Slum Re-development, Differentiated Resettlement, and Transit Camp

A review of literature on slum redevelopment policies of India: Geographies of dispossessions and caste

“…Apart from urban policy discourse that ultimately has a simplistic rendering of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies, a majority of the research on slum redevelopment policies in India has omitted the socio‐spatial realities of caste groups and how those play a critical, if not the most important, role in shaping vulnerability in the face of “redevelopment.” Even the recent studies mentioned in the earlier sections of this paper focus on mapping and studying dispossessions without taking into account how that experience differs from one caste group to another. While dispossessions are identified, such as the dilution of tenurial rights of slum residents (Upadhya & Rao, 2022) or the exclusion of residents on the basis of unofficial, subjective criteria such as local networks of power (Dupont & Shankare Gowda, 2021), no mention is made of the role of caste or caste groups in these instances. This is not merely an omission that reflects the existence of multiple ways of understanding social realities but is an active, even if unintended, instance of the obscuring of structures of the power and privilege of dominant caste groups over marginalized groups.…”

“…The process of counting and determining eligibility for redevelopment and rehabilitation, for example, is in itself an exclusionary process whereby access to successful rehabilitation is not equally distributed amongst the residents. Dupont and Shankare Gowda (2021) in their decade-long study on Delhi's first resettlement project called Kathputli Colony argue that the resettlement process involves exclusion and differentiated treatment of the slum dwellers which ultimately manifest in a variety of ways. They argue that not only does the exclusion take place on official criteria such as cutoff dates but also trickle down to unofficial, subjective criteria such as the residents' local power positions and influence over the members of the community, which shape their capacity to negotiate and the amount of support or resistance they are able to offer in the face of the redevelopment project.…”