Who let the ‘aam aadmi’ down in Delhi?

When the Aam Aadmi Celebration got here to energy in 2013, it made all types of guarantees to rework the nationwide capital — ‘we’ll clear the air, clear the river, make ladies safer, weed out corruption, appoint a Lokpal…’ No surprises there — all events make guarantees to attempt to seize energy.

However public reminiscence is brief and when elections come spherical once more, all of the media noise is concerning the new guarantees fairly than a actuality test on what we had been promised and what we acquired. Amongst a myriad different pledges to the folks of Delhi, AAP promised to place widespread people, the eponymous aam aadmi, on the centre of its insurance policies and governance. However did the aam aadmi get what the ruling get together promised them?

AAP made an enormous track and dance about its mohalla clinics and ‘world class’ authorities faculties, which flattered to deceive. For every thing that went fallacious or wasn’t mounted — town’s air air pollution or the state of the river Yamuna, for instance — it blamed everybody else: previous governments, neighbouring governments, the forms, the Centre, the lieutenant-governor… However let’s return to the aam aadmi.

Arguably essentially the most uncared for residents of Delhi reside within the metropolis’s slum clusters, the so-called jhuggi-jhopdi colonies, a.okay.a. JJ colonies. As per authorities knowledge, town has 675 slums and 1,700 jhuggi-jhopdi clusters, residence to roughly 1.5 million voters. They’re among the many poorest within the nationwide capital and embrace migrant employees, whose providers are crucial to maintain the capital working. In not less than 10 meeting segments, these of us are believed to play an enormous hand in deciding who wins. On voting day, additionally they have a tendency to point out up in bigger numbers than others, a reality not misplaced on political events, who do their greatest to woo them.

Unsurprisingly, the BJP too has made tall guarantees to rework the lives of those folks. For instance, it promised that everybody would have a pucca home by 2022, whereas, in reality, a number of slums have been uprooted over the previous a number of years. AAP received two elections — in 2015 and 2020 — on the premise of its promise to offer free water and electrical energy to slum dwellers, one other promise sadly belied.

Almost 80 per cent of those voters, principally Dalits and minorities, supported AAP in 2015 and once more in 2020. The get together promised them free water and electrical energy and the general transformation of their settlements, together with a pucca residence for each household. An entire decade later, the situation of those settlements is virtually unchanged, solely worse in some areas.

So, whereas the BJP is busily selling its ‘har ghar nal se jal (faucet water in each residence)’ scheme, AAP crows about offering 20,000 litres of free water per household per 30 days. The fact, pricey reader, is starkly totally different. Overlook a faucet in each residence — most of those settlements should not have a single faucet connection! Water remains to be equipped by means of tankers, and there’s a determined scramble when one arrives on the scene. Every household will get barely two to a few buckets, and the water just isn’t secure for consuming.

Likewise, the promise was to construct bathrooms for each family, whereas, in reality, a couple of group bathrooms serve complete neighbourhoods, forcing residents to queue up each morning. Drainage is horrible and overflowing sewage a standard sight within the monsoon months, turning these settlements right into a dwelling nightmare.

These schemes have existed in Delhi for many years, with the primary such initiative relationship again to 1960, when slum dwellers had been allotted 80 square-yard plots to construct their very own houses. However as extra folks migrated to Delhi and settled in slums, their rehabilitation didn’t sustain with the migration, leaving hundreds caught in precarious situations.

It quickly turned evident that Delhi’s restricted land space made it unattainable to offer particular person plots to all slum dwellers. This led to a shift in coverage, changing land allotments with flat-based housing schemes. Throughout town, a number of such settlements, generally generally known as JJ colonies, have emerged. They’re often known as EWS colonies. Initially, these housing tasks consisted of three-storey buildings, however because of area constraints, multistoried house complexes are the brand new norm.

Simply 4 days earlier than the announcement of the meeting elections, PM Narendra Modi visited Ashok Vihar in west Delhi to inaugurate Swabhiman Flats, handing over keys to 1,400 households from the Jailerwala Bagh slum. The timing was no coincidence, and the (election) message fairly clear. The same occasion occurred in November 2022, when he allotted flats to three,024 households in a newly constructed house advanced in Kalkaji; the same redevelopment challenge is below means in Kathputli Colony.

The inspiration for the Kalkaji challenge was laid in 2013 below the management of then chief minister Sheila Dikshit and PM Manmohan Singh. The Congress has, in reality, accused each the Centre and the state authorities of failing to allot 46,000 housing models initiated by the Sheila Dikshit authorities, which had been in several levels of building.

The redevelopment of Kathputli Colony in Delhi’s Shadipur Depot space was handed over to a non-public builder in public-private partnership mode. The preliminary settlement was {that a} third of the land could be given to the builder for business use, whereas the remaining two-thirds could be allotted to housing for slum dwellers.

This ratio was later modified, to provide the builder 40 per cent (as an alternative of 33 per cent earlier), and based on a Frontline journal report, the scenario has worsened, with the builder and the DDA now retaining two-thirds of the land for themselves, leaving solely a 3rd for slum residents. The challenge started in 2014, however a decade later, the promised flats have nonetheless not materialised.

In the meantime, residents of the Kalkaji flats constructed a pair years in the past report that the administration nonetheless treats them like slum dwellers fairly than reputable home-owners. There’s water provide, however it isn’t match to drink. After repeated calls for, an RO system was put in, however it’s situated on the bottom ground, resulting in lengthy queues harking back to days after they needed to watch for tankers.

Poor building has led to widespread seepage within the partitions. As a substitute of bettering their dwelling situations, the authorities have merely relocated them from horizontal slums to what are actually being known as ‘vertical slums’.

The aam aadmi has been deserted to his sorry destiny. Presumably one of many the reason why Rahul Gandhi, Congress MP and Chief of the Opposition within the Lok Sabha, selected to go to the Valmiki Mandir the opposite day, in a symbolic expression of solidarity with town’s dispossessed. The temple is a part of the Harijan Basti colony — as soon as New Delhi’s largest slum — within the metropolis’s Gole Market space. It falls below the New Delhi meeting section, the place the Congress’s Sandeep Dikshit is taking up former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

It has a storied historical past, too. Mahatma Gandhi as soon as lived and taught youngsters from the Harijan Basti within the Valmiki Mandir, and his belongings have been preserved. Nehru, Patel and different nationwide leaders would steadily go to him right here and pictures adorning the partitions bear silent witness to that passage of historical past. Over time, the slum was transformed right into a deliberate residential colony, and previous households grateful to the Congress authorities that gave it form, nonetheless reside in these flats.