On Commonwealth Games

As London gentrifies its way toward the 2012 Olympics, social cleansing and riverine renewal proceed in parallel but more brutal form in Delhi. In preparation for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 the city's slum dwellers are being bulldozed out to make room for shopping malls and expensive real estate. Amita Baviskar reports on a tale of (more than) two cities and the slums they destroy to recreate Banuwal Nagar was a dense cluster of about 1,500 homes, a closely-built beehive of brick and cement dwellings on a small square of land in northwest Delhi, India. Its residents were mostly masons, bricklayers and carpenters, labourers who came to the area in the early 1980s to build apartment blocks for middle-class families and stayed on. Women found work cleaning and cooking in the more affluent homes around them. Over time, as residents invested their savings into improving their homes, Banuwal Nagar acquired the settled look of a poor yet thriving community-it had shops and businesses; people rented out the upper floors of their houses to tenants. There were taps, toilets, and a neighbourhood temple. On the street in the afternoon, music blared from a radio, mechanics taking a break from repairing cycle-rickshaws smoked bidis and drank hot sweet tea, and children walked home from school. Many of the residents were members of the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam (NMPS), a union of construction labourers, unusual for India where construction workers are largely unorganised.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011

The ambition to develop Delhi as a global city is rooted in the liberalization reforms of the 1990s. Parts of the city region were integrated with the global economy, providing international firms with investment opportunities and outsourced services, while the metropolitan area emerged as a significant agglomeration of Export Processing Zones. The development of modern infrastructure, high-end residential complexes and exclusive shopping malls, in line with the rise of consumerism and middle-class ideology, has spectacularly transformed the urban landscape. This drive for global competitiveness involving image-building has had negative consequences, especially for the poor, through 'cleansing' the city of slums and other alleged undesirable elements, and has exacerbated socio-spatial polarization.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2012

Migration from the north-east frontier to Indian cities has increased rapidly in the last decade. Limited livelihood prospects, changing social aspirations and sporadic armed conflicts push migrants out of the region. Experiences of racism, violence and discrimination are crucial in shaping their lives. But this paper challenges the notion that north-easterners are solely “victims of the city”. Instead it analyses the ways in which they create a sense of place through neighbourhoods, food, faith, and protest. This “north-east map of Delhi” allows the migrants to survive the city and to construct a cosmopolitan identity at odds with the ways they are stereotyped in the Indian mainstream.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018

The world was changing; an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember Delhi looked like a giant construction site [ … ] but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. (Sethi 2012, 38) The old was dying, the new was in preparation, and we were living in the in-between, when nothing was resolved, everything was potential. Everyone was trying to absorb, to imagine what the city-and their own lives-might become. (Dasgupta 2014, 39) A sense of accelerating, dizzying change and heady possibility cuts through recent writing on the city in India. Delhi, as the nation's governmental heart and epicentre of the wider urban sprawl of the National Capital Region, has become the most urgent sign of this transition from national capital city to globalized megacity. The moment at which Delhi became a "megacity" occurred at some point between 1990 and 1991 when its urban population tipped over the 10 million mark, a moment that coincided with the country's much-vaunted liberalizing structural adjustment reforms. Delhi's continued growth means that it is set to be a megacity three times over by 2020, with a population of nearly 30 million, rising to a projected 36 million by 2030. 1 To put these figures in a broader context, India as a whole has a population of 1.2 billion, of which 65 percent are below the age of 35 and almost 50 percent are below the age of 25. By 2025, India is forecast to surpass China as the most populous country on earth. The Indian government expects the next wave of economic growth to be driven by the nation's centres and cities may account for nearly 70 percent of India's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. Nevertheless, one-third of the world's poorest people are Indian citizens, with 69 percent of the population living on less than two US dollars a day, and this underclass remains largely excluded from the story of India's recent economic growth (https://data. worldbank.org/). Such selective access to the rewards of the "New India", which seems congruent with global trends towards greater economic inequality, has resulted in an increase in informal urbanizing labour patterns and a continual pressure on urban residential space. Cities in the subcontinent are "anticipated to [become] the largest urban conglomerates of the twenty-first century"(

Cities, 2013

This paper revisits the City Profile for Delhi, the first article ever published in Cities in 1983 (Datta, 1983). Thirty years later and following the centennial anniversary year of Delhi's establishment as the capital of India in 2012, this article makes a wide-ranging survey of Delhi in the administrative, socioeconomic and environmental arenas. By tracing the history of urban planning in the city to the present and examining the issues facing Delhi, we then critically examine its institutional arrangements with respect to the outcomes of recent developments that have occurred in the city. These aspects are then evaluated in the context of the future development of the city; a city which still faces numerous local challenges but also houses the government of an emerging superpower that will play an increasing role both regionally and globally.

edgehill.ac.uk

This book, as the editors suggest, is concerned with challenging the conventional images of a capital city that 'nobody loves', offering alternative images of Delhi originating from less predictable perspectives, alternative social dynamics and from other less conventional life ...

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2018

Displacement is a byproduct of the deliberated developmental projects formulated and implemented by the government. India is a developing country; the phenomenon of displacement has its roots spread since pre-independence era. History of displacement in India can be traced back from the British era in India. Delhi is the capital of India and has been host for various international events (International Seminars, meetings, festivals, game tournaments, etc.). Likewise, Delhi hosted Asian games in 1982 and Commonwealth games in 2010. Both these events were mega events. A lot of construction and beautification work was carried out to make these mega events a successful one. A huge population was displaced from their places where they have been living since generations. The UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Article 25.1 states that the Right to adequate housing is a basic human right of all human beings. Further, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Righ...

2005