ABSTRACT
Issues of eviction and rehabilitation have been at the core of many political and social frictions in urban India. Evictions in urban India have targeted low-income urban residents living without any legal tenure in shanty towns and informal urban settlements, as well as residential and commercial encroachments on urban land by higher income groups. Over the past few decades, largely middle-class claims about the environmental pollution and degradation caused by informal urban settlements has been used as a major justification for eviction of such settlements in cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. Rehabilitation of the evicted persons has been a contentious issue, with little consistency in the way rehabilitation of urban evictees has been treated by different state governments or even by a single state government across different eviction cases.
