Eviction & Resettlement in Delhi

Since 1990, Delhi has witnessed an urban restructuring through forced eviction and peripheral resettlement of homes and families. After the Emergency, these past few decades have seen the largest rise in such forced evictions. Yet this is a story about the city that is either not known or told at the scale it should be. The Missing Basti Project seeks to document these forced evictions and create a public archive that recognises this facet of the city’s intended “world-class” transformation. In total, this website brings together various data sources and research into a single platform to underscore the scale and severity of such evictions. On date, we have recorded nearly 300 evictions, starting from 1990. Of these, over 200 evictions were between 1990 and 2010, when the Commonwealth Games took place in the city.

Forced evictions violate the rights of working families, erases a lifetime of investment in incrementally built homes, debilitates pathways to inter-generational social mobility, and deepens social inequalities structured and produced through caste, gender and religious faultlines. The archive is one part of what is needed to resist such violations of the rights of Delhi’s residents, in a hope that the act of recording and bearing testament can lead us to preventing future evictions and building a right to the city for all.