ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Kathputli Colony Rehabilitation Project being undertaken by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) so as to better understand the manner in which rehabilitative housing, having being denigrated as an unsustainable burden on the state, is institutionalising unsustainability in Indian cities. In 2007 DDA invited professional architects for empanelment as a panel of consultants to work towards generation of plans for in-situ redevelopment of as many as 21 slum settlements. Hemmed by an interstate railway line on its west and an array of planned and unplanned mixed-use residential, commercial, and industrial enclaves on the other three sides, Kathputli Colony is administratively part of Zone B as per the Master Plan of Delhi 2021. Thus, in order for squatter rehabilitation in Delhi – and India – to be a factor of economic, cultural, and environmental sustainability, it is necessary, first, to abandon the deeply iniquitous logic of cut-off dates for a policy framework of differential housing.
