“They’ve forgotten about us”: Mutual aid and life in a Delhi transit camp during Covid lockdown

Abstract

Over the last decade or so there has been a renewed focus in international policy on informal settlements or slums and recognizing the failure of slum rehabilitation schemes in improving the living conditions of the poor, there has been a push to move to a more equitable model where slumdwellers are resettlement near or on the same piece of land (Chalana and Rishi 2015). Between 2014 - 2017, the 4500 families living in Kathputli Colony, Delhi were displaced (Dupont and Gowda 2021) to make way for an in-situ slum resettlement project. 2800 families that were deemed eligible for housing were given “temporary” shelter at the Anand Parbat transit camp built near the project site (Chalana and Rishi 2016). While there is a wealth of research on informality and informal settlements, there is much less attention paid to transit camps in the broader scholarly literature. Transit camps in this context are largely “left behind” places where residents exist in suspended time awaiting resettlement “forgotten” by the city at large. In this paper, I present preliminary analyses of ongoing work at Anand Parbat camp that highlights residents’ struggles and triumphs as they make home in the camp, particularly during the Covid lockdown. The paper shows how residents leaned on relationships and strategies discovered formed during the struggle to escape eviction, to form mutual aid networks to access food and other essentials, and how these networks have now morphed into groups working to educate residents on other issues such as female reproductive health.