How DDA has Failed Delhi’s Working Class

Jai Singh is a cobbler who runs a small kiosk outside the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) colony in Ashram. He sits on the pavement during the day. At night, he covers his shelter with a tarpaulin to turn it into his home. Jai Singh is a migrant worker from Rajasthan. Asked where he cooks his food and where does he go to answer nature’s call, he replies: The Bala Sahib Gurudwara nearby. 

Perhaps, Jai Singh is fortunate to be living close to a gurudwara, but, for more than 70 per cent of the informal workforce living in Delhi, life is an everyday struggle and it’s getting all the more tough. 

Housing is a big nightmare for Delhi’s working class. They cannot rent a house as it is very costly and are forced to stay in shanty colonies and slums that are now bursting at the seams. This is also a fallout of DDA’s faulty policy. The authority built houses predominantly for the middle classes, ignoring the need for and significance of public housing. 

According to the Delhi government’s own estimates, only 23.7 per cent of the city’s population lives in designated planned colonies. The rest either live in completely illegal colonies or settlements  that were never authorised for development and, hence, have grown unplanned. 

The absence of planning has led to not just violation of building codes that include space requirements for road and other gird access, these settlements are also not integrated to the city’s bulk infrastructure delivery system. 

Such settlements have been classified and have the following percentage of population residing in them. 

1. Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (JJC): 14.8% 

2. Slum designated areas: 19.1 %

3. Unauthorised colonies: 5.3 %

4. Resettlement colonies: 12.7 %

5. Regularised unauthorised colonies: 12.7 %

6. Rural villages: 5.3 %

7. Urban Villages: 6.4% 

8. Planned colonies: 23.7%

This categorisation has been recognised in the Delhi 2021 Master Plan as unplanned areas. 

This form of classification does not just reflect the physical presence of human beings vis-à-vis space, it also signifies the differentiated citizenship developed according to these spaces. 

It is a form of a system by which the state assigns different levels of services to different categories of citizens based on their tenurial status. 

Why is spatial exclusion so wide in a city like Delhi which is also a centre of national governance? Gautam Bhan of the Indian Institute of Human Settlements has said spatial exclusion in Delhi is not a product of failed planning but of planning itself. According to him the practice begins at the highest level of state development and is driven by the city’s most powerful agency, the DDA. 

The DDA has the full responsibility for land management and development, including public housing. Successive master plans for Delhi issued in 1962, 1990 and 2007 prepared by the DDA have both systematically undersupplied the amount of land notified for urban development and undersupplied the estimated required stock of low cost public housing. 

Not only has the DDA fallen behind in delivering the number of planned housing units, the stock of built housing has also skewed dramatically in favour of higher income groups. In the period of 2004-2013, only 10 per cent of the houses were designated for the economically weaker sections. 

In the absence of public housing, there is this huge informal sector that gets developed which does not just construct houses but also brings in a new space of housing for the poor. The DDA’s failure to develop land and housing has been met by the massive construction of ‘unauthorised’ settlements outside the limits of the plans and occupation of underdeveloped land within the city. 

To quote from a Delhi project report, this form of policy has led to three important manifestations which are starkly witnessed in and around the city.  

1. There is a clear class bias in the housing provided by the DDA. It was proactive in providing housing for higher income groups. But for the poorer sections who apparently constitute a majority in the city, it has been a failure.

2. The city has grown with closure and privilege language of the state. Exclusion is quite inherent in policy planning. Various reports of the DDA speak about its efforts to ‘protect’ the city from unplanned settlements through a vigorous programme of fencing the vacant pockets so that lands are saved from encroachments. 

3. The overall pattern of investment has favoured the upper middle-class infrastructure over land development and housing for the poor. One can easily find the widening of the roads, construction of flyovers etc. for the big guzzlers to run at faster speeds but the space of the pedestrians and cyclists has been squeezed. The latter mode of transport is the primary mode for the informal working class in the city. 

Roti, Kapda aur Makaan (food, clothing and housing) was a Congress slogan in the ’70s. A similar slogan was coined by the Pakistan Peoples Party in Pakistan.  Both political outfits were able to ride these slogans because the three were the basic needs of the people back then. Not just that, a Bollywood movie of the same name, produced by Manoj Kumar in 1974, also became a super hit. But even after four decades of such sloganeering, the challenges of housing remain high and people like Jai Singh continue to live under the tarpaulin sheets on the pavement.