The Ground Beneath Our Feet

THIS IS A STORY OF DELHI NO ONE HAS EVER TOLD YOU. IT COULD BE ANY OTHER INDIAN CITY. TRIPTI LAHIRI EXPOSES A BREWING NIGHTMARE

Bulldozed Nearly 3 lakh people were displaced in the 2006 demolition of the Yamuna Pushta slums Photo: UZMA MOHSIN

CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known.

“I was born and brought up in Delhi,” says Shakia Khan, 50. “My father worked on the roads. He used to say, ‘Beta, I have built the streets of Delhi.’”

“I was born and brought up in Delhi,” says Shakia Khan, 50. “My father worked on the roads. He used to say, ‘Beta, I have built the streets of Delhi.’”

But the roads leading to where his daughter now shares a one-room shack with her son and daughter-in-law would be utterly alien to Ahmed Raza. Bawana, in Delhi’s far northwest, is a raw shanty set amidst villages being swallowed by Delhi’s steady outward creep. Like Shakia, tens of thousands of people have been sent in the past decade to shantytowns on Delhi’s urban frontiers as part of the city’s biggest slum clearance efforts in 30 years. In these shanties, five, six, sometimes 10 people crowd into slender brick homes, each about the size of a south Delhi bathroom. One glimpse of these colossal new outposts, where jumbles of thatched and mud-plastered huts house the newest arrivals, makes it clear that to say ‘Delhi has a housing shortage’ is putting it delicately. When it comes to housing, what Delhi has is a famine.

Barring Dhaka, India’s Capital is the fastest growing megacity in the world, a harbour in a sea of poverty. Multitudes swarm here because this is where the money is — Indian cities produce almost two-thirds of the country’s wealth. Delhi is presently adding 5,00,000 people a year, almost equally through birth and migration, and present estimates show no imminent decline in the numbers. Within a decade, Delhi will add more people each year than swelled the city at Partition.

Unsurprisingly, less than a quarter of Delhi’s estimated 1.7 crore people live in neighbourhoods that follow zoning and building laws. In recent years, the chaos of this ad-hoc city has sparked increased agitation. Courts have issued flurries of diktats in an attempt to stamp order onto its growth. In 2006, Delhi had to call in paramilitary police when, in a short-lived fit of zoning enthusiasm, it decided to try and enforce its laws. But those who run the Capital say they are now serious about transforming this city of squatters.

Unfortunately, one of the great hurdles to solving the housing problem — or any problem in India, really — is assessing exactly how big the problem is.

The 2001 census put Delhi’s shortage at 1,60,000 homes, but when India’s construction statistics agency, the National Building Organisation (NBO), looked at the same numbers, it said the shortfall was at least three times that. Two years ago, economist Amitabh Kundu, Dean of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Social Sciences, headed a committee that decided that India’s cities need 2.47 crore homes, although this too is probably an underestimate. Delhi, they said, is now short by over 10 lakh homes — and counting.

Narrow choices Sewer meets street in a Bawana JJ colony as a hawker makes his way Photo: VIJAY PANDEY

If shanties are the housing shortage made visible, it ought to be fairly easy to figure out the number of people affected by all these missing homes. Except the last proper door-to-door survey of Delhi’s shanties, which found 13 lakh people, took place 20 years ago. Twelve years later, the National Sample Survey Organisation put out numbers that seemed to show the squatter population had only increased by a few lakh. And the main body working in slums, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, believes 30 lakh people — almost one out of five people in this city — live in shanties. It doesn’t seem very sure why it believes that, though.

“It may be clarified here that no authentic door-to-door survey to ascertain the slum population has been conducted by the department,” the agency cautions on its website. “These are just projected figures of population based on purely rough assessment.”

It’s enough to make a fact-hungry bureaucrat despair. “Data is a big problem,” says Dharampal S Negi, Director of the NBO, a soft-spoken man who laments the fact that many civil service officers consider data collection a task for those who have fallen severely afoul of their superiors. “How can you base policy on some hypothetical thing? Everything targeted will be wrong.”

