At Nehru Camp, near Mother Diary, in Patparganj area of east Delhi, the first thing I notice is filth and foul odour.

Evidently, the inhabitants of this elongated settlement of about 650 jhuggis do not enjoy the ‘right to sanitation’, which I believe to be a derivation of the right to health, which, in turn, flows from the right to life enshrined in Article 21 of the constitution.

Being a fundamental right, the right to life should be enforceable through high courts and the Supreme Court, I understand.

Following Vivekanand (28), who works as a casual, daily-wage whitewasher, to his 8-by-6-feet, one-room jhuggi, Ravi, my photographer colleague, and I precariously jump on to a few stepping stones poking out of black, fetid water that fills one of the narrow passages.

“It’s been like this for many months. When we request our pradhan to get the filthy water drained out, he says ‘you will get a hard kick on your backsides’,” blurts out Premkumari, Vivekanand’s wife, sitting outside her jhuggi with Divya (2), their only daughter.

A pradhan is an unofficial representative of the residents of a jhuggi colony in Delhi, who takes up their problems with government officials, I gather.

“But this pradhan is of no use. He has no interest in taking up our problems,” says Vivekanand who has studied up to class IV.

As for the elected representatives of the people of Nehru Camp – municipal councillor, MLA, and MP – their names are heard at the time of elections. Visit Nehru Camp to enquire after their constituents they don’t.

Vivekanand says his BPL ration card, which entitles a family to 25 kg of wheat, 10 kg of rice and 6 kg of sugar at highly subsidised prices, was “deposited” two and half years ago when he was asked to get it renewed after the death of his mother who was recognised as the head of the household.

“I submitted all the documents for a new ration card. They issued me a receipt. Since then, every time I visit the office, they tell me abhi naheen bana hai (it is not made yet).”

Being deprived of the ration card has been a serious blow to Vivekanand’s family. His meagre earnings, which, he says, fluctuate in the range of Rs 3,000-5,000 a month depending on availability of work, now largely go into buying food at high market prices. He says he has no savings and no  bank account.

Vivekanand has painstakingly collected and preserved the documents that the government needs to identify a citizen and assess his/her eligibility for a public service or benefit.

He shows me the receipt issued by the ration office and his and Premkumari’s voter ID cards. He has preserved his dead mother’s voter ID card and death certificate. Vivekanand also shows me an officially issued metal plate inscribed with his jhuggi number – E77/23.

Nehru Camp being an unauthorised settlement on government land, Vivekanand and his neighbours do not have titles to their houses, but they certainly do not seem to need to wait for UID (unique identification) number to be issued for the officials to recognise them as potential beneficiaries of government aid.
(Why ration cards of Vivekanand, many of his neighbours, and, reportedly, thousands of slum dwelling families elsewhere in Delhi have been cancelled is perhaps explained by the assessment of a SupremeCourt-appointed  committee that recently described public distribution system or PDS as deeply “inefficient and corrupt”.)

Vivekanand’s and his neighbours’ jhuggis are serviced by electric bulbs and table fans. He says he pays Rs 300-350 in electricity bill that he receives once in two months, but can’t show me a copy of the bill because he hasn’t preserved any.

Pointing to a tap at the turn of the gali leading to his jhuggi, Vivekanand says water supply has not been a problem either.

None of the jhuggis of Nehru Camp enjoys LPG connection, though. Vivekanand’s household and their next door neighbours share a chulha, fuelled by wood.

“Most of the men here are whitewashers, installers of roof beams, and helpers in furniture workshops of neighbouring Pandav Nagar. Most of them earn Rs 5,000-6,000 unless they have a better-paying government job. A few women work as housemaids to augment family income,” says Varun, the teenage son of Mahender Thakur, Vivekanand’s neighbour, who is waiting for the results of his class 12 exams.

Two of Varun’s three younger siblings are school drop-outs; Vineeta Devi, their mother, says their names were struck off the rolls because they would not study and play truant.

It appears the only affordable schooling option available to Nehru Camp children is government schools nearby, but a lot of them are either drop-outs or victims of poor quality education and supervision. Unemployment is rife. Teenage and older men openly play cards for money and get drunk.

There is no agreement, however, on how good or bad government schools are. While Manju, a mother of school-going children and another of Vivekanand’s neighbours, says teachers do everything except teaching, Varun, the apparently exceptional teenager, says government schools are not bad if children were sincerely desirous of education and taking full advantage of them.

“I only wish I had a clean place to live and study in. It’s very difficult to study at a place as filthy as this,” he says.

Varun says he would strongly advise his father to move out of Nehru Camp if government came up with one of its slum relocation schemes.

Vivekanand says sickness in his family usually gobbles up a lot of money because his only reliable option is private clinics. “No one listens to us at government hospitals. They are careless when they do, dispensing medicine for fever when we need a cure for cough,” he says.

Vivekanand approaches government hospitals only for in-patient treatment of serious illnesses; both his parents were admitted to government hospitals to get treatment for the illnesses that finally claimed their lives.

Vineeta Devi, Vivekanand’s next-door neighbor, says she received satisfactory treatment for a broken arm at Delhi government’s Lal Bahadur Shastri hospital.
None of the people I talk to at Nehru Camp, including the apparently bright son of Vineeta Devi, has heard of the Right to Information Act, 2005. If they had, they might have sought the help of someone like Varun to file an application at government offices to demand an explanation as to why their ration cards had been cancelled, their galis were not being cleaned up, and doctors at government hospitals were neglectful of them.

All adults I speak with are either illiterate or poorly educated. None of the three families I meet buys morning newspaper, perhaps to save money, but Vivekanand says workers do get to read newspapers sometimes at their workplaces.

None of them has heard of the possible changes in the ration system through the proposed food security bill, but are unanimous, upon being asked, that replacing subsidised food with cash transfers would be disastrous for jhuggi dwellers because of potential misuse of the latter.

None of them has heard of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, which guarantees primary school education for children, including through a 25 percent quota in private schools for economically weaker sections. They have also not heard of the minimum wages law or any government scheme to provide pension or other social security to the workers in the unorganized sector of the economy.

Each of the adult, however, has heard of and is wary of the very real possibility that the government will some day want to demolish their slum. One part of Nehru Camp was demolished in 2007, Vivekanand and others inform me, without the uprooted people being relocated and resettled.

“They either moved out to other places to live as tenants or left for their villages in UP and Bihar. We hope we would be better treated by the government,” says Vivekanand.

Since demolition squads come with heavy police force, resistance crumbles fast, adds Tej Prakash, Manju’s husband, who runs a small shop.
By the way, Nehru Camp dwellers have, predictably, no trust in the police.

Asked how he would expect to be treated by the police if he were to make a complaint,  Vivekanand says: “Police listens to only those who pay them money.”
If he does not even expect to be heard by the police, what hopes Vivekanand has of some day approaching law-courts to get his rights enforced, I think.

Will the Supreme Court, which is located not far from Nehru Camp, take a suo motu notice of the denial of the rights of Vivekanand and his neighbours?

This piece first appeared in the May 16-31 issue of the Governance Now magazine (Vol.01, Issue 08).