Since then, more than half-a-dozen lathi-and gun-wielding guards patrol the eerie-looking complex built 15 years ago for rehabilitation of the city’s slum population by the Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (DSIIDC).
The buildings have no doors or gates. The windows are broken. The blackened walls are cracking. Taps and electrical fittings have been stolen. Broken shards of glass are scattered all over, while shrubs inside the complex have grown almost as tall as the buildings. Oblivious to the dangers that surround them, a few puppies loiter blissfully.
The flats in Ghogha, though, are hardly an exception.
Under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005 by the Manmohan Singh government for city modernisation, 52,584 flats across 14 locations in the national capital were planned, funded and constructed jointly by the state and central governments since 2008. But till date, only 4,833 flats—less than 10 percent—have been allotted.
All the flats follow the same architectural template—one bedroom-cum-hall, one bathroom, and one kitchen. In all the blocks, there are four-storey buildings, with four houses on each floor.
The construction of 24,524 flats is complete, and 28,060 flats are under different stages of construction. Yet, more than 90 percent of these lie vacant, unused and in ruins.
More than a decade after they were constructed, authorities sheepishly admit that it would take “crores” to repair them.
What happened to the thousands of flats constructed for the poorest of Delhi’s citizens—at least 1.7 million of whom live in jhuggi-jhopri (JJ) clusters—is a story of ivory-tower policy-making, political one-upmanship, multiplicity of authorities and a colossal waste of national resources.
Making Delhi slum-free
The over-50,000 flats were planned at the turn of the new millennium. India had just been liberalised about a decade ago, and it was Delhi’s moment of modernist euphoria.
In 2010, Sheila Dikshit, who had by now been the city’s chief minister for more than a decade already, echoed the euphoria.
“When I became the Chief Minister in 1998, I had one dream—to make Delhi a world-class city. Today that dream is coming true,” she said. “The government will also finalise its policy of allotment of low-cost houses, which will go a long way in making Delhi a slum-free city.”
The Commonwealth Games were round the corner, and the capital was being spruced up rapidly. Slogans like “mera shehar saaf ho, isme mera haath ho,” and “Clean Delhi, Green Delhi” captured the middle-class imagination.
This, as Dikshit had envisioned, meant that the city needed to become slum-free.
A new city modernisation project, the JNNURM, had been launched by the then Manmohan Singh-led UPA government in 2005. Funds flowed in copiously.
Under the JNNURM, flats for the urban poor in Delhi had to be built by three agencies—the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), the DSIIDC and the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC).
Of the total, DUSIB has constructed 10,684 flats in Dwarka, Sultanpuri and Sawda Ghevra, while according to the Economic Survey 2023-24, 7,400 more flats are under construction at Bhalswa. Meanwhile, DSIIDC has constructed 17,660 flats, while another 16,600 are under construction, survey data shows. The NDMC was to construct 240 flats, but it paid DUSIB for their construction.
“The scheme was started with much enthusiasm,” a former official in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said on the condition of anonymity. “That time the focus was on somehow making the people from slums come to these places… little attention had been paid to how or where they will work if they come to these houses built in the middle of nowhere,” the former official added. “Obviously, we couldn’t manage to convince people to shift here.”
“A lot of people who got houses allotted also put them up on rent, and went back and started living in JJ clusters,” the former official said. “It was a question of livelihood for them.”
Evita Das, an urban researcher agreed. “There was no attention given to the basic fact that the poor cannot afford to travel so far to work… the idea was to somehow invisibilise them, and get them out of the city,” she added.
“It is common sense that those who work in the homes of the rich need to be around the rich,” Das said. “But projects like these expect them to come to work in the homes of the rich, while they don’t vitiate the neighbourhoods of the rich with their presence.”
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Political one-upmanship
But the distance from the heart of the capital was only part of the problem. The other, perhaps bigger, problems were those of policy flip-flops and political one-upmanship.
To begin with, to be considered eligible under the Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP) component of the JNNURM, the cut-off date for allotment was 1988. This left out lakhs of families who had come to Delhi after 1988.
When a survey for eligibility was conducted across 119 JJ clusters, it was found that only 30-35 percent of the families were eligible for flat allotment.
The eligibility criterion was, therefore, revised to 2009. By now, the UPA government had launched the Rajiv Ratan Awas Yojana for one-time assistance to the urban poor to move into these flats.
