Every Metro ride in Delhi bombards us with advertisements celebrating India’s housing miracle. The government claims that under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), it builds 150 pucca houses every 20 minutes. That’s six houses every minute. Juxtapose this with the rate of demolition – roughly one home destroyed every 16 minutes – and a staggering statistic emerges: we are building 96 houses for every one we demolish. But for whom? https://thewire.in/urban/cities-not-medhu-vadas-or-donuts-how-new-india-is-shunting-its-poor-out-of-urban-centres
On a quiet morning in Bhoomiheen Camp, Delhi, bulldozers rolled in and erased over 3,000 homes. In Nalasopara’s Agrawal Nagar, Mumbai, another 2,500 homes met the same fate. Siasat Nagar in Ahmedabad saw 8,000 homes razed; Janta Colony in Chandigarh lost another 2,500. Just these four demolitions in the past six months account for approximately 16,000 houses destroyed, substantiating the rate of demolition. As per rough estimates, this renders one Indian homeless every three minutes.
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The arithmetic is as follows. Total houses demolished is 16,000 (3000+2500+8000+2500). A time frame of six months means 180 days or 4,320 hours or 259,200 minutes. This minute-count, divided by the total count of houses demolished gives us the rate of one house destroyed every 16.2 minutes. If the construction rate is six houses a minute, as the government claims, and the demolition rate is 0.0625 houses a minute (at one house per 16.2 minutes), then the ratio is 96:1. |
This is not an unfortunate paradox. It is a deliberate and coherent strategy of dispossession. A two-pronged state policy where housing becomes a tool of governance and exclusion, while demolition becomes the everyday method of urban planning.
Have you seen a donut or a medhu vada? This is what our governments are trying to make a city look like, evicting urban poor from the centre and relocating them to their vertical pigeonholes named as rehabilitation and sesettlement colonies built on the urban peripheries under respective housing schemes. One hand of the state builds houses to celebrate statistics; the other razes homes to sanitize the city of its poor. Where did the residents of Nagla Machi, a settlement which was evicted to construct Akshardham Temple go? Savda Ghevra in West Delhi, more than 25 kilometres from the current location. It is not the failure of a welfare state, but the success of an exclusionary statecraft.
Housing vs. Houses: Lives Erased in the Name of Urban Reforms
To understand the crisis, we must first confront the lie at the heart of the word “housing.” A house is not a home. A structure is not a shelter. A basti is not just a collection of tin roofs and brick walls. It is an ecosystem, a geography of survival. A place where women run tailoring units, children walk to government schools, elders access nearby dispensaries, families borrow salt from neighbours, and migrants find their first foothold into the city. Bastis were not built overnight like rehabilitation colonies, bastis have seen a transition from a house to a lane to a flourished settlement, sometimes with basic services, sometimes in a fight to gain one
When demolition squads come, usually without notice, often backed by police, they do not just raze homes, they erase entire social fabrics. In Indore’s Bhuri Tekri, a site for In Situ slum Redevelopment (ISSR), houses were demolished just six months after they had constructed toilets in their homes under Swachh Bharat Scheme. The SBM toilets were demolished too during the eviction drive and then they were shifted to transit homes. Several women told me how demolitions led to school dropouts, job losses, and medical crises as their housing was disrupted.
One mother said, “My daughter hasn’t attended her school for two months. Earlier we just had financial concerns, now the school is so far from our house.“
In Navi Mumbai’s Baltu Bai Nagar, demolitions under the pretext of beautification left daily wage workers displaced and invisible. Some were given slips for alternate housing that never materialized. Most simply vanished from public policy and public space.
PMAY: Housing for Whom?
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U), launched in 2015 with great fanfare, promised to construct 2 crore houses in urban areas by 2022. This number was later quietly reduced to 1.2 crore citing “lack of demand”—a convenient reframing that ignored the millions excluded by design. PMAY-U’s first phase operated through four verticals: In Situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR), Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP), Beneficiary-Led Construction (BLC), and Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS).
ISSR, the only vertical actually meant for slum dwellers, remained a non-starter. As of 2022, a shocking 2.5% of the total houses sanctioned under PMAY-U came through ISSR. This statistic alone exposes the apathy towards upgrading informal settlements. Instead, the lion’s share – more than 75 lakh houses – were sanctioned under BLC, a vertical that assumes beneficiaries own land and can build their own homes. Here’s the contradiction: out of these 75 lakh BLC houses, only about 26 lakh were for slum dwellers or the urban poor. Where did the remaining 49 lakh houses go? Who were the real beneficiaries? If this was a scheme for the poor, why do the numbers overwhelmingly benefit those who already possess the one thing most urban poor are denied—legal tenure?