It should be reassuring, then, when it sometimes sounds and looks like cement mixers and bricklayers are at work on every block of Delhi. If it is actually short by 10 lakh homes, such round-the-clock construction is what you’d need to make any dent in that number. The Master Plan prepared for the city in 2007 says 1.5 lakh new units a year need to be built by 2021. “We have a shortfall of 50,000 units a year, which we need to build to catch up with the backlog — and we’re not even talking about catering to the new population,” says Jagan Shah, Dean of the Sushant School of Architecture, set up by the Ansal real estate group. “It’s staggering.”

But New Delhi is far from the first city to be overwhelmed by its popularity since the Industrial Age picked up steam. Once there was another teeming city on the banks of another filthy river whose government officials too despaired at its slums. The word “slum” first appeared in print there, in a dictionary of slang produced by one of the city’s residents in 1812. As hundreds of thousands of people flocked there every decade, fleeing a feudal countryside, more than one family crowded into a single room. That city was London.

IN ANOTHER great metropolis, frequent fires in slums in the spring of 1934 led a business reporter to examine the city’s claustrophobic chawls. “In these plague spots live some 1.5 million people,” wrote the Time reporter. “When one block was recently razed, the only sanitary facility discovered was a row of holes in a board.” A former slum commissioner told him that complete slum clearance would take 250 years. That city was New York.

The great cities of the future may one day all lie in the East, but Indian cities still look West for inspiration. All those who wish this dishevelled, paan-stained city were more like New York, London, or Paris should take heart, then. New Delhi is a lot like them — give or take a century or two. And all of these cities exhibited the same inclination in the face of an overwhelming problem: Throw everything out and start afresh. One might call this the “clean slate” school of urban planning, which believes that a better city rises from the rubble left behind in the wake of bulldozers. In London, road widening and the construction of the railways 150 years ago tore out some of the largest slums. “In the enthusiasm for the ‘beautification’ of London, the hardships accruing to the evicted tended to be neglected,” wrote historian Anthony S Wohl in The Eternal Slum, an account of 19th century housing reform.

DELHI THE INDIAN CAPITAL, LIKE LONDON, HAS EXHIBITED THE SAME INCLINATION IN THE FACE OF AN OVERWHELMING PROBLEM: THROW EVERYTHING OUT AND START AFRESH. THE ‘CLEAN SLATE’ SCHOOL OF THOUGHT BELIEVES THAT A BETTER CITY RISES FROM THE RUBBLE LEFT BEHIND BY A BULLDOZER. BUT ANY MAJOR NEW URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVES SERVICES AND YET ADDRESSES THE ISSUE OF WHO GETS TO LIVE WHERE, ONLY BY ACCIDENT	NEW YORK FREQUENT FIRES IN THE SPRING OF 1934 PROMPTED A JOURNALIST TO EXAMINE THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC ‘PLAGUE SPOTS’ OF THE CITY IN WHICH CLOSE TO 1.5 MILLION PEOPLE LIVED. ‘WHEN ONE BLOCK WAS RECENTLY RAZED, THE ONLY SANITARY FACILITY DISCOVERED WAS A ROW OF HOLES IN THE BOARD,” WROTE THE JOURNALIST. A FORMER SLUM COMMISSIONER ESTIMATED THAT IT WOULD TAKE 250 YEARS TO CLEAR NEW YORK OF ALL ITS SLUMS	LONDON LONDON FACED THE SAME PROBLEM AS DELHI IN THE EARLY 1800S WHEN THE WORD ‘SLUM’ FIRST CAME TO DESCRIBE THE LIVING CONDITIONS OF THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS WHO FLOCKED TO THE CITY. THE ROAD WIDENING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE RAILWAYS 150 YEARS AGO TORE OUT SOME OF THE LARGEST SLUMS IN THE CITY. LONDON SOLVED THE PROBLEM OF ADDITIONAL HOUSING BY IGNORING THE HARDSHIPS OF THOSE IT EVICTED

