Daily Archives: July 12, 2018

#UprootedChildhood – When Children Rebuild Their Lost Homes Even At Playtime

What happens when evictions become a frequented reality in one’s life? Sometimes, children start building a safe space of their own, even before they can play. Presenting one such story from Navi Mumbai.

Losing home, again

Jyoti with her siblings and cousins outside their current temporary home (From left to right – Dasrath, Uma with Lakhan, Poonam, Pooja, Jyoti and Shiva)

A little over a year ago, when houses in the informal settlement of Mata Ramai Nagar, Khanda Colony, Panvel, were demolished Jyoti’s house was one of the many structures razed. In the days that followed, as the family pieced together their belongings and began re-making their home, class IV student Jyoti and her siblings played a game they had never played before. They started building a small house, exactly in the way they had seen their parents rebuild their home each time it had been destroyed. ‘We’ve seen people building houses around us so many times. We thought, why not give it a try’, she said, going on to explain the process chronologically.

First we dug a hole, then we got the sticks together which would form the frame of the house. We had to cut them precisely, breaking them with a spear which we managed to get from one of our family members. We tied the sticks together with a string, and then we attached paper on the roof of the house. It was ready to be used,’ she said confidently. When asked where she managed to get all the material to build this house, she said she used what was lying around her, pieces of her own home and her neighbours, left behind after the demolition.

Another fragile home for play

The makeshift house constructed by Jyoti and her siblings became their play space for the next few days. They would eat and sleep there, and play as if entertaining guests, pretending to cook meals too. The house lasted for another week before the civic authorities arrived for another set of demolitions, razing it to the ground, again. They tried to build another home a few months later, but Jyoti’s brother jumped on it and it broke. The pieces were fed to their stove as dinner was being cooked.

Jyoti and her brothers stand next to the house they have just rebuilt

Experiencing evictions

YUVA’s recent report highlights how, since 2015, forced evictions in Navi Mumbai have drastically risen. While communities never evicted since being formed in the early 90s were now being evicted for the first time, those who were evicted twice a year earlier experienced twice-a-month evictions in 2016, largely driven by infrastructure development plans, metro railway constructions, and city beautification projects. In the case of Mata Ramai Nagar, located on City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) land, the Panvel Municipal Corporation drove evictions.

Given the frequent spate of evictions, children are no longer unfamiliar with these processes. ‘Many a time, we have had to go for work even when there was a threat of eviction, else our employers threatened to fire us. The children at home packed up our belongings and kept it outside the house to reduce our losses,’ says Sunita Sawar, Jyoti’s aunt, who works as house help in the nearby areas. During one eviction drive, as Jyoti was running away from the bulldozers, three nails got lodged in her feet. ‘I ran towards her to rescue her, and received blows from the municipal authority in return,’ said her grandmother.

Repeated evictions have often led to loss of school books and uniforms. ‘Fed up with these mounting losses, once we walked to the local MLA’s house with the children, spending the night on the road to protest against the injustice caused to us. He didn’t meet us,’ said Sunita. When asked how they respond to evictions, Pooja, Jyoti’s cousin mentioned how she feels scared. At Mata Ramai Nagar they would be stranded in at the time of evictions, with the railway tracks on one side of them and constructions on the other side. There was no place to go. Many people were also jailed during the time of evictions, especially the men.

Adjusting to home away from home

Jyoti outside her home

On the day we met Jyoti, she returned home from school with her siblings at 5 pm. As we waited for her in the family’s temporary one-room structure at Khanda Colony, talking to her parents, aunt and grandmother, all of whom live together, they told us why they were living there now. The rains had ravaged their former home, and it was impossible to live there. A builder on the same site had created a construction which was directing water into their homes and those of their neighbours. Already, some people in the neighbourhood had slipped, fallen into the water and died. The family considers themselves lucky that they could move here for the rainy months. ‘Snakes and scorpions were entering the house. It was becoming really unsafe. Besides, the children were constantly falling sick in that damp and wet house,’ says Sunita.

