The previous chapter examined thoroughly the legal aspects of urban policies, dealing with management of illegal settlements and regularization. The issue revealed another intricate debate on the recognition of an effective right to the city of millions of slum dwellers. As the legislation and debates have been particularly developed in Brazil, most of our illustrations were from this country’s two major metropolises.

In the present chapter, the focus is directly on qualifying public policies regarding slums, mainly clearance, resettlement and in situ rehabilitation. For this issue, the Indian case offers a fascinating field as these policies are evolving rapidly, depending also on their specific urban context (cf. Chapter 2) and local network of actors and interests, thus providing a wide range of proposals and actions to analyse. Consequently, we shall question the “treatment” of slums in India’s two major metropolises, in order to understand better the similarities or, on the contrary, the divergences between the slum policies implemented in Delhi and Mumbai since the 1950s