Life on the streets of Delhi Searching for an identity in a wonderland

What do you do living on the streets of Delhi eating out of a lungar outside a gurudwara. one is still forced to fish out for an identity by the government. this is an everyday struggle for more than seventy percent of the informal workforce living in Delhi. its a question of sustaining himself every day, fighting with government dictats for every service

Jai Singh is the name of the person who is a cobbler and runs a small kiosk outside the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) colony in Ashram. He sits on the pavement and during the night covers his shelter with a tarpaulin as this space also happens to be his home. Jai Singh is a migrant worker from Rajasthan. When asked how he sustains himself, where does he cook his food, and which place he uses to answer nature’s call, he said “Bala Sahib Gurudwara” adjacent to his place.

Perhaps, Jai Singh is fortunate enough to work and stay close to a Gurudwara, but for more than 70 per cent of the informal workforce living in Delhi this is an everyday struggle which is getting all the more challenging. The challenge of housing continuously haunts the working population in Delhi. They cannot rent a space as it is very costly hence are forced to stay in shanty colonies and slums which have developed and swelled over a period of time. This is also attributed to the faulty policy of housing as practiced by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) which built houses predominantly for the middle classes and forgot public housing.

According to the Delhi Government’s own estimates, only 23.7 percent of the city’s population lives in designated planned colonies. The rest live either in completely illegal colonies or settlements that were never authorised for development and hence never planned. The absence of planning thus leads to not just violation of building codes that include space requirements for road and other gird access but also that these settlements are not integrated to the city’s bulk infrastructure delivery system.

Such settlements have been classified and have the following percentage of the population residing in them.

Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (JJC): – 14.8%
Slum designated areas: -19.1 %
Unauthorised colonies:- 5.3 %
Resettlement colonies:- 12.7 %
Regularised unauthorised colonies:- 12.7 %
Rural villages:- 5.3 %
Urban villages:- 6.4%
Planned colonies:- 23.7%

This categorisation is also accepted in the Master Plan of Delhi 2021 where it speaks about the unplanned areas of Delhi.

This form of classification does not just reflect the physical presence of human beings vis-à-vis space; it also signifies the differentiated citizenship developed according to these spaces. It is a form of a system by which the state assigns different levels of services to different categories of citizens based on their tenurial status.

Why is spatial exclusion so wide in a city like Delhi which is also a centre of National governance? Gautam Bhan from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements has stated that spatial exclusion in Delhi in not a product of failed planning but of planning itself. According to him the practice begins at the highest level of state development and is driven by the city’s most powerful agency the DDA. The DDA has the full responsibility for land management and development, including public housing. Successive Master Plans for Delhi issued in 1962, 1990 and 2007 prepared by the DDA have both systematically undersupplied the amount of land notified for urban development and undersupplied the estimated required stock of low cost public housing. Not only has the DDA fallen behind in delivering the number of planned housing units, but also the stock of built housing is skewed dramatically in favour of higher income groups. In the period of 2004-13 only 10 per cent of the houses were designated for the economically weaker sections.

In the absence of public housing there is this huge informal sector that gets developed which does not just construct houses but also brings in new housing space for the poor. The DDA’s failure to develop land and housing has been met by the massive construction of ‘unauthorised’ settlements outside the limits of the plans and occupation of underdeveloped land within the city.

To quote from the Delhi project report this form of policy has led to three important manifestations which are starkly witnessed in and around the city. Jai Singh also is one of those who are forced to work on the pavement and use a Gurudwara for their basic necessities.

There is a clear class bias in the housing provided by the DDA. It was proactive in providing housing for the higher income groups. But for the poorer sections who apparently constitute a majority in the city there has been a failure.
The city has grown with closure and privilege language of the state. Exclusion is quite inherent in the policy planning. Various reports of the DDA speak about its efforts to ‘protect’ the city from unplanned settlements through a vigorous programme of fencing the vacant pockets so that the lands are saved from encroachments.
The overall pattern of investment has favoured the upper-middle-class infrastructure over land development and housing for the poor. One can easily find the widening of the roads, construction of flyovers, etc. for the big guzzlers to run at faster speed but the space of the pedestrians and the cyclists have been squeezed. The latter mode of transport is the primary mode for the informal working class in the city.

Roti, Kapda aur Makaan (food, clothing, and housing) was the slogan of the 70s given by the Congress. A similar slogan was coined by Pakistan’s Peoples party in Pakistan. Both the parties (Congress & PPP) were able to ride these slogans as the need was felt immensely by their population. Not just that, a Hindi Bollywood movie was also produced by Manoj Kumar in 1974 under the same title which became a super hit. However, after four decades of such sloganeering, the challenges of housing remain high and people like Jai Singh continue to live under the tarpaulin shelter on the pavement.