Not long after the CWG, the myth of Delhi as a ’world-class city’ came tumbling down on the heads of its dispossessed in a cruel, criminal and tragic way. Not far from the Games Village, in the crowded locality of Lalita Park in Laxminagar, East Delhi, a building packed with migrant workers collapsed without warning. 67 of them were killed, buried under the debris, and some 100 were injured, many of them severely. It emerged that the building had violated multiple building regulations, was built on the sandy Yamuna floodplain, and with the flooding during the monsoons, water had seeped to the foundations. As a result, the building, a flimsy construction having walls but no pillars, and bearing the weight of several illegal floors, collapsed.
It has since emerged that there are countless other buildings in a similarly unsafe condition. In a spectacular act of callousness, the authorities have summarily evicted the residents from these buildings and left them homeless, taking temporary shelter in MCD community halls and open parks.
In the aftermath of this terrible event, the Delhi Government and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi have come under the scanner for allowing rampant illegal and unauthorised constructions in a nexus with corrupt builders and landlords. The landlord, who owns several similar buildings and is known to have a hand in a variety of scams, has been arrested. The Congress-led Delhi Government has ordered a one-man judicial enquiry into the incident and tried to point fingers at the BJP-controlled MCD which gave permission for construction of the doomed building in the first place and allowed it to stand subsequently.
In the shadow-boxing between Congress and BJP over the incident, we are apt to lose sight of the real crime. To locate who really is responsible for this senseless death of 67 people, we need to dig deeper beneath the debris of the collapsed building and look beyond the petty perpetrators like the landlord and corrupt or negligent MCD authorities (though they too need to be brought to book). We need to see the building collapse, not as an ‘accident’ caused due to acts of omission but as part of the violence against the unorganised sector workers that is structured into the very process of liberalised ‘development.’
When a government spends Rs. 26,000 crore (the estimated amount spent on infrastructure towards CWG) on flyovers, airport modernization and metro but leaves the city’s poorest workers living in unsafe, insanitary slums and unauthorised colonies that are no better than death traps, it is nothing but an act of violence. The daily lives of the people who lived in the Lalita Park building exemplify this violence – it is only when a building collapses that the violence comes into public cognition.
In the first place, these workers were forced to migrate from rural W Bengal and Bihar thanks to unemployment ; in Delhi they had lived in the Yamuna Pushta slum but were evicted in 2008-09 to make way for a flyover. In the name of CWG, nearly 400,000 people from Delhi’s slum clusters (including the Yamuna Pushta slum) have been evicted since 2004. This was done in the name of conserving the environmentally fragile Yamuna flood plain. But in the eyes of governments and courts, only slum dwellers were a threat to the environment ; the vast Akshardham temple and the Games Village came up on the same space with impunity. In 2006, when evicted slum dwellers approached court, a Supreme Court judge held that the right to shelter did not mean that “all will be given shelter” and told them, “If you can’t afford to stay in Delhi, go elsewhere !”
Rendered homeless, such workers then pay much of their meagre income as exorbitant rents to landlords for the hellish homes, of which the building that collapsed was just one among many. Shiela Dixit was re-elected in the last Assembly elections on the strength of her promise of a ‘slum-free Delhi’ thanks to the JNNURM Rajiv Awas Yojana ; but while the evictions proceeded at a relentless pace, not a single Rajiv Awas house is yet to be allocated. In the wake of the disaster, the Delhi Government has announced that some 15,000 low-cost flats under the Rajiv Awas Yojana will soon be allotted to slum-dwellers. There are an estimated 10 lakh migrant workers in Delhi – can 15,000 flats (if and when they are allocated) be anything but a joke for them, who will continue to be condemned to live in slums in danger of being evicted or shanties in danger of being buried alive ?
Those who lost their lives in the building collapse are among that vast mass whose labour builds shining new Delhi and serves the affluent in their gated communities ; who are routinely paid less than minimum wages and killed at construction site accidents ; whose rickshaws and vending-carts are being taken off the streets ; whom the Delhi Government sought to hide behind ’vision-cutters’ so that they do not mar the vision of ’Incredible India’ that foreign guests came to see at CWG. These unorganised migrant workers, as a rule, have no ration cards and rarely voter i-cards, and therefore no access to social security. Evicted from slums, killed at construction sites, treated as vermin, buried under debris - why do the poor and migrant workers have no chance of a life of dignity and security ?
Those whose family members have been killed or injured in the building collapse must get dignified and adequate compensation. Not only must unsafe buildings be identified and demolished ; those living in them must be guaranteed dignified alternative accommodation. Authorities responsible for allowing these death traps to come up and remain, as well as unscrupulous builders and owners must be identified and punished. But these measures, while necessary, are still inadequate. Neither can cosmetic measures like the Rajiv Awas mirage suffice. The building collapse should serve as a warning bell to end the skewed urban planning policies that amount to a kind of urban apartheid, condemning an entire class of people to suffer inhuman living and working conditions while a small minority enjoys affluence and ‘development.’ Not until the lives and rights of unorganised workers and migrant workers cease to be seen as cheap and dispensable ; not until the ruling class stops sacrificing the workers’ rights to a living wage, dignified housing and workplace safety to subsidise ‘development’ can the victims of the Laxminagar collapse really get justice.