RESETTLEMENT
Rewarding pickpockets?
‘For the ordinary people
of India, resettlement happens rarely, it happens in lieu of settlement, and it happens as
a favour’ writes Gita Dewan Verma, an urban planner and author of the book Slumming
India, a chronicle of slums and their saviours. Some extracts from her remarkable book
that exposes the chaotic planning that creates slums.
 Mandarins of nation building design projects for greater common
good and, say, villagers get labeled Project Affected Persons (PAPs) requiring
resettlement. As the earthmovers and hammers and chisels of ‘development’ redraw
the maps that society and nature have drawn, Resettlement and Rehabilitation is meant to
soften the blows.
Cities are not built over slums. Slums
grow in cities. The genesis (but only the genesis) of slums lies mainly (but not
exclusively) in work-seeking migration from rural areas. In a sense those who come to
cities are already Project Affected Persons of lopsided rural development. Unsettled from
their villages they come to the city in the hope of becoming (re-) settled, but end up
remaining unsettled in slums for years, even generations, watching urban development pass
them by. How can then one speak of resettling those who have not quite settled?
Willingness to
resettle slum dwellers has the flavour of a favour. It implies that the state is willing
to condone slum dwellers for having encroached on land meant for other (others’?)
public purposes and even give them a puny place to live (though it may seem like
‘rewarding a pickpocket’).
Sensitive
resettlement
Finally, let us consider a real urban resettlement – one meant for the well settled
rather than for the never settled – as a case in point to show that at least some
slum saviours do understand sensitive resettlement when it pleases them. This initiative
came from an all-party house committee for accommodation for Lok Sabha Members of
Parliament (MPs). The committee had decided (following flak from the supreme court) that
the MPs who have lost elections must vacate official residences. But in April 2000, after
‘sustained pressure from all parties’, it was decided that unsettling MPs
settled in official housing even after they were no longer MPs was ‘a very harsh
decision’. MPs, after all, ‘have their children in local schools, their families
move here and there is a change of base’ for them. Moreover, on being elected, every
MP ‘thinks he will be in Delhi for the next five years’. But as has been seen in
the past three tenures of the Government, no single House has been completed the full
term’. For that, naturally, one can’t blame the MPs. Accordingly, for
‘humanitarian reasons’, MPs in the parliament housing committee decided that
former MPs must be resettled in Delhi and, in order that they were not unsettled, there
should also be transit accommodation for new MPs.
This would mean that the capital would have
far more Lok Sabha MP houses than the number of Lok Sabha MPs. The Parliamentary committee
picked up 3 hectares of prime land (costing Rs 8 crore), taking care to ensure that it was
in the heart of Delhi so that the honorable MPs would not have to be inconvenienced too
much by having to be driven long distances.
Here then is an example of good practice in
sensitive resettlement for the direct and indirect benefit of those who have been rejected
through due electoral process by the people of India. For the ordinary people of India
(who also have ‘children in local schools’, besides no official cars to
transport them), however, resettlement continues to happen in 12.5 sq. metre plots in some
wilderness just outside the city, it happens rarely, it happens in lieu of settlement, and
it happens as a favour. |
