Manoj Kumar Mishra
Despite the Supreme Court’s intervention on the Municipal Corporation’s drive to remove encroachments after the communal tension during the procession of Hanuman Jayanti in Jahangirpuri, the political atmosphere of the country remains hot, not only in Delhi. Communal tension is a separate issue but unauthorized construction has put Delhi at the mouth of gunpowder. There is more than 70 percent unauthorized construction in the whole of Delhi. In most of Delhi, the standards of city building have become meaningless.
The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), formed in 1955 before the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, is responsible for the creation of Delhi. He does not even have the details of how much land he has illegally occupied. The land mafia has taken possession of many colonies cut off from the plan of DDA and made it their colony under a new name. To say Delhi is a city built on the land of more than three and a half hundred villages. In fact, many colonies have settled in those villages.
The condition of those colonies is also the same as the condition of unauthorized colonies in every area of Delhi. They have not met any standards of city building. There are no roads even in the old city of Delhi. Illegal constructions have taken place in the wide streets of Chandni Chowk that there is no place for people to walk.
Most of Delhi’s area of 1,483 sq km does not have any accident prevention routes. Land mafia, politicians doing vote politics, corrupt system of government departments (DDA, Municipal Corporation, Delhi Government etc.) and Delhi Police have done a large number of illegal constructions all over Delhi and this trend continues even today.
It is the misfortune of Delhi that instead of getting harsh punishment for those who got illegal constructions for notes and votes and those who set up unauthorized colonies, the politics of legalizing those constructions has been going on. DDA makes plans for every twenty years for showing off. Planning is now underway for 2041. When planning was being done for 2021, it was said that now there is limited space left for new schemes in Delhi.
Sensing this, the then Lieutenant Governor and DDA President Vijay Kapoor had got Delhi’s agricultural land included in the ‘Land Pooling’ scheme. He said that vacant land invites illegal occupation. But before the government preparation, the land mafia established illegal colonies on most of those lands. This cycle continues even today.
The situation has become such that the value of properties in most of the unauthorized colonies and villages has reached into crores but politicians are unable to muster the courage to implement property tax in those colonies. Due to this, the loss of Delhi Jal Board is increasing continuously due to providing more water to the Municipal Corporation. In 1908, the British had made a red line outside the population of the villages in the official map, which is called Lal Dora, that is, the population outside it would be illegal.
First, efforts were made to increase that Lal Dora, then the expanded Lal Dora was made. That is, efforts have been continued to legalize all the population as a whole. The DDA proved to be a complete failure in providing affordable houses to the people. Not only this, he or other government agencies were never seen trying to stop unauthorized construction. In the sixties and seventies, the Congress had regularized many unauthorized colonies by paying a nominal fee and made the residents of them permanent voters.
In later days the same effort was first made by BJP and now Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is doing it. Despite all the claims, no colony was regularized, nor was any illegal colony demolished. In 1993, after the formation of the Delhi Legislative Assembly, the BJP came to the government after winning the elections with the promise that by then it would get the unauthorized colonies that came in the ‘Aerial Survey’ regularised. List of 1,071 colonies was made.
Five years of the BJP government passed as soon as the efforts were made to regularize the colonies situated on the land of government, private, forest, railway etc. Then the Congress government was formed and the number of colonies kept increasing. A large number of such colonies were included in the list which were not actually there.
Ahead of the 2008 assembly elections, the Congress President got provisional certificates of regularization in 1,218 out of 1,639 colonies. In 2014, the BJP-led government at the Center announced regularization of 2,000 unauthorized colonies before the 2015 assembly elections. Not only this, before the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, it was announced to give ownership rights to the residents of these colonies.