The BLC vertical, which requires land titles, acts as a gatekeeping device. It filters out those without formal documents – migrant workers, tenants in informal housing, Dalits and Muslims disproportionately excluded from land ownership. This is not just poor design. It is active exclusion, cleverly masquerading as housing policy. This design flaw is the point. The scheme rewards legal ownership, not need. In cities like Indore, land was forcibly cleared under Smart City missions. Demolitions were presented as urban renewal, but the real goal was to vacate land for commercial redevelopment. In Navi Mumbai, land cleared of working-class settlements under the pretext of CRZ violations now hosts malls, hotels, and gated housing. Khori Gaon in Faridabad was demolished because it was on the forest land but at the same land Vivanta stands tall.
When you follow the trail of bulldozers and balance sheets, it becomes clear: PMAY doesn’t merely overlook the poor. It actively reorganises urban space in a way that pushes them out. The poor are not unintended casualties of this scheme – they are its targets.
This is not urban planning; this is urban cleansing.
Development by Demolition
In 2022–23 alone, over
Now consider the government’s claim: PMAY constructs approximately 0.6 houses per minute and completes 0.45. Impressive on paper. The government claims to have completed 15,42,952 houses under all verticals combined – the highest number in a single calendar year since the scheme began. But juxtapose that with the ground reality: based on HLRN’s data, one person is rendered homeless every three minutes, an estimated 1,53,829 house demolitions during the same period of 2022-23 (with actual numbers likely higher). This contrast raises important questions: What are we demolishing homes for, and who are the new homes being built for?
The language used – “encroachment removal,” “beautification,” “smart city development” – is clinical. But it serves to obscure the real violence. These terms are not neutral; they erase both the people and the politics behind forced evictions. They allow state machinery to sanitise brutality and package it as progress. From sanitation workers to domestic help, construction labourers to vendors, the poor are critical to the urban economy. Yet, they remain absent in urban plans. In Indore, entire settlements were labelled as “illegal” overnight. In Delhi, colonies that have existed for decades were declared encroachments before international events. What links these disparate events is a state policy that criminalises the poor and valorises concrete.
The right to the city has become the right to invest, to build, to sanitise, but not to belong. The idea of a citizen is being replaced by the idea of a consumer. If you cannot pay, you cannot stay. This is what empowers even courts to use the words like “iron hands” to remove urban poor from their houses to build a link road, or a flyover.
What does it say about a society that builds six houses for every one it destroys, and still ends up with more people on the streets? It says that these houses are not meant for the evicted. It says that the state’s housing policy is not a ladder for the poor, it’s a wall that keeps them out. This is not development; it is erasure impersonating as planning. It is eviction as governance. It is a deliberate erasure of lives, communities, and histories in the name of global competitiveness. We are not building homes for the poor, we are building a city without them. Our sanitised urban imagination dispossess urban poor from their right to the city. Even when houses are built, they often remain unoccupied—too far, too costly, too disconnected from employment, healthcare, and schools. People call them “towers of exile”—multi storey cages that strip away the community ties that once made bastis liveable.
Urban India is being reimagined—but not for the people who built it. UN-Habitat defines adequate housing through seven criteria: legal tenure, habitability, affordability, availability of services, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. PMAY fulfils none for the poorest, except a bare minimum four walls and a roof. Housing without dignity, relocation without access, and numbers without people is not a welfare scheme. It is state-managed displacement.
A City Without Its Makers
The narrative of India’s urban transformation hides its ugliest truth: we are building cities on bulldozed homes, and on the backs of those we refuse to see. PMAY, Smart Cities, beautification drives – all operate in concert to create a city that shines, but only for some.
To celebrate housing construction without accounting for demolition is not just misleading; it is violent. It turns cities into zones of exclusion, where the poor are first erased from land, then from policy, and finally from memory. Who remembers Nagla Machi in Delhi? Who remembers C.P. Shekhar Nagar in Indore?
It is time to call this what it is: an architecture of displacement. A strategy that rewards capital and criminalises care. A city that measures success by GDP and square feet, not by dignity or justice. The poor do not lack housing. The state lacks the will to recognise their right to the city. Until that changes, every house built will carry the ghost of a home destroyed.
Ankit Jha
08/07/2025