As in Victorian London so in postmillennial Delhi. But while major new urban infrastructure improves how a city works, it doesn’t address the issue of who gets to live where. The basic problem of rapid urbanisation, coupled with a high birth rate, is that the large pool of people in cities keeps wages low while land prices shoot up. Urban improvements can make the problem worse, since they require land too and because new and improved cities often come with new and improved rents. The sobering lesson from the history of some of the world’s loveliest cities is that there is usually a price to be paid for turning medieval cities into modern ones and it is often the poor who pay that price.

GOVERNMENTS, EVEN laissez-faire, market-loving ones, have often tried to fix this problem by building housing themselves. However, it is probably no coincidence that the names for what they built — council housing, the projects, banlieues — are pretty much epithets today. Many countries have since tried to figure out better ways of nudging private firms into building for poor people; because only in rare circumstances do governments do a good job of building or maintaining housing on their own.

Delhi is increasingly inclined to agree. “It can’t be the government’s sole responsibility to provide all housing,” says Rakesh Mehta, Delhi’s Chief Secretary. “The developer has to do his part of the job.”

That marks a real change for officials whose approach to housing was shaped by the cataclysm of Partition. Then, in just years, the Capital’s under-10-lakh population doubled. Many newcomers arrived with nothing but bundles of belongings. Delhi coped pretty well with this deluge by developing the land bank it inherited from the British and distributing plots to Partition refugees. It was a tall order for the planners of any city, particularly one so new and poor. After that first heroic effort, the exhausted city has perhaps never fully recovered.

Applying the lessons of that time to the future, the government went on to acquire vast swathes of farmland for the new planning and building agency that was put in charge of housing the city 50 years ago. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) became Delhi’s biggest landlord, coming to hold more than a fifth of the city’s almost 1,500 square kilometres. On that land, the agency, virtually the city’s only real estate developer for decades, built an average of just 8,000 flats a year, often falling short of its annual building plans. For most of this decade, the authority missed its targets by between 17 and 80 percent and its completion rate sometimes dipped as low as 10 percent for people below the poverty line. When it came to starting new housing, it did even worse. Between 2006 and 2007, they didn’t begin work on even one of the 18,000 new flats planned for the city’s poorest families.

The DDA’s spokeswoman says the agency does not grant one-on-one interviews to journalists. Written queries about the persistent shortfalls were never answered. But others in the government admit there were problems. “They have to find a balance between the high-income people, where they can make money and compensate in the other category. That requires a lot of balancing,” says Union Urban Development Secretary M Ramachandran, whose ministry — and not the Delhi Government — oversees the DDA. “If it had worked well, probably this much of slums would not have come up.”

But lengthy land acquisition disputes with village councils slowed the agency’s building plans. Compounding the problem, the agency distributed the majority of the land it had to rich people and encouraged them to use it extravagantly through its zoning rules, which is why much of Delhi resembles a suburb, all detached houses and yards. The top 10 percent of the richest families got about 60 percent of the city’s residential land, according to the libertarian Centre for Civil Society (CCS) think tank.

THE ACROSS-THE-BOARD shortage of built housing meant rich families took their own share of government flats as well as ones meant for middle-class families. So middle-class families moved into housing meant for the poor. In any case, without mortgages, even the DDA’s cheapest flats were out of reach of the families they were built for. Delhi became a city where most of the housing was built not by the government or by developers, but by individual families. Those who had the money broke strict laws about the use of agricultural land and built homes on land bought from farmers, creating “unauthorised colonies,” some of which are now being legalised. Poor families, meanwhile, built houses on public land.

