OUR STUDENTS continued Doctoral candidate Debangana Bose researches informal land ownership and its governance in Delhi, India, as a lens for examining the relations among peri-urban governance, citizenship rights, land-property management and slum dwellers’ experiences of displacement. Since India opened up to the global investment market in 1991, thousands have been evicted from the inner city and resettled on the city’s periphery in planned resettlement colonies, to create a slum-free image of Delhi. In summer 2015, Bose conducted preliminary dissertation field work in one such resettlement colony, Savdha, located in Delhi’s western periphery. Bose discovered that the resettlement of slum dwellers in the periphery created diverse land-tenure systems and illegal settlements within planned resettlement colonies. The resettlement policy permits the resettled to live on — but not own, rent or sell — plots, and prohibits commercial activities in the resettlement colonies. The resettlement program provides a conditional land lease to the slum dwellers valid for 10 years and restricts full land rights. The conditions of the lease include cancellation of plots if the beneficiary of the plot does not build a concrete house within three months or discontinue residing in the house later to
prevent absentee-land occupancy. The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) — the Delhi government‘s wing responsible for managing resettlement plots — has cancelled around 30 percent of allotted plots in Savdha. However, it remains unclear what the DUSIB does with the cancelled and retrieved plots. Bose plans to examine this issue. The lack of job opportunities, land-tenure rights and prohibition of commercial activities has compelled 40 percent of settlers to sell their plots through illegal land markets controlled by land mafias who sell the plots to other displaced poor, creating new forms of illegal settlements. The reasons for the differential treatment by the DUSIB between the slum dwellers practicing illegal land transactions and slum dwellers leaving their plots unused is unknown; why some of the resettled engage in illegal activities, whereas others do not. Through future field research, Bose will ask what factors affect the decision to sell the plots by the beneficiaries. This line of inquiry will reveal how new subjectivities and associated practices are formed among slum dwellers in light of their differential treatment.
Doctoral candidate Debangana Bose researches the differential treatment of slum dwellers in Delhi, India
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