The razing of houses continues along the sewage drain that extends from the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium to the new sports facilities behind INA market.

These are pictures taken this morning in the Kotla Mubarakpur stretch.
In the 35-40 years that these families have dwelt here, their homes have been razed twice before. As this is the third time, they have learnt to cope, being that their livelihoods are here and they hope, as promised before the last election, that all the dwellers here would get pukka houses nearby. This being their main incentive, apart from their existing livelihoods nearby, makes them determined to continue to stay in the rubble.
The local MLA has been hiding from them since the houses were razed, they said.

Into the third day now, they have reconstructed makeshift homes which they dismantle each morning. The police trouble them all day. At night, poles and plastic sheets again reconstruct a shanty town. Some have shifted to the pavement across the road, where a few homes that already existed were not touched. Others have set up huts in a nearby park.

Two small temples have been left standing. The larger temple is already expanding its footprint, as new barbed wire demarcates extra area for expansion. "We have to do this. Look how small my baby is. Can he live in the open in this cold?" a mother said. The night temperatures touch 11*. She said the temple belongs to her father in law.

The grand dog belongs to 'someone very big in the supreme court' who owns a cargo/tempo service. A large plot within this area of demolished huts is used for parking his vehicles. These tempos were not touched by the bulldozers.
The toilet with a cemented WC has been built over a sewage pipe. 'If they bulldoze that, sewage will explode over them,' I was told, and the morning mist comes over the site and opens the sewage drain. Huts multiplied into hundreds in this ugly, filthy drain over the past 45 years.
Families, buffaloes, pigs, and geese, all lived in utter squalor.
They used the material people like me threw out to build themselves homes.

Gently he chisels intact bricks free to use again.

A shoe and a ball of wool. Signs of lives lost in the rubble

These were walls and windows

Behind a temple left untouched. A new barbed wire fence. Huts that come up each night and are taken down each morning.

This is the temple with idols on the side wall just above the rolled tarpaulin, and nightly huts visible behind.

Her home, her child, her work.
This bathroom has a sover braided charpoy for one wall.

Children are our future.
reflecting out times

' We shifted here.'

' I built this toilet with my own hands.'


Today those huts behind are to be razed.
Strange how raising huts and razing huts sounds just the same in English, but
to Delhi, by and large, either process makes no difference.
source by: Mr.Herman Kumara