Once thriving with agrarian economy, Khriki has been reduced to a mere adjunct to a neighbouring pocket, torn between a placid village life and highly competitive urban life. Right where Chauhan’s house ends, a neighbourhood called Saket begins, which is home to high-rise apartments, European-style outdoor cafes, restaurants, and shopping arcades.1

Delhi continues to spread further. Its southern periphery has approached the next set of lal dora villages like Dhansa and Mitraon. Whether or not they would resemble Khirki in future depends on what the Delhi government and people in lal dora have in their mind and what they actually do on the ground.

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According to an independent historian Gyanendra Pandey, post-Partition refugee crisis led to increase in Delhi’s population by over a million in the next four years. So, to rehabilitate the refugees, Delhi government began acquiring large tracts of agricultural land to build temporary settlements. Chauhan’s family gave half of their 40 acres. Subsequently, the rest of the Khirki’s agricultural land was acquired by DDA between 1962 and 1964 for the planned development of the city. “DDA paid us around Rs 4,600 per acre,” recalls Chauhan.

Soon after acquiring agricultural land of some lal dora villages, DDA created Delhi’s first Master Plan in 1962 to develop the city. But it decided to leave the residential areas of these villages largely untouched. Even today, lal dora areas are marked on Delhi’s revenue maps with a single plot or khasra number – a mark of older collective ownership. This means that residents of such villages do not have individual property rights over their plots, and so cannot access bank loans or buy and sell their properties transparently.

The following year, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) declared 20 lal dora villages including Khirki as “urban villages” whose agricultural land was acquired by DDA. That meant that people of these villages had to follow the Building Bye-Laws. But few months later, that same year, MCD issued a second notification exempting these villages from certain sections of building regulations of the Delhi Metropolitan Council Act.

This was largely done to accommodate Delhi’s growing post-Partition refugee population.

• 1. “Urban villages bear a sense of ‘in-between-ness,” says Pati, “they neither resemble the village nor a city, as much as they aspire to live an urban life.” Dharam Saini still refer to himself as a “dehati” or villager.