'We Were Given 72 Hours': Delhi's Resettlement Residents Speak Out on a Housing Policy That Keeps Moving the Goalposts

The demolition notices arrived on a Tuesday morning in late June. Residents of the Khanpur Extension resettlement colony, a dense grid of kaccha structures south of Tughlakabad, say they had 72 hours to vacate before municipal workers arrived with earthmovers. Several families had lived on those plots since 2009, when the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board — DUSIB — shifted them from a riverbank jhuggi cluster near the Okhla Barrage. Sixteen years later, they are being moved again.

This is not an isolated incident. Across Delhi, a city that houses an estimated 3 million people in unauthorised or semi-authorised settlements, a quiet crisis in housing administration is producing very loud consequences. The timing matters: the Delhi government is under pressure from the Central government to accelerate Phase 4 of the Metro expansion, several corridors of which cut through densely populated low-income zones in Janakpuri, Krishna Nagar and Lajpat Nagar. Where Metro construction goes, resettlement follows. And where resettlement goes, so do the stories of people who fell through the administrative cracks.

Waiting Lists, Missing Files, Vanishing Allotments

At the DUSIB office in Patparganj, the queues form before 8 a.m. Residents from the Seemapuri belt, Bhalswa Dairy and the Wazirpur Industrial Area describe a process that is less a system than a lottery. Eligibility for a DUSIB flat under the Janta Flat scheme requires documentation — a ration card, a voter ID linked to the original address, and a cut-off date proving residence before January 1, 2015. The problem, residents say, is that the cut-off date has shifted three times since 2019, and the files that proved earlier residence have, in numerous documented cases, simply gone missing.

The numbers are stark. DUSIB's own annual report from 2024-25 acknowledged a backlog of over 1.1 lakh pending flat allotments against completed housing stock across sites including Narela, Rohini Sector 34, and Dwarka Sector 16B. A two-room DUSIB flat in Narela — a 25-square-metre unit — carries a subsidised cost of approximately Rs 5.5 lakh under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana linkage, but residents report unofficial facilitation fees of Rs 40,000 to Rs 80,000 demanded at various stages of the documentation process, claims the board has denied.

At Bhalswa, where the municipal landfill casts its particular shadow over roughly 35,000 people living nearby, the community has been waiting since 2021 for a resettlement notification that was announced, then deferred, then announced again. The AAP government cited land acquisition complications in Bawana as the reason for the latest delay. The Kejriwal administration has pointed to the Central government's refusal to release Urban Development Fund allocations on schedule; the BJP's Delhi unit counters that DUSIB's administrative failures predate any funding dispute.

What the Policy Actually Says — and What Happens on the Ground

Delhi's Master Plan 2041, notified by the Delhi Development Authority in February 2023, designates significant portions of the urban periphery — including swaths of Mehrauli, Najafgarh and the Yamuna floodplain — as zones for in-situ slum redevelopment, meaning residents should, in theory, be resettled within the same neighbourhood rather than pushed to the city's edge. The gap between that stated policy and ground-level practice is where community frustration lives.

Residents from Kathputli Colony in Shadipur, perhaps the most-studied resettlement case in Delhi, have been shuffled between transit camps since 2017. The promised return to redeveloped flats on the original 5.4-acre site has been pushed to at least 2027, according to documents from DDA's project directorate reviewed this week. Families who were weavers, puppeteers and folk artists — the colony's identity — now describe struggling to practise their craft in 20-square-metre transit units in Anand Parbat.

Community organisations including the Housing and Land Rights Network, which operates from offices in Nizamuddin East, are advising affected residents to file individual representations with the DDA's grievance cell before July 31, a deadline linked to the current review cycle of the Master Plan 2041 implementation schedule. Legal aid is available through the Delhi High Court's Legal Services Committee at Sher Shah Road. For those in active demolition zones, a stay application under Section 151 of the Code of Civil Procedure remains the most immediate recourse — but it requires documentation that many residents, by the nature of their situation, do not have.