The current house is not bereft of dampness either. The walls are thinly plastered, with large gaps in between. But they have access to electricity here, something that was denied to them in their former home. ‘We lived in a pucca house earlier but it was demolished. We have lived in Mata Ramai Nagar since 2002. When we moved, there were just 10–12 families in the area. Over the years, the settlement increased in size and currently there are approximately 150–200 households there,’ said Ratna, Jyoti’s mother.

The family’s earnings are mostly spent on food and medicines. The 11 family members residing in the one-room structure are cramped for space. ‘We have struggled a lot through our lives. We only hope that with the education they receive our children can build a better life and home for themselves,’ says Ratna.

Going to school

Jyoti’s current school is over 4 km away from their house. The 5 siblings (including Jyoti and her cousins) pile onto 2 cycles, driving them amidst the traffic on the roads. The parents worry about their safety on the road, but they are unable to provide any other option for them. Once they are back from school, the children go to fill water in the neighbourhood. Then they sit down to complete their homework and if they get any more time they watch some TV. ‘We miss our friends from Mata Ramai Nagar. Some of them have returned to their village, others are still living there. A few of them come over here sometimes and we play catch or kho-kho with them,’ says Jyoti.

Frequently displaced

Jyoti’s family is just one of hundreds getting regularly evicted from a place they call home. In Navi Mumbai, families experiencing these threats number in thousands. While Jyoti’s family has been lucky to find another temporary home and the children have been able to continue with school, others are not so fortunate. When the house is razed down, children frequently find themselves homeless and out of school given their displacement, the increased distance from school (if resettled elsewhere), and the losses suffered. The lack of data on the number of children affected during evictions highlights the invisibilisation of the issue and the glaring gap waiting to be addressed.

In such situations, what is unthinkable often becomes a part of reality. Children learn how to build a home; those around them don’t react to this enactment, knowing how evictions frequent their daily lives.

#UprootedChildhoods is a collaboration between Leher and YUVA (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action), attempting to spark dialogue on a critical yet oft invisibilised concern—the views of children on housing. The campaign draws from YUVA’s in-depth interventions with children over the years across cities, and Leher’s focus and commitment to child rights, with a preventive approach towards child protection. Through the different blogs, photo essays, video stories, infographics and other formats we hope to present many faces of urban childhoods.

#UprootedChildhoods – Gulsabha Idrisi

“Mujhe ek alag kamra chahiye… I want a separate room of my own. There should be a separate toilet, kitchen and study room for us at home,” appeals 12 year old Gulsabha from Ambedkar Chowk in Ambujwadi, Mumbai who lives in constant threat of her home being evicted.

#UprootedChildhoods is a collaboration between Leher and YUVA (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action), attempting to spark dialogue on a critical yet oft invisibilised concern—the views of children on housing. The campaign draws from YUVA’s in-depth interventions with children over the years across cities, and Leher’s focus and commitment to child rights, with a preventive approach towards child protection. Through the different blogs, photo essays, video stories, infographics and other formats we hope to present many faces of urban childhoods.

#UprootedChildhood: Growing Up With Evictions

Bulldozers. Crumbling walls. Rubble. Fallen electric poles. Lost possessions. Vanished memories. Broken childhoods. A home lost forever.

In 2018, Housing and Land Rights Network published a factsheet—2.6 lakh people were forcefully evicted across rural and urban India in 2017. This was a ‘conservative’ estimate, they said, and the actual figures are likely to be much higher. The evictions took place despite the government’s Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Housing for All by 2022 Mission). Evictions were carried out, often without following standard processes (such as giving the community adequate notice before demolishing their houses). Resettlement, if at all, has been in inadequate, cramped, unsafe, and unhealthy surroundings.

The feeling of standing as audience while your home gets pulled down, scurrying to fetch the last of your belongings that you can get your hands on, and the trauma of having to accept that your home will never be your home again is unfathomable to those who have never experienced it. Imagine these effects on children, who constitute about 40% of an informal settlement’s population.