Then, in June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared Emergency. During the next two years — and particularly in 1976, the year India was awarded the right to host the 1982 Asian Games — city officials uprooted and relocated at least 7 lakh squatters, sterilizing many of them along the way. In the decade that followed, shanties experienced relative calm as a backlash against the Emergency’s authoritarianism led the city to turn away from large-scale demolition of new slums. Meanwhile the housing shortage continued, prompting more and more people to squat.

PHOTOS: VIJAY PANDEY
‘I tried hard to find a teacher but there is nothing here’ RESHMA (in green) with her mother and brother in their house in Bawana. Reshma, 13, wants to work for one of India’s private airlines but is still looking for an English tutor to realise her dream	‘My father used to say, beta, I built the streets of Delhi’ SHAKIA KHAN with her grandson outside her one-room shack. Shakia grew up in Delhi where her father, a small-time wrestler had migrated to from UP. The city has pushed her to its fringes	‘I borrowed five here, ten there to build my own house ’ MUTHULAKSHMI with her daughter and son. She paid upto 60% in annual interest on a complex set of loans from neighbours and friends, sometimes pawning her jewellery, to buy two grimy rooms

In the eighties, Raumuni, 63, was making about Rs 65 for each of the handful of East Delhi apartments she cleaned, while rent for a room nearby cost Rs 100 to Rs 200. A woman she worked for suggested that the Tamil migrant take over one of the huts vacated by construction workers who had finished building an English-language private school next door. For the next 20 years, she lived on a pavement hedged by East Delhi’s gated housing complexes, fetching drinking water from the homes she worked in. Over time, the government gave the families there electricity. To remind them where the largesse came from, the slum was named Rajiv Camp.

FAMILIES WHO made it out of slums sometimes fell back in. Irshad Khan, a vegetable seller, was among thousands of families who were given plots in 26 desolate new residential areas on the borders of the city in the 1970s. When Shakia Raza, who had grown up in the shanties of Old Delhi and the riverbed, married him, she lived in a brick house for the first time in her life. But after only a decade, Irshad developed a heart problem. Unable to cover both his medicines and their living expenses, the family, who had seven children by then, violated the terms of their license and sold their two-room home. “My husband told me not to waste money trying to treat him,” says Shakia Khan, a slim woman with a hoarse voice. “But my heart wouldn’t listen.” The family moved to the Yamuna riverbed, where they had two more children.

In spite of the large numbers of people affected by the housing shortage, the debate over what to do about the mushrooming shanties was, for a long time, confined to officials. But as liberalisation spread, a lot of other people started to want — and expect — a say too. Among the first to do so was a group of people represented by a body called the Ashok Vihar Residents Sufferers Association.

In 1990, these north Delhi residents sued the government over some missing toilets. They told the court that thousands of squatters were using a park near their homes as a public toilet. The daughters of Ashok Vihar could not come to their balconies for a breath of fresh air without being assaulted by the sight of the bare bottoms of men answering the call of nature. “It was a horrible scene,” said Krishan Kaul Manchanda, 62, then the president of the association. “If, every time you opened your front door you saw a man shitting or pissing, would you feel things were being managed properly?”

At first, the association’s demands were modest: Asking the court to force the city to keep its pledge to install a public toilet block by the slum. Nine years and many promises later, things were as smelly as ever. So the Ashok Vihar residents asked the court to reopen the case and their predicament came to represent one side of the hundreds of urban development cases that hit the courts in the 1990s as the number of squatters in Delhi surged.

Middle-class residents’ groups who were upset by the squalor of their surroundings and saw the removal of the slums as the solution filed a lot of the cases. On the other side of this courtumpired class warfare were the squatters. By this time, more than 20 lakh of the city’s poorest people were squashed into shanties on just half a percent of the city’s area, mostly on DDA land, making the agency the city’s biggest slumlord.

In 2002, the Delhi High Court ordered most of the squatters evicted and, in a separate decision the same year, also tossed out the city’s compensation policy: licensing tiny plots of land on its outskirts to the evicted. Echoing the words of the New York official, the judge noted that were he to allow the government to continue this practice, it would take 272 years to move everyone.

