From correspondents in India, 08:32 AM IST

By car, the journey from central Delhi to the Bawana 'jhuggi-jhopri' (shantytown) resettlement colony in north Delhi takes about an hour. If you have recently been 'resettled' there - in the wake of the demolition of your jhuggu (slum) in central Delhi - then you can expect to change up to three buses and spend about two-and-a-half hours travelling to work. 'Slum clearance' is not a new activity in the history of making and remaking of urban space in Delhi.

Indeed, the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT), the predecessor of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), was established in 1937 for this very task. Specific to our times is the urban imagination and the vicious political economy of land that accompanies contemporary 'clearance' and 'beautification' drives.

The urban imagination at play is no less than magical in its ambitions: people, relationships, smells, sights and activities that otherwise constitute the life of the city during daylight hours are sought to be made invisible as night approaches. This is nothing less than an ambition to obliterate all reminders of the labouring bodies that build and service the city.

The desire for such mastery over urban space, where we want to see only the end products - a massive temple complex here, a bright shopping mall there - and banish the flesh and blood that goes into their making, is a frightening development of our times. For, it suggests a wide consensus over issues of 'urban renewal', the 'global city', and the place of the most disadvantaged within this city.

This wasn't always the ways we imagined cities. The G.D. Birla Committee Report of 1951 on the functioning of the DIT is a case in point. Severely castigating the trust for making huge profits from land through its monopoly powers, it pointed out that the trust had completely sidelined the 'interest of the community' and the welfare of the less well off.

Most crucially, the committee noted that the solution to the slum problem did not lie in casting the poor as far away as possible from the sight of the better off. To its great credit, it did not visualise the urban poor as living ghosts, their bodies at the service of the rich, but simultaneously invisible. Neither did it stay with the established colonial model of 'social hygiene' where the urban body could be cured of all diseases through simply excising the offending part.

The imagination of a humane urban planning regime requires, the committee suggested, that it is not only the well-off who have the right to live conveniently to their places of work, this should also be a right of the poor. This, of course, is linked to the crucial problem of why so many 'original allottees' in contemporary resettlement areas choose to sell their plots and move back nearer to their places of work.

They do not sell because they are simply playing the market; rather, they do this for reasons of economic survival: having to travel some 35 km each way to work, changing a number of buses, and spending a good part of the daily earning on travel is not particularly conducive to staying put. In the absence of other alternatives, some of the resettled men have simply chosen to come home once a week, leaving the women to manage the best they can. There is a different kind of apartheid city in the making.

In a wonderfully prescient observation, the Birla Committee also noted: 'There never was money in housing the poorest people well; there has always been money in housing them ill'. Indee

d, housing the poor 'ill' at the furthest points of the city has led to the growth of an entire industry of profiteers that stretches across government departments and the private sector. For quite some time now, and despite the best intentions of policy-makers, resettlement policies have become deeply mired in an extraordinary complex system of fake allotments and spurious documentation through which the poor are deprived of their legal rights.

Several strategies operate here. So, for example, demolition of a slum cluster is normally preceded by a 'survey' to identify potential allottees of alternative plots. During this period, it is not uncommon for government officials involved in the survey to be in close touch with property dealers. In some cases, eligible allottees are declared 'ineligible', and the plots due to them pass directly into the hands of property dealers.

Further, it is also not unusual for property dealers to be kept informed about the exact layout of an upcoming resettlement colony so that they may choose the best of the plots (on the main road, for example). So, while on the one hand, we seek to make poor invisible, there are also processes for creating entirely new entities, such as the land speculator as the original allottee of resettlement plots.

A new group of displaced people - earlier living and working in central Delhi - has recently been moved to Bawana. Their shacks sit at the edge of a vast dusty field that both bakes in the summer heat as well as throws off swirling dust clouds. Children bathe in the nearby canal, and adults seek to make arrangements for water, electricity, and other necessities.

Every one is concerned about the rainy season, for the dust bowl will then become a vast patch of mud, and the water will easily seep through the thatching. Why could they not have waited to move us here after the basic amenities had been established, some ask. Perhaps part of the answer lies in the rise of the new urban imagination where we want our 'global cities' to serve a variety of takeaway food, serviced by throwaway people.

(Sanjay Srivastava is a sociologist affliated with the Centre for Physical Research and Social Change, Delhi. He can be reached at sanjaysrivast@fastmail.fm)

(Staff Writer, © IANS)