Lack of inclusive approach to urban poor

In Chennai, where involuntary resettlement of slum dwellers has been practiced for at least two centuries, in the past two decades alone more than 55,000 families were moved to massive state-built settlements outside the city Is. In the absence of policy, these transfers are handled by informal Government orders or specific projects or by guidelines of funding agencies.

a narrow view

In October 2021, the Tamil Nadu government released its first draft “Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy” for public comment. While long awaited, the policy is also premature. It is not included in a comprehensive housing and housing policy that defines a framework for affordable housing, slum clearance and land use in which relocating slum dwellers to remote peripheries is specified as the last-ditch option.

The draft policy aims to “ensure that slum dwellers are treated fairly and humanely when resettled from the offending Porombok lands”. But resettlement needs to be located within a clearly stated vision of integration and inclusion of vulnerable communities in the mainstream. Instead, the policy limits its scope to managing procedures for eviction and resettlement.

Large-scale ghettos on the periphery of cities have emerged across the country as the default mode for resettlement of the disenfranchised urban poor. The results have been well documented. In places like Bawana (New Delhi), Vatva (Ahmedabad), and Mahul (Mumbai), scholars, journalists, and fact-finding committees have uncovered the lasting distortion produced by these poorly-served colonies. While broken livelihoods are widely recognized as the most serious impact of resettlement, many other problems such as alcohol and substance abuse, criminalization of youth, and security threats to women and girls are also endemic to these sites. Many residents sell or rent out their allotments and return to informal settlements in the city to protect their painstakingly carved paths to a better life.

A resettlement policy, which deals with the most vulnerable population of the city, should be visionary, proactive and visionary. This should ensure minimal disruption to the ecology of survival and mobility that these families have built up over time. If it is to root them out, it must ensure that the state does everything it can to support their rapid re-integration into the urban mainstream and improve their lives. Delhi’s Slum Rehabilitation Policy identifies it by defining Besides Rehabilitation is as its principle strategy, which envisages rehabilitation only “in rare cases”.

Tamil Nadu led

Chennai has a history of implementing innovative and inclusive models of slum clearance. Tamil Nadu has historically led the country in providing low-income housing largely through land acquisition or by regularizing and upgrading informal settlements. The site and service projects of the 1980s, which produced about 57,000 plots of land in Chennai, proved to be scalable, cost-effective and successful in facilitating socio-economic mobility for its residents in the long term. The projects created mixed class and mixed-use neighborhoods by providing differently sized plots for different income groups on state-acquired land and incorporating industrial and commercial spaces within the sites. By allowing households to design, build and incrementally expand their homes to accommodate growing households or rental units, these schemes expanded the supply of affordable housing over time with minimal outlay by the state. Despite their peripheral location, they sat near existing developments where trunk infrastructure such as roads, water supply and public transport were already available. Thirty years later, they have emerged as thriving and dynamic neighbourhoods, well integrated into the urban fabric.

drawbacks

Instead of taking advantage of these achievements to allow low-income families to establish their footing in the city, the Tamil Nadu rehabilitation policy is indirectly tied to the tired and discredited model of large-scale peripheral resettlement.

The policy defines its scope as “rehabilitation of people who have been evicted for the purpose of court orders, implementing other development projects or enforcing various Acts or Rules”. In other words, it only supports the government’s firm intention to remove “encroachers” – defined as non-titleholders – from reducing disaster vulnerability to “smoothing traffic” or various infrastructural or For a wide range of discretionary purposes to clear land for developmental projects. , Since a large proportion of urban land in Indian cities, including purchased and registered plots, lack the holy grail of legal title, the policy is based on a foundation of widespread vulnerability to eviction without recourse. Compare this with Odisha’s award-winning slum rehabilitation project, which is transforming the urban economy and future by giving land rights to slum dwellers.

Despite the sacred language, Tamil Nadu is apathetic about any genuine commitment to the draft policy integration. For example, in addressing the important question of distance, it stipulates that travel time by bus or train “should not exceed half an hour to reach the nearest urban areas from which people are expected to move”. . This is probably intentional, unclear. The “closest urban area” can be a small town. A resettlement colony a 30-minute bus ride from a small town can effectively ruralize urban workers, as happened in the Gudapakkam resettlement colony, about 50 km from Chennai city, in 2014. An explicit stipulation of the maximum distance from the previous residence will do what this section pretends to do. For example, the Delhi policy specifies that alternative accommodation will be provided “within a radius of 5 km”.

A sensitive policy will formulate measures to ensure adequacy, quality and timeliness of facilities in resettlement sites. While “integrated township with all facilities” has been the stated norm for two decades now, resettlement colonies have gradually, intermittently, sometimes after a decade or more, often by residents and activists. After the constant pressure of, and often seen too late. To prevent irreversible breakdown of fragile livelihoods and educational trajectories. The high drop-out rate of women and school children from the labor force in these colonies has been the norm.

join problems

Given this record, the resettlement policy should demonstrate a more concrete intent to provide good service standards at the new sites. “Transportation facilities” do not mean starting with certain bus routes and increasing them over time, but should include adequate, reliable and affordable arrangements prior to resettlement to ensure that workers maintain their links to their workplaces uninterruptedly. Keep from Livelihood support may not just mean “skill development training”, which almost certainly won’t translate into employment for the city’s 40-year-old salesperson. Most importantly, an effective policy must address the complex problems that make these settlements unsafe for women, children and youth.

Karen Coelho is Associate Professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies