EcoHouse Research

Kavita Ramakrishnan

Department of Geography. University of Cambridge

 

Ms Ramakrishnan’s presentation draws our attention to the topic of slum resettlement, which too often is clouded by myths of improved housing and circumstances for the poor. Through a case study of families displaced from the Yamuna Pushta settlements in Delhi to Bawana, a resettlement colony located on the periphery of the city, she challenges the measures deemed beneficial by the government – and instead demonstrates their negative impact on the colony in the subsequent years. In her presentation, Ms Ramakrishnan also addresses the importance of understanding ‘community’ and ‘dispossession’, which impacts how urban scholars and practitioners view both life in the resettlement colony and forced displacement overall. 

 

Approximately 200,000 people were evicted in Delhi during the lead-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games, with the consequent demolition of their homes in then existing slums by the state for the development of mega-event infrastructure and city ‘beautification’ efforts. In the aftermath of this demolition and relocation, Ms Ramakrishnan began her anthropological study, focusing on how residents perceive the city’s future; where they saw their place in it; and how perceptions of this future had impacted their idea of their ‘right to the city’. She explained the residents’ perceptions through metaphors they uttered during interviews, which convey a strong sense of marginalization and disruption of their migrant trajectories. Residents interviewed felt they had more social connections and financial opportunities prior to the eviction. Although state policies envision an improvement in the living standards for the resettled families, the residents felt more isolated and less secure in their new settlement. Additionally, the eviction ruptured long-standing employment, forcing families to sustain themselves through a larger number of underpaying jobs, whilst having the increased financial pressure of commuting long distances to the city and constructing new houses in the colony. Under such pressures and abrupt shifts in their livelihoods, the previously social and financial capital existing in the past slum settlements has been destroyed. 

 

In her case study, Ms Ramakrishnan raises two challenges for thinking through resettlement and conducting research amongst the urban poor. Firstly, she encourages an examination of preconceived notions of ‘community’: During the demolition and eviction process, communities were broken up and people sent to different resettlement colonies. This abrupt change fragmented long-standing social networks and has created a forced ‘community’ where people feel hesitant to trust and mix with others. Secondly, she aims to convey dispossession as an ongoing process across the rural-urban divide: Bawana is geographically as well as metaphorically an in-between space, neither in the village (the original homes of the resettled migrants), nor in the city (the past homes in the slum settlements). The displacement to Bawana is another ‘space’ inhabited by these migrants, albeit in a forced capacity. In conclusion, eviction is not just a movement from the city to the outskirts of the city, but a shattering of the migrant trajectory that connects those resettled from the village to the city to its outskirts.