Shattered lives: Where do the victims of Tughlaqabad demolition drive in Delhi go?

Reena Sharma, 40, has been on a sit-in protest since April 30. She refuses to leave the rubble of her demolished home until her family and their neighbours are rehabilitated. Hers is one of nearly 2,000 families that were left homeless after the Archaeological Survey of India launched an “anti-encroachment” drive at Bengali Camp in Chhuriya Mohalla of Delhi’s Tughlaqabad village late last month.

The drive to remove encroachments from the protected area around the Tughlaqabad Fort, ASI officials said, had been pending for years. They were only able to carry it out on April 30 and May 1, they claimed, because they finally received support from the local administration. However, some residents claim that that the demolitions were part of the drive by a raft of state and central government agencies to give the capital a facelift ahead of G20 summit meetings in September. The drive has rendered homeless an estimated 2,60,000 people who were residing in jhuggis, informal settlements and independent homes in Tughlagabad, Mehrauli, Dhaula Kuan, Moolchand Basti, and the Yamuna floodplains.

In Tughlaqabad alone, more than 10,000 people have been affected. Some, like Reena Sharma’s parents, had been living there since 1997. In that time, they had slowly transformed their homes from shanties...

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