 Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board was established in 1971 by the then DMK government. The board constructed concrete tenements for the poor in Chennai and the party earned the support of the urban masses. But over the past two decades, slum dwellers have been forcefully evicted and moved to large slum resettlement colonies in the suburbs such as Kannaginagar and Perumbakkam. In a manner that legitimizes this existing practice of eviction, a policy for resettlement is initiated by the present DMK government. Does this mean that DMK has drifted away from its pro-urban poor housing stance? Let's see. In 1970s, DMK came up with this Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board policy, which is quite revolutionary compared to the rest of the country. But that was also used as a political weight. See, they had a plan that within seven years, they should be building tenements in all the slums in Chennai. That was their plan. But if you look at in those seven years, I think they built around like 15,000 tenements or so, just that, because it was just a political weight. And of course, the problems of whether you have funding to do, there are other macroeconomic issues that the government needs to be thinking about, like whether we have enough funding to construct such huge housing projects, etc. But in 1990s, things have completely changed, as I've already said. And this is not something that I would particularly attach to a DMK per se. I think this was the case with most of the governments throughout India, both national and state, that they followed neoliberal policy. And they just did not follow it because they liked it. I think they were forced to follow neoliberal policy. See, this is a case like, as I said, there is a huge competition between the cities to attract capital. So if Chennai is not going to follow the suit, then Chennai is going to be left behind. So you cannot be a player who's not going to play. So there is some kind of coercion that forces the government itself to follow such neoliberal policies. And World Bank and IMF, they directly intervened in those policies, and they came up with huge money. And of course, the central government came up with JNNURM, Jawaharlal Nehru-Arband Renewal Mission. And their idea was also sites and settlements. They did not have institute development in that policy. I think now the government has come up with this resettlement and rehabilitation policy without attaching any sinister intentions to this policy. I think the reason they have come up with this is that this is not something that matters only to Chennai. If you look at the DMK's budget, the last budget, they say that they are going to come up with several industrial parks and information technology parks all over Tamil Nadu, particularly in the southern Tamil Ladu. And it means that there's going to be a series of evictions that's going to happen in cities like Coimbatore, Trichy, Tuthukudi, such places. So they need to have a policy in place if they have to have this kind of evictions throughout Tamil Nadu, of course within Chennai too. If they are going to do that, they need to have a policy. I think that's why they have come up with this policy. In the recent Tamil Nadu budget session, the announcement of formulating a policy on resettlement and rehabilitation was made. The draft of the same was released in the public domain on October 12th to invite feedback from all stakeholders. Stakeholders were given only two weeks to provide their feedback. After some criticism, it was extended by another week. The policy was initially released only in English and after it raised some eyebrows, it was brought out in Tamil as well. Kishore says, though a policy for resettlement is a welcome move, there are many aspects in the draft that are not friendly towards the urban poor. If the present DMK government has to continue at least the ideals of the 1970s DMK, which was in some sense protecting the urban poor because they were also their own. If at all it has to follow something that was there in the 1970s kind of DMK, which was not completely neoliberal, then they have to allow people to comment on this policy and take those comments so seriously. Earlier they said it's only 15 days, now they have said till November 3rd, that's like extending it to a week, but that is not enough. As I said, that's a South English document. It's a quite technical document. It is a document only people who are academics or people who are already involved in this can read and understand. It's not a document that any, see generally any government document is not something a layman can read and understand. So who needs to comment on this is not academics, journalists and social activists. People who needs to comment on this is the accepted population, the people who are living in the slums and people who are living in the resettlement colonies like Anagina and Tenupakam, they have to give their experience. So if you have to take this document to the people and allow them to understand this and then comment this, then it is a process which is, which takes much more than a period of a one month. This is not in one month, this is just 21 days. At least the government should keep this open for six months so that people can comment on this and there are two other things that this document has completely undermined. I think they are quite important. The first thing is the, this document has completely undermined 74th amendment. See if you look at the discourse in general in social sciences, abolition, politics, people have always talked about the 73rd amendment like grand panchayats providing power to the local bodies. But always the 74th amendment is not at all discussed, which is providing power to the urban local bodies and there is a reason to that. The urban local bodies are not at all included in most of the process is that the provincial state have complete control over the urban centers and do not allow the urban local bodies to exert their power because urban local body representatives can be easily reached by the people. They will be living in the same