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Last month, while chopping onions, Sujata told me that bulldozers had come to Chitapur the day before and demolished hundreds of houses, leaving the families that had lived in them homeless. Over the rest of that day and week (during which the demolitions continued), this is what I learned from conversations with those in Chitapur: there was some vague ‘masterplan’ that demanded the construction of an ‘ambulance road’. There had been some kind of warning several days earlier, but they had not all properly understood nor known how to stop it. There was no talk of compensation. No one was offering the families any guidance on how to get emergency assistance or relocation support. They were all terrified of ‘The Madam’ on the scene; when one man insisted she give clear answers on what was happening, she asked him to point to his home and then had the bulldozer demolish it immediately. One local politician I spoke to assured me, incorrectly, that only a few houses had been demolished, almost all on “encroached land”. (He did not actually go there himself to see any of this with his own eyes, and did not care to discuss the ‘philosophical’ need of all people to live somewhere even if they are poor.) He assured me that what was happening in Chitapur was not extraordinary; it was happening all over northern Karnataka and had been sanctioned by the Supreme Court as a necessary measure to widen roads. Full story...
Don't miss:
Last month, while chopping onions, Sujata told me that bulldozers had come to Chitapur the day before and demolished hundreds of houses, leaving the families that had lived in them homeless. Over the rest of that day and week (during which the demolitions continued), this is what I learned from conversations with those in Chitapur: there was some vague ‘masterplan’ that demanded the construction of an ‘ambulance road’. There had been some kind of warning several days earlier, but they had not all properly understood nor known how to stop it. There was no talk of compensation. No one was offering the families any guidance on how to get emergency assistance or relocation support. They were all terrified of ‘The Madam’ on the scene; when one man insisted she give clear answers on what was happening, she asked him to point to his home and then had the bulldozer demolish it immediately. One local politician I spoke to assured me, incorrectly, that only a few houses had been demolished, almost all on “encroached land”. (He did not actually go there himself to see any of this with his own eyes, and did not care to discuss the ‘philosophical’ need of all people to live somewhere even if they are poor.) He assured me that what was happening in Chitapur was not extraordinary; it was happening all over northern Karnataka and had been sanctioned by the Supreme Court as a necessary measure to widen roads. Full story...
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