Scattered Lives, Shattered Promises! Kathputli Colony was once a renowned hub for performers, where patrons knew exactly where to find talented artists. However, now that the artists have become dispersed, the community has lost its sense of unity. The challenges faced by the families in Kathputli Colony, who have been displaced by an ongoing redevelopment project, underscore the struggle in the capital city to provide affordable housing.
As of early 2025, the people living in Delhi’s Kathputli Colony are still dealing with the effects of a long redevelopment project that started over 15 years ago. Although there were promises for quick housing, many families are still in temporary camps, waiting for permanent homes. In 2009, over 2,800 families from Kathputli Colony were relocated to temporary accommodations with promises of new homes, but delays have left them in limbo. The change in Delhi’s government has sparked renewed hope. In February 2025, during the swearing-in of Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, Kathputli residents performed traditional music, hoping the new administration will finally resolve their housing issues.
The redevelopment project, Delhi’s first in-situ slum rehabilitation initiative, has faced challenges like legal hurdles and logistical issues. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) planned to build 2,800 flats in 14-storey towers, but as of mid-2022, only 700 flats were nearing completion, with delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and pollution-related construction bans.
In the chaotic lanes of Kirti Nagar, one of Delhi’s many overburdened urban pockets, 40-year-old Mubarak has lived his entire life. A native of the capital, his memories are etched into the broken pavements and rusted tin roofs of the Kathputli Colony, once a vibrant, if impoverished, community of street performers, daily-wage workers, and displaced souls.
Mubarak is married and a father of three. Alongside his wife, elderly mother, and children, he has battled the extremes of urban survival, poverty, displacement, illness, and social exclusion. His family’s current address is a makeshift dwelling patched together from salvaged wood, plastic sheets, and corrugated metal, not a house, but a structure that barely offers shelter from Delhi’s scorching summers and bone-chilling winters.
Once a rickshaw puller, Mubarak knew what it meant to earn every rupee with sweat and grit. But his declining health, which remains undiagnosed due to lack of access to proper medical care, forced him to give up the only work he knew. Jobless and physically worn out, he soon became just another invisible man in a city that doesn’t pause for those left behind.
To sustain the family, Mubarak’s wife took up sex work, a choice borne not of will, but of compulsion. In the desperate economy of survival, where the price of food often outweighs shame, the family made a silent compromise. She, too, lives under the judgment of a society that condemns the poor for the very choices it forces them to make. Their oldest child was sent back to the family’s ancestral village in Bihar, not out of preference, but as a temporary escape from Delhi’s unbearable living conditions.
The younger children remain with them, exposed to the harshness of urban poverty and the fragility of dreams born in slums. Years ago, Mubarak lost the most important proof of his existence, the papers to his home, in a fire that consumed not just his shelter, but the few possessions he had managed to gather. With the flames went any legal right he had to claim his place in the city. Since then, he has been just another faceless slum dweller, easily ignored by the machinery of governance.
His situation worsened when the government began demolishing parts of Kathputli Colony in the name of redevelopment. Mubarak and hundreds of others were promised alternative accommodations, a humane relocation, a new beginning. But those promises crumbled like the homes they bulldozed. No house, no compensation, no dignity. Just dust and silence. Now, the colony in Kirti Nagar, their current, tenuous refuge, is under threat. A new government notice has arrived, warning residents to vacate the area. Another demolition looms. Mubarak knows the script all too well. Officials will arrive, homes will be razed, and yet again, families like his will scatter like birds with nowhere to land.
There are over 500 people like Mubarak in the area, daily-wage labourers, widows, sick and elderly, mothers raising children alone. They live without sanitation, without clean water, under the constant threat of eviction, and beneath the judgment of those who live in apartment blocks and see slums only as eyesores. These residents survive rainstorms that flood their huts, heatwaves that suffocate their children, and the endless noise and pollution that ravage their health. They endure, because what other choice do they have?
No political party has shown consistent will to address the issue. Temporary shelters, flawed surveys, and token rehabilitation schemes have failed to make a lasting difference. The people of Kathputli and Kirti Nagar do not ask for charity, only for recognition, for land rights, for a safe place to live and raise their children.
For Mubarak, life has been a long negotiation with adversity. He has weathered joblessness, illness, the loss of a home, and the slow disintegration of dignity. Still, he wakes up each morning to face another day, not because hope is abundant, but because survival demands it. With another notice to vacate, the cycle begins again. Mubarak doesn’t know where he will go, or how long he can keep his family together. All he knows is that in the heart of India’s capital, he remains a man without a home, a citizen without proof, a human being left out of the city’s grand visions.
His story is not unique, and that’s the tragedy. For every Mubarak, there are hundreds who suffer in silence, navigating the fragile line between being seen and being erased. And until the system sees them not as statistics but as people, the slums of Delhi will continue to house broken promises and shattered lives. Between 2014 and 2017, the DDA’s eviction drive displaced over 4000, families from Kathputli Colony, scattering them across various parts of Delhi.
Households with proof of residence before 2011 qualified for two-room flats in the in-situ rehousing complex and temporary accommodation in the transit camp. Those with proof of residence between 2011 and January 1, 2015, were eligible for direct allotment of flats in Narela, on Delhi’s northern outskirts, under a DDA housing scheme. However, families unable to prove residence before 2015 or establish themselves as distinct households were deemed ineligible for any alternative housing.
In 2017, the DDA demolished over 500 structures in the colony, which caused many people to lose their homes. The Delhi High Court got involved and ordered a halt to further demolitions. The court instructed the DDA to let eligible residents move to specific relocation sites. It also stressed that the rights of those not eligible for relocation should be protected, giving them time to appeal the decisions.
Many residents still live in difficult conditions, without access to basic needs and unsure about their future. This situation shows the challenges of urban redevelopment in Delhi and how marginalised groups struggle to secure their rights and livelihoods. As the new government takes office, the people of Kathputli Colony hope their needs will be heard. They want real actions to fulfill the promises made over ten years ago.