The court relied heavily on a 2000 opinion in a case about garbage disposal that blamed shanty residents for the dirtiness of the city and then — though they were not the subject of that litigation — hammered the first nail in the compensation policy by comparing squatters to thieves. “Rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternate site is like giving reward to a pickpocket,” wrote Justice BN Kirpal in Almitra Patel vs Union of India.

Some lawyers wonder why the judges aren’t as critical of city authorities. “The most illegal in all this has been the DDA but the DDA has never been held to account,” says Usha Ramanathan, a lecturer at the Indian Law Institute who writes about housing rights and poverty. “When an agency acquires vast swathes of land for planned development but does not do so, why is that not illegal?”

Since the judgments, perhaps 5 lakh have seen their homes bulldozed as police looked on. In echoes of the 1970s, the demolitions picked up speed in 2004, a year after Delhi was awarded the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Perhaps 2 lakh people were evicted from the riverbed alone. After the bulldozers left, families frantically combed again and again through piles of bricks that once were homes. Others guarded forlorn bundles of belongings in scenes eerily reminiscent of those India sees after a natural disaster or riot.

The Supreme Court allowed the city to continue licensing plots to eligible squatters as it mulled over the policy’s legality, a deliberation that has lasted seven years so far. Before and during the demolitions, city officials fanned out in slums to separate those with documentary proof of having lived here before 1998 – from those without such proof. When the DDA and MCD surveyors came to Shakia Khan’s door in the Yamuna Pushta’s drummers’ colony, she had nothing. She didn’t have a ration card, that most important piece of paper. “My husband ran around a lot for it,” says Shakia. “We were always told it would come in a day or two.”

Joint family Shakia with her daughters, daughter-in-law and grandchildren

HER OTHER documents were lost months earlier in a blaze, a frequent occurrence among houses of straw. As news of the impending demolitions spread, she began putting the earnings from her job in a denim factory towards a plot of land in East Delhi’s Khajuri neighbourhood. Her son urged her to take the family’s life savings of two lakh rupees and build a house as well. “When the jhuggis broke, my son said, ‘Ammi, we did well for ourselves. Even if we don’t get a plot, we’ll have somewhere to live’” says Shakia.

Many of the other ineligible families may have tried to rent elsewhere in the city, but the demolished slums took a lot of the city’s cheapest rental housing with them. New low-income areas like Bawana don’t make up for the loss, since renting is forbidden in resettlement colonies – although it happens anyway. “If you can afford to pay only 1,000 rupees, there are not many proper places you can go,” says Parth J Shah, head of CCS. The government has not attempted to find out where the thousands of ineligible families finally end up. “Once a cluster breaks, they resettle maybe 300 out of 500,” says an officer with the MCD’s Slum Wing who cannot be identified since he is not authorised to speak to the press. “The remaining ones keep after you like ghosts haunting you for a plot.”

After Rajiv Camp was torn down, the 80-odd families lived atop rubble for a week until officials promised they would get plots elsewhere very soon. Raimuni moved in with her younger daughter, Uttarapathi Vijia, 37, who had married a man whose parents had also been given a plot during the Emergency. “It was practically jungle then,” says Vijia, of her in-laws’ first impression of Trilokpuri, one echoed by most people in new resettlement areas.

TRILOKPURI, ONCE known mainly for being the scene of some of the worst anti-Sikh riots in 1984, is a bustling lower-middle-class neighbourhood now, part of the city proper. Vijia’s four sons go to school and goof around practising Kollywood dance moves when they’re home. Their mother, who was an ayah at their age, is a banker of sorts to her neighbours, running savings committees that help people amass money for big expenses. On committee meeting evenings, she changes into a fresh sari, often pink, before she takes out the ledger that records deposits. This Diwali, the family bought an LG refrigerator and an electric bicycle for her to get to and from her cooking and cleaning jobs.

