By Jessica R. Barnes and Amar Sawhney
Jessica Barnes, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation at Northern Arizona University, and Amar Sawhney, Professor of Architecture, Building Construction and Interior Design at Miami-Dade College, were participants in the 2019-2020 CAORC-AIIS Faculty Development Seminar to India. In this joint essay, they discuss the immense challenges facing India’s numerous and densely populated informal settlements as they become incorporated into new urban development programs in Delhi and other major cities.
A trash dump lies in the shadow of a 5-star hotel on the outskirts of New Delhi. This dump is a community where 3,000 people work and live – gathering refuse, sorting scrap for recycling, doing laundry, cooking, raising children. About two hundred homes are built here in the Bhowapur ragpickers colony out of salvaged materials (such as tarps, rugs, cardboard, and corrugated metal). The municipality brings water for a communal tap, but there are also a few wells that sip from the polluted land below the dump. There are no toilets. Electric wires web through the settlement siphoning power from illegal hook ups. Satellite dishes top some of the structures and the sound of radios and televisions drift through the air with the smell of burning plastic as people fuel their cooking fire and try to create some heat on this winter day. The cold chills the ripeness of what must become an overwhelming smell in the sweltering summer heat.