Social Science Research Council

"Green Evictions: The Politics of Land Privatization and Access in Delhi"

This research examines the politics of land privatization in Delhi using the lens of environmental discourse. For the first time in thirty years large-scale, forced evictions are taking place in Delhi. These evictions are explained and often justified by the media, politicians and the courts in terms of the environment. My first hypothesis is that elite environmental discourse constructs a particular way of seeing the environment through which the spaces of the poor get defined as polluting and illegal. This “green legibility” legitimates the eviction of the poor as a process of environmental improvement. Green legibility, while initiated by elite representations of the environment, also consists of the redefinition of legality in terms of environmental quality and the internalization of these environmental representations among sections of the poor. I will explore green legibility through ethnography of an elite residential colony and the political channels through which its residents convey environmental discourse to the government.

In response to the risk of displacement, the informal poor take up a variety of strategies to retain land access. My second hypothesis is that the majority of the poor contest displacement through a discourse of land privatization, specifically by demanding legal title. I suggest that this approach operates in accordance with green legibility and facilitates the restructuring of land tenure to the detriment of informal settlements. My third hypothesis stems from the identification of a subset of the informal poor who use self-mapping practices to resist eviction. I argue that these approaches have effectively won material benefits by critiquing the terms of green legibility. I will evaluate my second and third hypotheses through ethnography of informal residential colonies.

This project explores the contours of neoliberal urbanism in India’s expanding cities and how, in Delhi, a particular bourgeois environmentalism articulates it with an aggressive campaign for land privatization.