Coping with the Threat of Evictions: Commercialisation of Slum Development, Marginalisation of NGOs and Local Power Play in Ahmedabad

The ‘slum-free India’ slogan that came to the fore in urban policy discourses in the mid-2000s has marked the draconian shift from in-situ slum improvement to slum relocation. Accordingly, the burgeoning literature on urban governance in India has portrayed slum dwellers as victims of such neoliberal forms of development. Despite its unique focus on the socio-spatial configuration of poor people’s exclusion, it has paid little attention to their resilience to such processes. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from two slums in Ahmedabad, this paper examines the manner in which some residents collectively negotiated with the local government either in defense of their right to housing or in pursuit of personal gains through manipulating the compensation for relocation. This paper has three objectives. Firstly, it gives an overview of the Slum Networking Program (SNP), which was implemented from 1996 to the late 2000s through a partnership between aid agencies, local government, non-government organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs), as an example of in-situ slum improvement. Secondly, it portrays the process by which the SNP was replaced with some rehabilitation schemes as evident in the provision of dwelling units in multi-storied housing blocks, which are typically located in urban fringes. Thirdly, it presents the diverse strategies that slum dwellers took to claim their right to housing and livelihood. Some residents sought redress with an NGO and the opposition party. Some residents sought cooperation from their neighbors through coercive means and attempted to obtain more compensation than would be available to them by claiming inappropriate data on their households and neighborhoods. This paper concludes by stressing that the powerful in a slum can mobilize an ‘illegitimate’ means of survival when they are at risk of eviction and deprived of access to ‘legitimate’ channels of claim-making such as NGOs.