The Hindu : Karnataka News : It ended cheerless for them

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Friday, Jan 04, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka

It ended cheerless for them

Swathi Shivanand

Evicted, 122 families in Chikkabommasandra are out in the cold

The slum board has not provided any allotment letters even after three years
20 of the 122 houses that were sealed have been opened up

LEFT IN THE LURCH: A family of the Chikkabommasandra with its belongings at a make-shift home.

BANGALORE: Seventy-year-old Shantappa has not spoken a word since he was evicted from his one-room tenement at Chikkabommasandra in Yelahanka on Thursday morning by officials from the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board.

“He was dragged out of our first-storey house and thrown near the drain. They paid no regard to his age and disability,” cries his wife, Banamma. A Gulbarga migrant, Shantappa, who is partially blind, deaf and lame, remains motionless throughout the day unless someone prompts him to sleep or eat, a condition his wife attributes to the violent treatment meted out to him.

Even as people welcome the New Year with carousing, 122 families in Chikkabommasandra will spend the night out in the cold, thrown out of houses that they have lived for over two years. Incidentally, these families had lived in tents and under thatched roofs on the same piece of land before the slum board re-developed the area to build 202 houses under the Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana.

According to the Karnataka Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance Act), 1973, these houses should have been allotted to the families who resided on the land prior to its development. Three years after the houses were built, the slum board has not provided any allotment letters, even though many have paid Rs. 15,000 in the form of demand drafts to the slum board as allotment fees.

“Some local leaders in collusion with the area slum board engineers told these people they could occupy the houses and promised allotment letters. Now, they are being thrown out and, in fact, the list of allottees includes names that have been recommended by the former MLAs and local rowdy elements,” says Kamalamma, member of Samata Sainik Dal, which has been fighting on the behalf of the displaced.

After two days of constant dharnas in front of the slum board office, 20 of the 122 houses that were sealed have been opened up. Banamma, Shantappa and their other 13 family members share a 150 sq.ft. house with four other families. Says Jayamma, another evicted person, “On an average, some four families share one house. The men sleep outside and we put the children inside the house. If there is some place left, then some of the women also sleep inside.” Privacy is almost non-existent with many having to share a tiny toilet.

Many women who live in the slum work as domestic help. “We have not gone to work for the last one week. Some employers are understanding, while others will simply hire someone else. But if I go to work who will look after all our belongings lying in the open,” says Navneeta. She, like many others, has not sent her children to school and has been running back and forth to the slum board in the hope of getting back her house. Slum Board Commissioner V. Ashok says: “About 25 per cent of those evicted have genuine claim over the land because they have relevant documents like ration cards and voter ID. Others are migrants who have trespassed into the houses we have built with help of the land mafia operating in the area.” He promised to accommodate those with genuine claims in this slum or at another slum in Laggere.

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