Why Did Central Delhi’s Population Shrink?
Some urban scholars and activists have been arguing that in the last decade the Indian capital saw some of the most massive evictions of low-income squatters since the 1970s—when ousting on a similar scale last took place. Now they have evidence backing them up from an official source: the census.
Noah Seelam/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Slum demolitions are a frequent occurrence in Indian cities. Above, bulldozers tear down a shanty in the southern city of Hyderabad.
According to the new numbers for Delhi, the population in the zone of Central Delhi dropped by over 10% in the last decade. In New Delhi—largely the British-built part of the city—the population shrank by 25%. Everywhere else the population grew by double digits, especially in areas in the west of the city.
“A major reason for the fall in the decadal growth rate is the wide-ranging removal of slum (jhuggi jhopri) clusters from various parts of the city since 2001,” said the report. “Removal of slum clusters existing within the NDMC area is the primary reason for a 25% fall in population in New Delhi district vis-à-vis 2001.”
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The New Delhi Municipal Council, or NDMC, is the municipal authority for the New Delhi zone.
Demolitions are common across all Indian cities, and have taken place in different decades as well. They usually occur when city officials decide to develop land on which a squatter community has arisen. Most Indian cities have a lot of squatter housing because there isn’t enough legally built housing available at affordable prices.
But several developments conspired to lead to the widespread clearing of some of the Indian capital’s most populous slums, including the decades-old settlements on the city’s riverbed, which was once home to hundreds of thousands of people.
Land prices soared in the last two decades, making the public land held by various city agencies much more valuable.
Urban scholars say that two 2002 decisions, in which the Delhi High Court ordered many slums to be removed and also limited the city’s obligations to compensate squatters, made it easier to carry out major evictions.
Then, in 2003, the city won its bid to host the Commonwealth Games, pushing local authorities to promote efforts that would improve the city’s appearance for the visitors expected to descend on New Delhi for the event.
Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Shanty residents protested the razing of Delhi slums in May 2006.
Tens of thousands of huts were razed between 2004 and 2007, and many families had to move unexpectedly to the outskirts of the city where there was little in the way of local jobs. Social activists severely criticized the slum removals, arguing that they made families poorer.
Some families, who had previously been living in brick houses, found themselves in grass huts, since they were unable to immediately undertake the cost of rebuilding. There’s a telling line in the census report, in a description of the city’s count of the homeless:
“Only in one location on the outskirts of the city, there was some disagreement about whether certain persons were to be defined as homeless or not,” said the report. “The persons in question turned out to actually be jhuggi [hut] dwellers and not homeless persons.”
The report added: “About 32,000 families have been shifted to rehabilitation colonies in the North West and South districts as per the data from the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, (DUSIB), but the rest were not eligible for rehabilitation and thus were displaced. It is not known where they may have gone.”
The shrinking of central Delhi—already much less densely populated with its wide roads and sprawling colonial bungalows than the rest of the capital—was at odds with the numbers for the city as a whole. Overall, the population of the national capital grew by more than 20% in the last decade—higher than the national rate of 17.64%. It added almost three million people to reach 16.7 million.
Fuente: India Real Time