“I don’t know how I got so lucky,” says Vijia, a philosophical woman who smiles readily. Four years on, Raimuni still lives with Vijia. A mini glass-fronted mall with a Cafe Coffee Day outlet has come up where Raimuni used to live, but she still hasn’t got any compensation. In May, Murugan Chettiar, Vijia’s nephew, filed an information quest with the DDA to find out what was happening. The response the 21-year-old got was polite bureaucratese. “The matter is under process and pending for some administrative reason,” said the letter. “As soon as the issue of allotment is finalised the necessary action shall be initiated.”

Part of the delay may be because Delhi is winding up the almost 50-year-old resettlement policy, plagued for years by the charge that the beneficiaries sell their plots to brokers or better-off families. Two years ago, the CBI held several municipal slum officials on the suspicion that they were running a scam to give the plots to real estate brokers, an astonishingly unregulated profession in a land famed for “license Raj.” The Delhi Government now says it will house squatters in apartment blocks, and that it will build 2 lakh flats over the next decade. It plans to get around the resale problem by borrowing the construction money and having families pay monthly instalments towards eventual ownership directly to the lender, so the bank will have to keep track of illegal transfers.

Open kitchen Crammed tenements push cooking out on to the street

The government will still have to get around the land issues that have plagued other housing projects. By January, the Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation will have finished only 15,000 of the 50,000 Rs 3 lakh flats it began building in 2007 as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission because several of their sites have been tied up in land disputes with village councils.

The DDA, meanwhile, says it will redevelop over 20 slums within Delhi into a mix of high-rise public housing and commercial space with the help of private developers. In 2006, a subsidiary of the Indiabulls Group, which counts Lakshmi Mittal, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley among its investors, won the reported Rs 440 crore bid to redevelop one of the bigger slums, near the Okhla Industrial Area in south Delhi. But the project — meant to be a model for the rest — is now on hold because of “site problems”. Recent news reports say the developer wants to drop out and get its cash back. Neither the DDA nor the private developer responded to queries.

In any case, housing activists are wondering how the Indian government will deal with the issue that brought down — literally — public high-rises in America. “The projects started being torn down in the 1960s and 1970s because you had maintenance problems,” says architect Shah. “Lights would go off and they wouldn’t be replaced, so you had dark corridors. The moment you have a dark corridor, it’s a dangerous corridor. When services break down, they create unsafe buildings.”

For a 300-square-foot apartment in an elevator building, the maintenance costs could approach Rs 500 a month, on top of what the family might be paying in loan instalments.

Others worry that just like the resettlement colonies, the new flats will be in desolate areas, far from work. Urban experts say that the city needs to find a way to insert at least some new low-cost housing into its fabric – and a lot more of it needs to be rental. “We need scale. so you’re housing 10,000 people together, you’re creating cities of the poor,” says Rakhi Mehra, founder of the yearold start-up Micro Home Solutions. “Let’s look at 200, 250-unit places or a half-acre or acre plot of land. Get your scale by a number of such little pockets.”

In 2004, when the Hazards Centre looked at 11 slums slated to be demolished, they found that there was often vacant land nearby — some of it already zoned for residential use — where residents, who depended on nearby jobs, could have been re-housed. Instead, they were moved to places like Bawana. Five years on, the “industrial estate” in Bawana isn’t fully occupied, the wages there are low, and the work is unsafe. Many people in Bawana spend a third of their monthly salaries commuting to the city and back each day. The nearest metro stop — Rithala — is an hour-long bone-rattling bus ride away, past the Jat village where swarms of real estate traffickers have set up shop, past empty swathes of numbered sections of the mini-city of Rohini, where lone buildings stand like dominoes waiting to be knocked over.