Things began to move, finally. Authorities in Delhi were to now bear 50 percent of the cost of the flats, and the beneficiaries another 50 percent. Moreover, over half of those living in JJ clusters were found eligible for allotment of the flats.
But with elections in Delhi in 2013 and 2015, any talk of slum evacuations and rehabilitations was put on the back burner.
By 2015 came a change in policy. The AAP government came to power in Delhi on the key promise of “jahan jhuggi wahan makaan” (where there’s a slum, there will be a flat). By 2017, it notified the ‘Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy’, according to which the poor had to be given in-situ rehabilitation—i.e. rehabilitation at the site of their slums or within 5 km of it, in order to ensure that their livelihood is not impacted.
In 2019, the Delhi government sought to rechristen the JNNURM, now called the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana with the BJP-led NDA government in power at the Centre, as ‘Mukhya Mantri Awas Yojana’. This again halted the survey across 675 JJ clusters to find potential beneficiaries of the scheme.
Under the BSUP, the Centre was to fund 40 percent of the housing construction. This meant that for allotting the houses, both the Centre and the state governments had to agree.
With the AAP ruling in Delhi, and the BJP at the Centre, the agreements were hard to come by.
“Most of the constructions were done by the Delhi government, but 40 percent of the funding came from the Centre, that is why the allotments could not be done without the Centre’s nod,” a former DUSIB official said on condition of anonymity.
“In the case of some 9,000 flats, people have also paid the booking amount, but the Centre did not allow us to allot even those houses,” the former DUSIB official said.
Under the scheme, allottees also have to pay Rs 1.12 lakh per house, and an additional one-time maintenance charge of Rs 30,000 for 5 years.
“It is a national tragedy… crores of rupees have been spent, and these houses are lying vacant in a city where thousands are homeless,” the former official added. “Now, the repair work of these houses will itself cost crores of rupees.”
Meanwhile, the Centre has insisted that instead of allotting the houses, they be given on rent to the urban poor under the Centre’s Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) scheme, which it had launched in the wake of the pandemic-induced reverse migration of the urban poor from Delhi.
“It would be much more prudent to give these houses up on rent instead of allotting them,” a central government official said on the condition of anonymity. “A lot of the urban poor do not come to the city with the idea of permanently being here, if you give them affordable renting homes, it is much better for them.”
Another official from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said the Centre was waiting for the AAP government to sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to bring these houses under the ARHC scheme, but until February, the state government had not done so.
However, with the change of guard in Delhi, the houses would soon be allotted, the state’s new urban development minister Ashish Sood said to ThePrint.
“The allotment of the houses was not done by the previous government, as it wanted to allot these houses under a state government scheme named after the chief minister,” he said.
“But this couldn’t be done, as the Centre has paid for the construction of these flats. They (Delhi government) didn’t even convert these flats under the ARHC scheme and have deprived people of facilities developed for them. We will soon get a survey done to identify eligible beneficiaries.”
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‘Cure worse than the disease’
Even in the flats which have been allotted, the situation is alarming.
As one enters the Lal Flats built in Bawana under the JNNURM scheme, a putrid smell fills the air. The narrow lanes are blocked with sewage water and garbage. The last time any authority came to clean the area was in October, at the time of Dussehra, the residents who live there said.
“Come here and see, these lanes have never been cleaned,” said Sheetal, a domestic-worker who has lived in one of the flats for the last 10 years. “We are a family of eight and we have been packed into this little matchstick of a house… this is worse than living on the street, we feel we will suffocate here.”
Other residents also complain of the poor quality of water. “If even a drop of water goes into your mouth while taking a shower, it is like you have consumed poison,” said another resident, Jyotsna. “It’s worse than living in a basti.”
This was no lie. In her paper on slum evacuations and resettlements, titled ‘Slum Demolitions in Delhi since the 1990s: An Appraisal’, urban demographer Veronique Dupont wrote: “The relocation costs for the landowning agency and town planners are minimised by the insufficient civic amenities provided at the relocation sites.”
The fact that the new “dignified” housing for the poor is hardly any better than their lives in the slums, and that their places of work are so distant from the places where they have been allotted homes, is perhaps why many of the people who live in the flats are living there on rent.
“Many people who were allotted the land, sold it or have rented it out to other people, and gone back to their bastis in Delhi again,” said Jyotsna. “I myself am living here on rent… I pay Rs 3,000 a month, there is no government welfare here.”
With inputs from Risha Chitlangia
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
