There are settlements of riverbed cultivators on the Pushta (embankment) along the Yamuna in Delhi. These are connected to a centuries old ridge-river agro-tradition and a most apposite riverbed land use in terms of imperatives of environment and planning law. They have, nevertheless, got caught up in the riverbed encroachment removal drive that is underway in name of heritage and environment and a court order -- typical case of urban data distortions snowballing into development discourse distortions
There are settlements of riverbed cultivators on the Pushta (embankment) along the Yamuna in Delhi. These are connected to a centuries old ridge-river agro-tradition and a most apposite riverbed land use in terms of imperatives of environment and planning law. They have, nevertheless, got caught up in the riverbed encroachment removal drive that is underway in name of heritage and environment and a court order -- typical case of urban data distortions snowballing into development discourse distortions
Thousands of slum families are currently being evicted, purportedly in belated compliance of a court order of March 2003 for clearance of all riverbed encroachments in two months, in the ITO-Salimgarh stretch of Yamuna Pushta (view sketch map). This stretch also has settlements started by families who have been cultivating the riverbed for generations. These are not slums.
In land use terms they are consistent with the statutory Master Plan, which specifies riverbed land use in the category 'agriculture and water body', and with notification by Central Ground Water Authority of the riverbed, whose ground water holds the key to resolving Delhi's water crisis. Their clearance is unjustifiable in law and cannot be connected to the court order for encroachments. If anything, there is a strong case for restoring the riverbed to urban agriculture related uses after clearing all encroachments.
One only has to wander into these settlements to see they are not slums. Their citizens know they are not encroachments. But when I chanced upon them, for the first time on 01.04.04 in course of my Pushta wanderings, more palpable than this knowledge was a crisis of confidence. By then 7000 families had been evicted from ITO-Rajghat Pushta, 6000 in the previous fortnight, and miles of debris had taken its toll. Those proudly telling me about hundred years of Pushta had also gone and made the incongruous beggarly demand for mere compensation for tomatoes, etc, and some were even beginning to evacuate.
They seemed, at once, resigned to a lost identity and loathe to losing it. What helped restore a modicum of confidence, oddly, was the very ham-handedness that had eroded it. On 09.04.04 several cultivators' homesteads were demolished, without notice or resettlement.
This incensed people enough to write to demand explanation for the 'mistake'. The demand for restoration and expansion of riverbed agriculture after removal of all riverbed encroachments was logical next step, quickly taken. They have, since, sought relevant multi-disciplinary expert inputs in order to shore up their case, etc.
Significant in what riverbed cultivators are doing about the crisis they have curiously come to face is the attempt to address the question about how they came to be caught in it in the first place. This is a question that the discourse cannot dismiss with the indifference with which the dispossession from Pushta has been tolerated. The obvious part of the answer to it lies in the real motives behind the clearance drive - illegal and unsustainable icon-class riverfront projects in the likeness of a standard notion of world-class development wholly unmindful of the unique imperatives of this riverbed - and the tendency of contemporary development discourse to accommodate rather than confront such motives. A significant part of the answer also lies in how people themselves came to confuse their identity and how the sprawling Pushta with all its diversity came to be reduced to one single homogenized phrase, conveniently interchangeable with Bangladeshi, migrants, jhuggi mafia, etc, or, from the 'other side', with hapless, hardworking, informal sector needing to be recognised, sympathetically treated, etc. Both these parts of the answer share the commonality of data distortions that snowball into discourse distortions.
Over the years data about Yamuna and Pushta has been copiously collected. Delhi Development Authority and Municipal Corporation of Delhi have carried out surveys of all households to provide basis for resettlement. National Institute of Urban Affairs, besides sundry academics and NGOs have created additional CBIS (community-based information systems) innovations into which much capacity building investments are also flowing. Under Yamuna Action Plan also massive investments have been made for generating data. Several riverbed and related projects have also been formulated, presumably also with data. Investments have also been made in other data and information systems - DDA is supposedly gathering mandatory data for the ongoing Master Plan revision, Delhi Government is supposedly pursuing IT enabled governance, voter ID cards issued for IT enabled electoral process are supposedly connected to other data systems and say they are usable as ID under different government schemes, etc.
Severally and jointly authorities and institutions and NGOs and businesses and academics have been collecting data in Pushta - a lot of it funding and 'independent' of authoritative or constitutional mechanisms for data collection and collation, all of it ticket to participate in discourse for development decision-making, and none of it open to public scrutiny. In absence of any transparency or ground rules for establishing reliability or validity of all this data or how it is processed into information, its use as basis for contemporary development decision-making makes the said basis nothing but pure anarchy.
The incredibly unfolding Pushta chapter in Delhi's development history has caught the discourse with its pants down on several counts, including how data that fuels the discourse has been abused to empower data-walas at cost of disempowering - even dispossessing - people. 'Truth' has been made a contentious word in the information business world, but one truth that Pushta has thrown up with certainty is that the half truths being fabricated in that world add up to a pack of lies. An especially striking question that Pushta poses, especially since information business thriving in it is also amongst the direct real estate beneficiaries of the ongoing dispossession from it, is how come riverbed cultivators' settlements - too conspicuous to be missed by conventional data collection and home to typical key informants in innovations for it - nearly did, and still might, slip into oblivion without a whisper of truth from the copiously informed discourse. How come?
Some more about distortions in the Yamuna Pushta discourse:
The official 'plan' that provided the justification for Pushta clearance drive1
The much belated NGO protest against the drive2