This Project is an initiative to archive past and ongoing evictions in Delhi to question as well as mobilize action for the prevention of further evictions. Since 1990, Delhi has witnessed an urban restructuring through forced eviction and peripheral resettlement of homes and families. Yet this is a story about the city that is not either known or told at the scale it should be. The Missing Basti
Project seeks to document these forced evictions and create a public archive that recognizes this facet of the city’s intended “world-class” transformation. In total, this website brings together various data sources and research into a single platform to underscore the scale and severity of such evictions. On date, we have recorded nearly 300 evictions, starting from 1990. Forced evictions violate the rights of working families, erases a lifetime of investment in incrementally built homes, debilitates pathways to inter-generational social mobility, and deepens social inequalities structured and produced through caste, gender and religious faultlines. The archive is one part of what is needed to resist such violations of the rights of Delhi’s residents, in a hope that the act of recording and bearing testament can lead us to preventing future evictions and building a right to the city for all.
