NO TO POLITICS OF WILLFUL FAVOURS, ACCOUNTABILITY ON STATUTORY ENTITLEMENTS

Citizens' groups to engage purposively to field Master Plan entitlements on the political agenda in Assembly elections

The run-up to this year's Delhi Assembly elections, like the run-up to every election, is marked by frenzied political activity to woo slum dwellers. The Chief Minister's dramatic personal interventions have upped the ante. Meaningless promises and pronouncements, rallies and counter-rallies, are freely flowing, not only humiliating citizens but placing them at risk, as borne out by demolitions as both cases of Chief Ministerial intervention to score political points backfired on people.

In this election the every election politics of slums calls for protest because in the last year the very people now promising favours to slum dwellers have demonstrated exceptional incapability in discharging their responsibility of securing statutory housing entitlements of citizens.

MASTER PLAN PROVISIONS FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSING

CITY-LEVEL PROVISIONS

REQUIRE 4.0 LAKH EWS PLOTS AND 49000 SLUM HOUSING UNITS (BY 2001).

  • Slum population, as counted by Census 2001, is consistent with backlog on Plan targets.
  • Re-settlement/regularization short-changes the poor on housing entitlements and denies their entitlements to priority in further (planned) housing development

AREA-LEVEL PROVISIONS

REQUIRE ALL HOUSING FOR 100,000 TO HAVE 25% CHEAP PLOTS.

  • Resettling the poor in areas just for them short-changes all on benefits of integration.
  • In-situ options at less than 1 lakh population infringe entitlements to desired segregation
  • Both ‘spare’ land meant for the poor for ‘profitable’ but infrastructure-stressing uses.

SITE-LEVEL PROVISIONS

DON’T PERMIT PLOTS LESS THAN 25sqm OR DENSITY MORE THAN 250du/Ha

  • The provision for minimum size to be split between plot and cluster is option, not norm.
  • Minimum size does not preclude larger plots, is part of provisions for 70-80 sqm for all.
  • Development for the poor at less than minimum standards amounts also to misuse of public land since the Plan specifically cautions against it.

Plan provisions represent statutory entitlements under Delhi Development Act (by which DDA was set up for development according to plan) and Delhi’s land policy (by which land was placed at state’s disposal for this with a view to safeguarding interests of the poor).

Those undermining the Plan to suggest ‘alternatives’ with no legal basis are willy nilly helping vested interests at the cost of short-changing the poor on rights and of making city problems intractable as 2000 hectares of land meant to take care of slums disappears under unsustainable profitable uses.

In November 2002 Delhi High Court quashed Delhi's illegal and defunct slum resettlement policy, leaving it open to governments to come out with an alternative. All slammed the Court order but did nothing about an alternative and, instead, continued Slumming Delhi1 with more land acquisition for illegal and defunct resettlement and more illegal and defunct projects with NGOs, builders, NGO-builders, etc, in defiance of the court order. Nor did they do anything to ensure that the order was not misused to effect mid-winter demolitions that the city shamelessly witnessed. Slums were summarily demolished at the whims of upper-income Residents' Welfare Associations, empowered by Delhi government's exclusionary bhagidari to seek encroachment removal, such as in Alaknanda2, and in service of vested interests illegally occupying land meant for housing those consequently in slums, as in case of Rajiv Gandhi Camp3 and Arjun Camp4.

A far more robust challenge to legality of Delhi's slum resettlement policy than the one that led to the November order in PIL by some factory owners in which neither petitioners nor respondents placed statutory Plan provisions before the Court remains stubbornly unacknowledged since 2000. Pursuant to demolition without notice in July 2000 citizens in Rangpuri Pahari5 slums have consistently engaged with DDA and MoUD to oppose resettlement in contravention of the Master Plan and seek settlement in accordance with it. In August 2002 citizens of Arjun Camp6, facing imminent demolition and illegal resettlement for a few, moved court on this basis. Even after repeated court orders in the Arjun Camp Case and questions raised in an unprecedented number of responses to a Public Notice about the illegal scheme that would require demolition of Rangpuri Pahari, even clarification on entitlements has not been forthcoming.

