When in 2004 the government of Delhi announced its plan to turn 100 acres on the banks of the Yamuna into a promenade, the land was occupied by the Yamuna Pushta "unauthorised" settlement and was home to over 35,000 working class families. The subsequent evictions and forced relocations have destroyed people's lives by removing them from their areas of work, cutting off their social networks and destroying the housing and infrastructure they had built with their life's savings. It is ironic that the courts have not held government bodies accountable for their failure to provide affordable and adequate housing for the poor, even as they have chastised them for slum creation, instead of slum clearance.