locality, they can be easily questioned. So if you look at this document, the councillors, the elected councillors, elected urban local body representatives do not have any rule. So what I say is that this document has to be rewritten where the urban local body representatives have a role to play in all the three stages of the process during pre-resettlement, during resettlement, post-resettlement. Pre-resettlement urban local body representatives should be there to question and also represent views of the people. And post-resettlement urban local body representatives should be there in order to fulfill the promises that are being said by the government so that the people can reach the urban local body representatives. And the second thing over here is that the authorities who is going to decide whether a place, whether a certain people should be evicted or not, that decision is taken only by the government breakers. They have the development agencies, you have the implement authority board, etc. And all these people are mostly S-men, right? S-men, they are going to say that, okay, if the government says this needs to be evicted, yeah, this needs to be evicted. There is no agency for the people, there is no agency for the social activists who can question that decision, who can argue against the decision. So there is no room for discussion at all in this policy over the decision of eviction. Once a decision of eviction is made, it is made. There is no, you can only contest that in court. And we always know how the court functions, and particularly against the urban poor. And finally, they have two committees, they have three committees, but I am particularly concerned about the last two. One is at the Chennai level and the other one is at the district level, other districts. In Chennai level committee, the Chennai Corporation Commissioner will be the chairperson. In other districts, the district collector will be the chairperson. But if you look at the committee, it has representation from every government department, which is good, because we need to have that kind of inter-departmental coordination. But if you look at people's representation, there are only two. One is representation from the NGOs, non-government organization, one person, one minister. And the second is two members from residential welfare association. See, to start with NGOs, if you look at in the neoliberal era, mostly the NGOs has played the role of smoothening the eviction process. Somebody like Mike Davis, who worked on Urban Question and Law in his Planet of Slums, clearly mentions how NGO has played this smoothening role in Latin America and Africa. NGOs will go to the urban poor region, they will go to the slum dwellers, and they will act as some kind of liaison between the government and the people. And they will kind of sweet talk them and then smoothen the process. So that is not the NGO we want. We want an NGO which will actually advocate for the people. And there are very few NGOs like that. One NGO that I can mention is Information Resource Center for Deprived Urban Communities. And Chennai, we have Hyderabad Urban Lab in Hyderabad. We have Phukkar in Mumbai. There are several such NGOs, but we do not know which NGO will be selected. So that is the process that makes the question. The second is residential welfare association. Which residential welfare association will be included? Will the residential welfare association members be from the slum regions, from the people who are being affected? Or will we have residential welfare association which are there in really upscaled regions in the centers? Like for instance, will it be from boat club? Will it be from Besan Nagar? Or will it be from the slum population? Because if it's going to be from the upper middle class or the upper class region, their only objective is to clear the people from the regions, from the squadron settlements. That is their only agenda. So who will be there? So these are the questions that needs to be addressed. If there are so many points in the draft policy that require to be reconsidered, then what should be the way forward? In my opinion, is more exclusionary than inclusionary. This document is more about eviction than about rehabilitation. If it has to be anything that will resemble the DMK of 1970s, which also came out of some kind of aspiration of uplifting the poor, uplifting the lower caste, because it had a huge, it had quite a great Dravidian lineage starting from Periyar. And it had a great support from the left. If you see in several of the policies, left has been with Dravidian movement throughout. So if it has to be anything of that, then they have to really extend the time and ask questions from several stakeholders and include that. And I think they have to rewrite this policy. The policy that it is there right now, it is quite clearly against the well-being of the poor, against the well-being of the slum dwellers. And it is something that is there to serve the upper class. And particularly, which is it's something that will the government will try to oothe the foreign capital into the city. I think that's what this and I think that's where in the economic sense, that's where the DMK is moving. You can see DMK does two things. One is they implement the neoliberal agenda to the finest details, but they also safeguard themselves by providing some kind of welfare policies. It might be TV, it might be free bus ride for women, such policies will also come up. It's like basically another kind of a smoothening process. There's going to be the neoliberal economic policies that will be implemented, but we will also kind of like assuage a pain of that by providing welfare policies. I think that's where the DMK government is different from the Congress in the national government when it was there or it is different from BJP or it is even different from the governments of Chandrababu Naidu and others. Their motto was only implementing neoliberal policies. The welfare took a, they really did not concentrate so much on that, but the DMK will have its foot on both sides, but in the long run it will not help the poor.