Devangshu Datta: The greater common good

WORM'S EYE VIEW/ Monkeys or men - displacement pays scant regard to the welfare of those affected

The corridors of power are infested with monkeys "" literally, in Delhi's North Block. As in so many other parts of north India, there are huge tribes of aggressive urban monkeys in permanent residence and believe me, in the daily eyeball-to-eyeball encounters with Cabinet members, the monkeys usually win.

I have always had mixed feelings about the protection that religion accords to urban monkeys. Without the bar, this very-specialised sub-species would have been wiped out, or at the least decimated, as so many other Indian animals have been. Instead, they have been fruitful and multiplied "" quite naturally, given an abundance of free food and the lack of natural predators.

But the religious sanction doesn't extend much beyond a prohibition on the taking of life. There is little concern for the animals' welfare "" they are fed on demand and worshipped when the moon is in a certain phase. But there is no attempt to keep them healthy and prevent epidemics; to offer controlled diets or a better alternate environment.

Once in a while, the monkeys in the corridors of power grab the wrong person's tiffin and then "steps are taken". The steps consist of trapping some monkeys and moving them out to somewhere like Tughlakabad.

More creatively, a pet Langur is sometimes brought in to police them. The monkeys return, or other monkeys arrive from elsewhere and colonise the free space.

The monkeys are not consulted on relocation "" they would have little to say, in any case. Unfortunately that attitude is carried over to decisions affecting human underclasses. When large human populations are displaced by monster projects such as dam-construction, the sheer scale of operations attracts attention.

And it should: if the state has the power to displace people for what it claims as the greater common good, it has the countervailing duties to consult them and to offer handsome compensation for the disruption.

Smaller displacements occur on a daily basis in the wilderness of urban India. The sum of those displacements might even add upto larger numbers than the mega-project displacements.

It appears impossible to get credible statistics on the subject without collating data from a multiplicity of individual sources. But the numbers routinely displaced in urban India are large and will inevitably get larger as urbanisation increases.

Urban displacements are often lauded as "JJ/ slum clearance". True, urban slums are an eyesore, they are often inconveniently located; as unauthorised constructions, they get less than their share of water, power and other urban resources such as access to decent schools. They are focal points for epidemics, they are hotbeds of vice and political chicanery. Etc, etc, tut-tut.

But the people who live in them are, by and large, law-abiding citizens forced into the city in search of employment. They provide the labour on which the cities run. They are upwardly mobile, struggling to give their kids a better chance in life.

When they are moved out of the places they have illegally squatted on, they are frequently relocated to places that are even worse, if that is possible, in terms of access.

The working population frequently loses jobs because of increased commutes and the temporary nature of employment. The children end up in worse schools. And others move in to colonise the spaces that these people have vacated.

A concrete example. Last year, several thousand people were moved out of a JJ colony close to where I live. They were resettled in another locale where access to water/ power was a little better. But there is only one, rather infrequent bus-service connecting to a main trunk route.

The frequency of bus services didn't increase. Every day, there are scuffles due to over-crowding. The kids are commuting to their old schools because there isn't an acceptable alternative nearby, and that's a big financial burden.

The spaces vacated in my neighbourhood have already been resettled. The newcomers will presumably be re-resettled after they steal the wrong guy's tiffin.