In Delhi, too, Rly squatters can’t be evicted

With the Railway Minister Mamata Bannerjee out of the capital, Railway officials have been directed to appeal for more time from the Delhi High Court for the eviction so that the Urban Development Ministry can consider alternative arrangements and Jagmohan said he would soon meet Mamata to find a way out of the impasse.

The eviction of the squatters who have occupied railway land along the tracks has taken on a political hue with the former Prime Ministers and the left parties strongly opposing their removal without adequate alternative arrangements made for their rehabilitation.

The Urban Development and Railway Ministries would carry out a joint survey of the encroachments on railway land in the capital, and prioritise areas that had to be cleared immediately and the alternative residential arrangements that could be made, he said.

Giving details about the rehabilitation schemes already being implemented by the slum department of the Ministry, Jagmohan said the Centre already had a scheme under which residential plots were offered to slum dwellers at a cost of Rs 5000 per family, with the government matching it with a subsidy of Rs 10,000 and the landowning agency coughing up Rs 29,000.

However, this scheme has not found favour with the Railways. Indian Railways is clearly in no position to dole out such largesse to the tens of thousands of people who have illegally occupied railway land.

Without directly referring to the Wazirpur Industrial area slum dwellers, who have now hit paydirt with headlines of former Prime Minister V P Singh sitting on dharna to protest their eviction, Jagmohan said “those who are taking up their cause do not see the inhuman conditions in which these people live”.

Every day at least two persons die when they are accidently run over by trains. There are no toilet facilities or running water and people from these slums take to defecating along the tracks. Diseases, squalor and crime make their existence the worst kind of inhumanity that people can be subjected to, Jagmohan said.

Since migration to the metropolises was inevitable due to economic compulsions, the only way to prevent cities from being run over by slums was to have a rational policy of migration which would make it planned and purposive, the Minister added.

The slum resettlement scheme launched by the Ministry was aimed at providing an affordable alternative to those who had found refuge in haphazard squatter colonies.

The Ministry has succeeded in moving out some 5000 family units from around Gole Market, Kotla Mubarakpur and AIIMS to resettlement housing colonies in Rohini and Narela. But considering the speed with which slums are mushrooming in the capital, the solution may end up being another case of too little too late.