After the November order, requests were made to central, state and local government and DDA to base their review or appeal against it on statutory Plan provisions that are adequate for solving Delhi's slum problem and already raised though not answered in Arjun Camp and Rangpuri Pahari matters through due processes of law. These requests were reiterated in other representations against illegal resettlement and up-market housing schemes in excess of Plan norms. These requests were reiterated when the court ordered removal of Yamuna encroachments7 and slums, rather than other glaring encroachments, seemed at risk. These requests were reiterated in the wake of the CBI expose in specific instances of exposed scams ...

But the SLP that central government eventually filed in Supreme Court did not mention Plan entitlements and state and local governments simply did not bother to approach the court about the order they had publicly slammed. Apart from failing to secure, even on request, citizens' Plan entitlements and pursuing infringing and short-changing schemes and policies and white papers in disregard or contravention of the Plan, Union Urban Development Minister, Chief Minister, Municipal Commissioner and DDA Commissioner Planning (besides numerous politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and professionals) have also been slamming the Master Plan. This is even as the Master Plan is a document of citizens' entitlements that they are duty-bound to uphold, protect and secure, even as their interventions in disregard of it are beyond jurisdiction, even as their disparaging remarks about it are unconstitutional.

The Master Plan is all that stands between the city's land remaining a public asset and becoming real estate for sustaining note-banks, including in election years, by reducing public from entitlement-holder to vote-bank.This is why it is necessary that the Plan be implemented with earnestness. And, in the current state of affairs, this is also why it is defied with impunity - impunity perhaps unsurpassed in this election year.

To add insult to injury, no less than Chief Minister in our duly elected government appealed to Election Commissioner to stop slum demolitions - only till election so that vote-banks are not tampered. That Election Commissioner responded to this appeal and that this response was celebrated and debated as a political victory says it all.That public servants then became righteously confused and even defiant about what the right to vote did or did not cover says it loud and clear.

Citizens can continue to take this humiliation. Or they can start saying NO.

In the municipal election of 2002 those associated with Master Plan Implementation Support Group had started saying NO by trying to field the entitlements' perspective of planned development on the political agenda - by participating via a proxy candidate to seek a vote for the Master Plan, for themselves, for politics of rights not favours, for representation not rule. Later in 2002 Mahanagar Asangathit Mazdur Union, a union of unorganised sector workers taking up housing issues as extension to its work on workers' rights, had also made Master Plan entitlements central to its efforts especially in recently 're'-settled Narela8. In 2003 a small NGO proposed the same to citizens in slums in Giri Nagar9 and their Residents' Welfare Association had begun engaging from this perspective. On 10.06.2003 Delhi Jhuggi Jhompri Ekta Manch, a platform of citizens' and activists in slums in various places in Delhi, had called a conference to say No to vote-bank politics. At the discussion on 16.06.2003 about slums in the series on Delhi Master Plan 2021 - Gearing up for citizens participation through Public Notice' it, too, had agreed to make existing Master Plan entitlements central to its efforts and, accordingly, revised the memorandum that it was to present to PMO on 23.06.2003. In the concluding session of the discussion series the same evening, a follow-up meeting was fixed for 05.07.2003 at Narela Building Centre at the initiative of Mahanagar Asangathit Mazdur Union .

Subsequently, Election Commissioner's direction was reported. Master Plan Implementation Support Group wrote to ask now that evictions be stopped not till election but till implementation of Master Plan entitlements to housing.

It has proposed that the meeting of 05.07.2003 should explore, especially since development is the claimed poll plank of both leading parties and Master Plan is the only statutory framework defining planned development and governing use of land in Delhi, ways for purposively engaging to field Plan entitlements on the political agenda for Assembly elections. For saying NO to politics that refuses to look beyond citizens' right to vote, so that irrespective of who gets elected People win.

