Slum dwellers across the city have every reason to believe authorities want them to disappear, and some think fires are used against them

“We lost everything … Our fans, TV, coolers. Whatever money we had saved, pots, pans, utensils,” says Ruxana, a 30-year-old mother of three who lives in a slum in Mansarovar Park, eastern New Delhi, that was ravaged by fire earlier this summer.

All but a handful of the roughly 300 homes in the area – which lies in the shadows of an overground segment of Delhi’s metro – were destroyed. A few weeks later, a sense of total devastation prevails. Men and women carry buckets of water from nearby tankers, while others surround NGO workers trying to help residents claim compensation from the government. Children wander around unsupervised and unclothed, charred soil smudged across their faces.

“Everything got burned in one go,” says Ruxana. “We could only save our kids and run for our lives.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mansarovar Park. Photograph: Sahiba Chawdhary

Not everyone could even do that. A man nearby slumps to his knees on the scorched earth below and lets out a wail that reverberates around the settlement. His family tell me his young daughter Kalua was killed in the blaze. She was the only person to die.



“We’re trying to tell him that we’re all with him. This has happened to all of us, not just him,” says his brother Jai Singh. “The incident won’t leave my heart. I cannot forget it.”

The fire at Mansarovar Park was not unusual. Ten days earlier, 50 huts in a Rohingya refugee camp in the city burned to the ground. And the day after the Mansarovar Park blaze, a similar settlement in the area of Rohini saw many more homes destroyed.

The victims of these fires had little to begin with. Many were already living in constant fear of their homes being destroyed through demolitions and evictions in the name of development, which are common in the city’s informal settlements. Activists complain these incidents are often carried out in a cruel and unjust manner.

Slum dwellers across the city have every reason to believe the authorities want them to disappear, and some believe fires are often used against them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A resident of the Rohini slum that suffered its own fire the day after the one that struck Mansarovar Park. Photograph: Ashish Malhotra

“I firmly believe – not only in Delhi, but in many cities across the world – arson is definitely one of the means that lands are cleared for use,” says Miloon Kothari, a former United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing. Kothari says such evictions are not necessarily direct state policies, but are carried out through collusion between those with vested land interests – slum lords, developers, local politicians and sometimes even the police. He refers to this nexus as a “land mafia”.

“A lot of Delhi’s low-income people live in prime areas,” he says. “It’s very clear that whatever means available will be used to clear them from that land.”

Before the Mansarovar Park fire, residents were already under threat of eviction, with a Delhi high court case on the issue ongoing since last year meaning any evictions were on hold until the case was decided.

Four months since the blaze, residents still don’t know what caused it. There has been no evidence of foul play, but local police would not confirm whether they have come to any conclusions about the fire’s cause. Activists say investigations such as these are rarely thorough.

But they also know that fires in informal settlements are not uncommon. “The way they’re structured, there isn’t space between the houses,’’ says Armaan Alkazi of the Centre for Equity Studies (CES). “It’s all very flammable material – they’re like tinderboxes waiting to catch fire.”

Over the past few months, Alkazi and other NGO workers have worked closely with the community in Mansarovar Park to help people rebuild their homes and lives. This has included helping them get government compensation – 25,000 rupees (£275) per family – and getting children enrolled in new schools.

Such tasks are tricky when identification documents have been lost in the fire – but groups like the CES have been operating in the area for years, and ensured many photocopies exist.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Model of suggested nonflammable home. Photograph: Swati Janu

‘All eyes on the street’

Others have been encouraging residents to rebuild with less flammable materials. Swati Janu, an architect and urban designer, has developed a model for informal housing that involves metal poles and galvanised iron sheets instead of bamboo and tarpaulin. Her design also looks to draw more sunlight into homes – and can be more easily moved if people are forced to relocate.

“As a designer you try to see if there’s something you can come up with that they can build again which is low-cost but also temporary, that they can carry with them,” says Janu.

Getting Mansarovar Park residents on board isn’t so simple. Janu notes that while her ideas have received positive attention, they haven’t yet been widely taken up.

Some residents had already purchased materials for new homes by the time she got involved. Other drawbacks include the higher cost of her materials and a fear that building homes that look more permanent will draw the attention of the authorities and developers.

But she says other elements of the rebuild have matched up with her ideas. Fireplaces used for cooking have been placed at the front of houses rather than the back, and wider lanes have been created between homes.

This has helped general safety on the street, and made it easier for residents to look out for each other. “Any time someone is walking down a lane, smoking a cigarette and drops it on the ground, someone or other will be able to see it and say ‘hey, stub it out’,” says Janu. “Basically what they’re trying to say is ‘all eyes on the street’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cheques given to fire victims in the Rohini slum have names spelled incorrectly. Photograph: Ashish Malhotra

‘We keep asking but nobody is listening’

Despite the ongoing eviction case, Alkazi says the government’s response to the Mansarovar Park rebuild has been fairly robust, with compensation, new electricity lines and re-enrolling pupils in school.

But Alkazi says such a positive response is not always the case. “If you have a court-ordered eviction of an area, then somehow the state is not sympathetic to that place,” he says, referencing a slum in Amir Khusrao Park where a fire and demolition took place on the same day last year.

That compassion seems to be missing in Rohini, where an informal settlement was gutted by fire a day after Mansarovar Park. Only a handful of the burned-down homes there have been rebuilt. People cram into a few small tents at night, while others sleep unprotected on the ground outside.

Since the blaze, storms have created large pools of mosquito-attracting stagnant water, while hot weather is making life unbearable. Most of the community are garbage pickers, and waste is piling up around them.

“We’re staying in this heat, we’re just existing,” says Archala, a resident of the area. “There’s no electricity. We keep asking but nobody is listening.”

The residents of the Rohini settlement have not received the level of help those in Mansarovar Park have. They show me compensation cheques they received earlier this summer after the fire. Almost all have spelling or clerical errors, making them impossible to cash.

“Everyone should have proper cheques but we have nothing,” says Subhash Chauhan, another resident.

“How did they manage to mess up all the names?” shouts someone else.

Additional reporting by Kanika Dhupar.

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