To those insulated from such realities, evictions may seem justified in the name of city beautification, and ‘development’ plans for urban centres. After all, the goal of creating world-class, slum-free cities has been broadcast in mainstream media and drilled into popular imagination in different ways and formats. The roads seem so crowded anyway with these ‘encroachers’ and ‘illegal’ citizens, who often don’t have to pay any taxes (never mind their earning potential). Why should we clamour for their housing rights, when our own housing space is becoming a luxury?

We need to talk because forced evictions constitute gross human rights violations, particularly the right to adequate housing. Far from providing marginalised people access to better lives, they are the tools propagating the poverty cycle further, ensuring that the inequality gap gets larger, not just in terms of wealth distribution, but access to basic facilities and services too.

Evictions are an everyday phenomenon in our fast developing nation, and children its worst victims. From denial of food, water, health, education, a number of child rights are violated when children are evicted from their homes and left homeless. The sudden loss of a secure home, being uprooted from a familiar community, exposure to harsh weather, loss of schooling, child labour, unsafe conditions … the list of wrongs inflicted on children is endless.

Millions of children grow up watching their houses being demolished and rebuilt over years of hard labour, only to be demolished again …. and such fortunes are faced by their children too as the cycle repeats itself unceasingly.

When a home is demolished, years of effort to set up a dignified life come crashing within a second. Children watch their parents standing helplessly as homes are brought down; these impacts on their mental and physical state are unknown.

Evictions cause great damage to and loss of household possessions. School books and uniforms go missing, sometimes they are even confiscated, along with other items. Hard-won certificates and awards are lost. Families often end up losing their legal entitlements, making it difficult for them to access basic services (such as a water/electricity connection) in future.

Rehousing provisions, if any, are often at distant, often unfamiliar locations. Families are forced to occupy cramped living quarters in rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) sites, without adequate light and air. Their ‘subhuman’ living arrangements have increased the incidence of tuberculosis, and other diseases.

Children have often reported feeling unsafe in these ‘vertical slums’, locked up in rooms where no one can hear them if they feel threatened, unlike the open structure of their erstwhile settlements. Rape and abuse of children is rampant, unless checked. Further, sanitation issues are aplenty in the R&R sites. Girls, especially, have no access to play spaces and are restricted home, stunting their physical development.

With R&R sites located far from their former localities, children’s schools become inaccessible. Parents, forced to seek alternative livelihood opportunities after being resettled in faraway sites, find it difficult to make ends meet. The losses suffered and lack of a stable income often lead to children dropping out of schools.

Once children are out of school, they often take to work to supplement the family income. Many of them work long hours, often in hazardous conditions, subject to the whims and fancies of their employers. They are overworked yet underpaid, spending their meagre earnings on food or drugs. A recent study suggests how majority rescued child labourers have gone back to work over time, given inadequate rehabilitation processes.

Older children, especially girls, often become caregivers in the family from a young age. With the parents forced to work long hours, the responsibility of caring for the younger siblings rests on their shoulders.

In a few more years, even before they have got a chance to enjoy their childhood, the young ‘caregivers’ are married off. Following their early marriage, the girls settle in new informal settlements, where they continue to struggle for their rights.

Unfortunately, the eviction cycle does not spare their new homes either. Civic authorities arrive in due course, informal settlements are razed, and the community is left to pick up the pieces of their life and restart again. This may be someone’s tenth experience of eviction. It is also the first time a child watches helplessly as his house is brought down.

#UprootedChildhoods is a collaboration between Leher and YUVA (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action), attempting to spark dialogue on a critical yet oft invisibilised concern—the views of children on housing. The campaign draws from YUVA’s in-depth interventions with children over the years across cities, and Leher’s focus and commitment to child rights, with a preventive approach towards child protection. Through the different blogs, photo essays, video stories, infographics and other formats we hope to present many faces of urban childhoods.