2010 Commonwealth Games

When I was in India from '03 to '04, I worked with a small NGO (non-governmental organization) in Old Delhi in a shantytown there. Mid-way during my year the city government decided to demolish this shantytown to supposedly clean the nearby Yamuna River (which was polluted not by the poor but by waste from middle and upper class colonies it turned out) and to make the area into a cultural tourism complex, given its proximity to Mahatma Gandhi's grave.

Shantytowns are illegal structures but much of the housing in the city is illegal to begin with and the government selectively chooses which structures to go after. Within a shantytown, people pay rent, even buy individual shanties, which means that residents often lose everything when the government decides on the demolition of a specific area.

The city government did demolish all those shanties, offering only poor rehabilitiation schemes and the Yamuna Pushta demolition is still referenced by many as a dark incident in recent Delhi history.


Residents standing in front of their demolished shantytown

After living in Delhi again, I see now that the Yamuna Pushta demolition was just the beginning of an whole series of changes that will continue to take place as the city attempts to 'beautify' itself...Beautification meant to satisfy the gaze of tourists and foreigners...people like me!

The government is presently getting ready for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, a smaller version of the Olympics. Along with trying to practically decipher how to make space to accomodate the games, there are more 'beautification' efforts in place. This includes efforts to drive beggars out of the streets under the framework that beggary is illegal under a 1959 act and campaigns encouraging people not to patronize beggars. (Something similar happened when President Clinton had visited but this is on a much more widespread scale.)

The criminalization of beggary dates back to 19th century and is nothing new or specific to India. Rather, it is part of a social process of displacing and ghettoizing the poor. Some call this 'progress' and 'development' and the inevitable cost of industrialization.

But what is development is highly contested as public interest lawyers, activists, and the public that suffers under these laws and government policies assert that this is not a cost to be paid. Public interest litigation has been filed by a homeless advocacy organization seeking to decriminalize begging. And in response, a Delhi High Court Justice called the government campaign 'a crime against humanity'. Let's see where this goes. I'm not an expert in city or urban planning but it's easy to see that what we consider progress and development is problematic when it benefits the few at the cost of the majority.