“Despite the scale of the problem, it is not an election issue,” said Shivani Chaudhry, executive director, HLRN

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The estimates show that over 114 houses are being demolished every day and 23 people are being evicted every hour in the country by the Centre and state governments, the advocacy group’s report said. This comes at a time when the ruling BJP has highlighted ‘housing for all’ in its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections.

The report documents cases from 19 states and two Union Territories, and the actual numbers are likely to be higher than the report’s estimates, the HLRN said. While slum-clearance, anti-encroachment and city beautification drives displaced 47 per cent of the people affected, infrastructure and ‘development’ projects, including the construction of roads and highways, housing and ‘smart-city’ projects, led to the eviction of 26 per cent of the people displaced.

Environmental projects, forest protection and wildlife conservation contributed to the displacement of around 20 per cent of the affected population, and another 8 per cent were evicted due to disaster management, according to the findings of the report, ‘Forced Evictions in India in 2018: An Unabating National Crisis’.

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