Shakia Khan’s older son gets up at 4 am to make it in time to the Matia Mahal shop in Old Delhi where he makes kajal boxes for Rs 250 a day. The 26-year-old worked on Eid too, reluctant to miss out on a day’s work that could go towards supporting his wife, his mother and his youngest sister. The four share a 10-by- 13 foot room for which the family pays Rs 400 a month. Shakia says she didn’t want her daughters to repeat her mistake of having nine children. But her two oldest, Baby, 35, and Gulshan, 30, already have four children each. One of Shakia’s younger daughters, Rahima, 22, dropped out of school when the slum broke and now has a toddler. Shahnaz, 15, the youngest will probably be married in a year or two.

The large numbers of very small children playing in the muddy streets is one of the most striking things about this sad neighbourhood. And yet, you will find no five-rupee bars of chocolate in the shops here. No one can afford it.

Little lives A girl sits atop her Bawana house built with funds provided by NGOs

AFTER TRACKING more than 2,500 families in Bawana over two years, researchers Gautam Bhan and Kalyani Menon-Sen reported that most families saw their incomes go down by at least 20 percent. Years’ worth of family savings were wiped out and many families sold bicycles, fans, even mattresses to raise the money to pay for the plots and new shacks, according to their book Swept Off the Map. Far from being free, as the court has said, the families pay to license the land at what it cost the government. The government’s share of resettlement expenses is supposed to go towards providing services in the area, but families struggle for power, water and clean toilets years after they arrive. In one resettlement colony, electricity arrived four years after 15,000 families were moved there. For a family of five, pay-per-use toilet and washing charges add up to at least Rs 300 a month. That explains why Bawana’s perimeter is paved with coiled blobs and flattened cakes of human waste.

Those who can afford to, stick it out. Those who can’t, sell and move closer to jobs. Even after spending their own money to build new houses, families here can count on nothing. In older resettlement colonies like Trilokpuri, the government gave out long-term licenses, but now families pay for the right to live there for just five to 10 years. In response to an RTI request asking what options families have once the licenses expire, the DDA replied, “There is no policy.”

PARENTS HERE understand their children might have to temper their dreams, even if they don’t tell them that directly. Shakia’s granddaughter, Reshma, 13, has always wanted to work for one of India’s new private airlines. Although they could scarcely afford it, Reshma’s parents said they would pay for English classes if she found a tutor in Bawana. “I tried and tried to find something,” says Reshma. “There’s nothing here.”

In the space of just five years, the government managed to turn what was as close to a clean slate as you could get in a city into a dismal cross between a city slum and suburban ghetto. That’s why many are hoping that the market — which thrust cheap phones into the hands of people waiting endlessly for government landlines — can do the same for housing. That hasn’t happened. Homes built by private developers sell for at least 40 times Delhi’s average annual income of Rs 80,000.

“Ideally, the price of any dwelling unit should not be more than four to five times that number,” says Sachin Sandhir, who heads the India arm of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, a UK-based association of property professionals.

In the suburb of Gurgaon, which was meant to take some of the heat of Delhi, little housing for service workers has been built alongside the towering condos that employ so many of them. In any case, private developers don’t build very large amounts of housing. In the first six months of this year, developers in the Delhi metropolitan area, which includes Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida, built around 4,400 homes, according to research from real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj. But as customers for marbleswathed condos vanished once the global economic crisis began to be felt in India, some firms began looking at families a lot lower down the food chain. And there are a lot of them. In Delhi, half of all families live on Rs 5,000 a month or less.

In May, the Tata Housing Development Company announced it would sell apartments for Rs 6 lakh outside Mumbai. Brotin Banerjee, who heads the firm, says they plan to bring the Shubha Griha homes to Delhi if the company can repeat the land arrangement they made in Boisar. Rather than buying the land outright, the owner shares in the profits, which Banerjee declined to spell out though he says the firm expects a “healthy margin”. “People are already building at Rs 1,000, Rs 1,200 a square foot,” says Ashish Karamchandani, who heads global consultant Monitor Group’s social entrepreneurship arm, which has begun a series of low-cost housing projects around Mumbai and Ahmedabad. “The only thing we’re doing is building smaller houses.”

