Delhi's Urban Villages Are Inside The City But Outside The Law

Delhi’s 135 urban villages house the city’s migrant workforce in buildings that no one regulates. The Saket collapse and the Malviya Nagar fire show what that costs.

A review of Sushmita Pati’s 'Properties of Rent' on how a 1963 exemption turned 135 villages into unsafe rental blocks, and why Delhi now has to rebuild them.

Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi. Sushmita Pati. Cambridge University Press. Price: Rs 893.

At present Delhi can be fairly described as a tale of two cities. One city narrates the tale of prosperity with modern infrastructure coupled with high-speed rail aspirations of a global ‘model city’, aiming to compete with Dubai or Singapore.

The other city tells a grim tale of squalor, of what Sushmita Pati in her book calls a half-eaten mosaic.