  • 1. Slumming Delhi: Evictions, Endowments and Entitlements
    I have picked, as peg to hang this plannerly talk, the Delhi High Court judgement of end-November 2002 striking down Delhi's slum policy and permitting eviction without resettlement. I have done so for three reasons other than topicality. One, I think evictions interest all those who are interested, one way or another, in the slum issue. Two, city politics before and after the judgement shows how the slum discourse is stuck in what I call the 'endowment paradigm'. Three, some concurrent matters raising the issue of citizens' entitlements provide a different perspective, which I believe merits urgent attention.

    http://skel.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-21808
  • 2. Documents
    http://skel.architexturez.net/documents/A_RHRX1.htm
  • 3. source: http://skel.architexturez.net/mpisg/SP_RGC.htm
  • 4. source: http://skel.architexturez.net/SP_AC
  • 5. Right housing Rights: Rangpuri Pahari Chronicle
    We, in professions or politics or government or NGOs, call them ‘slums’, their residents ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ if we are good guys or ‘encroachers’ and ‘migrants’ and more if we are bad guys. In democracy that must surely be in infancy if not actually stillborn, ‘we’ do not even think of ‘them’ as citizens. Rangpuri Pahari Malakpur Kohi is a ‘slum’ because we say so. Many if not most of its residents are citizens because their actions say so, in ways that many if not most of us have yet to learn to speak.

     http://skel.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-21760
  • 6. source: http://skel.architexturez.net/SP_AC Op.cit
  • 7. 2003 03 encroachment removal orders
    http://skel.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-22052
  • 8. Narela relocation project (February 2003)
    On 19.02.03 Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit laid the foundation stone for what is to become, two years from now, 'one of the most innovative housing schemes built with alternative materials and technology', 'cost-effective and ecologically-appropriate'. This is a project for 3000 two-room flats, likely to be priced at 2 lakhs apiece, for industrial workers in Bawana.

    http://skel.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-22795

  • 9. source: http://skel.architexturez.net/mpisg/GiriNgr.htm

MASTER PLAN PROVISIONS FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSING

CITY-LEVEL PROVISIONS

REQUIRE 4.0 LAKH EWS PLOTS AND 49000 SLUM HOUSING UNITS (BY 2001).

  • Slum population, as counted by Census 2001, is consistent with backlog on Plan targets.
  • Re-settlement/regularization short-changes the poor on housing entitlements and denies their entitlements to priority in further (planned) housing development

AREA-LEVEL PROVISIONS

REQUIRE ALL HOUSING FOR 100,000 TO HAVE 25% CHEAP PLOTS.

  • Resettling the poor in areas just for them short-changes all on benefits of integration.
  • In-situ options at less than 1 lakh population infringe entitlements to desired segregation
  • Both ‘spare’ land meant for the poor for ‘profitable’ but infrastructure-stressing uses.

SITE-LEVEL PROVISIONS

DON’T PERMIT PLOTS LESS THAN 25sqm OR DENSITY MORE THAN 250du/Ha

  • The provision for minimum size to be split between plot and cluster is option, not norm.
  • Minimum size does not preclude larger plots, is part of provisions for 70-80 sqm for all.
  • Development for the poor at less than minimum standards amounts also to misuse of public land since the Plan specifically cautions against it.

Plan provisions represent statutory entitlements under Delhi Development Act (by which DDA was set up for development according to plan) and Delhi’s land policy (by which land was placed at state’s disposal for this with a view to safeguarding interests of the poor).

Those undermining the Plan to suggest ‘alternatives’ with no legal basis are willy nilly helping vested interests at the cost of short-changing the poor on rights and of making city problems intractable as 2000 hectares of land meant to take care of slums disappears under unsustainable profitable uses.