Karamchandani says that one of the biggest problems in convincing developers to build for lower-income families is the fact that they know many of their potential customers will never get financing. Unlike in the United States, where sub-prime loans helped people buy more house than they could actually afford, here people buy a lot less house than they should be buying, because of having to rely only on their own savings. When K Muthulakshmi, 33, decided to buy the house she was renting, she didn’t bother going to a bank. She went to her neighbour, Vijia, who helped Muthulakshmi, a tailor, put together a complex chain of financing, that involved temporarily pawning some of her jewellery and taking several very personal loans.

“I borrowed five here, 10 there, 25,000 rupees from one,” says Muthulakshmi, who paid her Trilokpuri neighbours back on monthly interest terms that totalled as much as 60 percent a year in some cases. She paid off her loans in five years. The house she spent Rs 2.5 lakh on is two grimy rooms with plaster shedding from the walls. Her children find it so embarrassing they won’t invite their friends over. “They’ve never lived in a jhuggi,” says Muthulakshmi, a tall woman who plans to save for the next two years to completely rebuild the house. But slowly, firms are trying to lend to people like her.

THE MUMBAI-BASED Micro Housing Finance Corporation, which the Monitor Group helped start, has lent to a street food hawker, a beautician, a machine operator, a maid and a hotel waiter, spending time with each one to verify their cash flow. It’s expensive and time-consuming, but the group cut down costs by lending to the buyers of one project at a time, in this case, the Tata homes. That limited the amount of time they spent on title checks, the single biggest deterrent to home lending in India, where titles are frequently disputed.

A few months after Shakia Khan and her family moved to their new home in Khajuri, a man named Mehboob showed up. He would bang on the door, often accompanied by a gang of friends, insisting the plot was his. Shakia was surprised. The papers the dealer had showed her when she was looking at the plot appeared legitimate to her.

“He told me that after I completed all the instalment payments, the papers would be made over in my name,” says Shakia, who has never been to school. One day, Mehboob and his friends barged into the house, packed up all her stuff and dropped it off at the broker’s home. The broker refunded her the Rs 35,000 she had paid him towards the Rs 50,000 plot, but gave her nothing towards the money she had spent on building the new home. A few months later, unable to afford Khajuri rents, the family moved to Bawana.

Although they don’t know it, Muthulakshmi and Vijia have also spent their money on homes they don’t actually own outright. The Delhi Government is still waiting for final word on how to handle property rights in resettlement neighbourhoods, where real ownership remains with the government and sales are illegal but happen all the time. The system doesn’t distinguish between those who sell on the spot and those who want to sell after years of investment into their new neighbourhoods. This penalises families who play by the rules.

Vijia and her husband occasionally talk about selling the three-floor house that the family built over decades and putting the money towards a new home in a nicer neighbourhood. Sometimes, when the system actually works, what you get is social mobility.

But the Delhi High Court has barred the government from granting the resettled families title. And the Supreme Court is still deciding what exactly the city owes its past, present and future squatters. “Unless we are able to overcome that judgement, there’s no question of giving them titles,” says Delhi Chief Secretary Mehta. The courts might have the final say, but there’s not a whole lot all the court orders in the world can do to “clean up” this city until Delhi really starts building those missing one million homes.

Ashok Vihar is a lesson in the limits of court-directed urban development. Almost two decades after the Ashok Vihar neighbourhood association first went to court, the middle-class residents and the squatters now share the park, in a manner of speaking. The people who live in the nice houses go for strolls in the park from time to time. And in the morning or late at night, a few hundred squatters still use the park as a toilet. “It’s not the fault of the jhuggiwala,” says Manchanda. “He needs some place or the other.”

(Tripti Lahiri is a Delhi-based freelance journalist interested in urbanisation)