills and voter cards, said Kaur.
Kaur said a legal tussle was underway over built housing capacity between MoHUA, which wants to rent them out to urban migrants under the 2020 Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) scheme, and the DUSIB, which wants such housing for rehabilitation.
The disputed dwelling units were built more than a decade ago under a previous scheme: the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Many are poorly constructed and located in inhabitable places, she said in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court.
According to Kaur, temporary shelters do not constitute permanent resettlement and the government has rarely been held accountable for failing to provide adequate housing.
She said, “Rather than view rehabilitation policies as tools for dignified resettlement, courts have narrowed its scope by framing these settlements as illegal occupation.”
(Nayla Khwaja is a New Delhi-based independent journalist and researcher with Land Conflict Watch.)
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