Bulldozed dreams: The vanishing slums of india’s expanding cities

By Raj Kumar Sinha 

"किसकी है जनवरी, किसका अगस्त है?

कौन यहां सुखी है, कौन यहां मस्त है?

महल आबाद है झोपड़ी उजाङ है,

गरीबों की बस्ती में उखाड़ है पछाड़ है।"

(“Whose is January, whose is August?

Who here is happy, who here is content?

Palaces flourish while huts are torn apart,

In the colonies of the poor there is only uprooting and despair.”)

These lines of poet Baba Nagarjun remain as relevant today as when they were first written. The ever-expanding cities continue to draw the rural unemployed in search of livelihoods, forcing them to make homes in slums and survive under inhuman conditions. In Delhi, the government once promised “where there is a slum, there will be a house.” Instead, successive demolitions have driven thousands of the city’s slum dwellers onto the streets.

Delhi officially recognizes over 675 slum clusters, all part of the capital’s urban sprawl. Legally, these colonies are entitled to protection and rehabilitation. Yet without alternatives, they are being razed with bulldozers. From Madras Camp to Wazirpur, and from Jailerwala Bagh to Ashok Vihar, entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Since June 2025 alone, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has demolished more than 1,500 homes, displacing nearly 27,000 people. An estimated 9,000 among them have been denied even basic rehabilitation under public housing schemes.

Life inside these settlements is already a daily struggle—schools and hospitals are scarce, taps exist but water doesn’t, sanitation is poor, and garbage piles up. People arrive here leaving behind villages and states in search of work, only to watch their fragile shelters fall to bulldozers. Women, children, and the elderly suffer the most from these demolitions. Children, in particular, bear the trauma of losing their homes along with disruption in their education. Families say politicians assure them before elections that no demolitions will take place, but after polls, they face harassment and neglect. Even electricity meters are denied, yet electricity bills are demanded as proof of residence.

The picture is grim: bulldozers are being used to create cities where there is no space for the poor who build and sustain them. No society, institution, or industry can function without workers, and cities cannot develop without their labor. Yet the very people who clean, construct, and transport—who keep the urban machine running—are denied dignity, security, and a place to live.

The scale of the problem is immense. According to the 2011 Census, India had 1.23 lakh slums housing about 65.5 million people. In Delhi, more than 35,000 flats built under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) remain unallocated, lying in ruins. Projects such as the Rajiv Ratan Awas Yojana, launched in 2005 to provide homes for the poor, have failed to deliver. In other states too, such as Madhya Pradesh, governments are planning mass slum clearance campaigns, even as these settlements house large segments of urban populations.

Meanwhile, the government’s Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015 with a massive budget of two lakh crore rupees, has been wound up after achieving only partial implementation. Only 16 cities completed their projects, while most others were left incomplete. The United Nations had already warned in its 2014 report that rapid, unplanned urbanization was fueling sprawl, pollution, environmental degradation, and unsustainable patterns of consumption and production.

Urbanization in India cannot mean bulldozers and evictions. What is needed is upgrading of slums, not erasure. That requires improving living conditions responsibly, ensuring access to land rights, credit, and essential services, and providing decent housing both in the short and long term. For millions of working-class families, this is not just a housing issue—it is about survival, dignity, and the constitutional right to life guaranteed under Article 21.

As India’s cities continue to expand, the question remains: will they be built for the rich alone, or will the workers who sustain them also find a place within?

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Bargi Dam Displaced and Affected People’s Association