 The draft of the resettlement and rehabilitation policy does not address the homeless population, nor does it talk about the lack of proper housing for lower income groups or about the large section of people living in rented accommodation in the urban spaces. In short, it does not address the urban housing crisis and nor is that the intention of the policy. Why is that the case? Why is the government bringing out a policy while more pressing issues of urban housing are not addressed? See, Gav, this is another major flaw with this draft policy itself. It is very clear that it is only talking about encroachers, non-titled holders who are living in the objectionable land. It is not talking about payment dollars, it is not talking about homeless people. That is why I said that the policy is not concerned about people who are homeless, that they have to find new houses, they have to build houses. It is not really on that note. The policy is very clear, they are interested in evicting people. So this policy has nothing to do with the homeless people and moreover, this policy has nothing to do with housing in Chennai or housing in Tamil Nadu. This policy is kind of a standalone policy in itself. There is a huge housing crisis in Tamil Nadu and I think a huge housing crisis all over India but if you look at the data of the latest housing survey from NSS Go, we can see that around 55% of the urban dwellers in Tamil Nadu is living in rented households. That is more than 50% of the population and if you look at some of the major cities like Chennai, I think that the number will be around 60% and 70% and most of the people are living in houses that has only one room, which means that they just have living room, they don't have any other. The housing crisis in Tamil Nadu is huge and Tamil Nadu is also one of the most, I think Tamil Nadu is the most urbanized state in India. The very census number gives you 55% but if you go beyond that, I think it will be around 60%. So the housing crisis is quite huge in Tamil Nadu but this policy has nothing to do with it. It is very clear. It is only about evicting people and you should ask the question why that is the case? Why are you not talking about homeless people? Why are you not talking about the housing crisis? Why are you just interested in evicting people? Then we have to look at it from a kind of global context because now particularly after the neoliberalism and after India opening up its economy, the competition to attract foreign capital is quite huge and the competition is not between Indian cities and Indonesian cities and Indian cities and other developing countries. No, the competition is also between the cities within India. There is competition between Chennai and Bangalore, there is competition between Chennai and Hyderabad. So these three cities like the states, Andhra Pradesh, then Andhra Pradesh, Andhra and Bangalore and Chennai, they are in huge competition to attract foreign capital. There are certain kinds of capital which only comes to South India. They don't go to North India except Delhi or Mumbai for some reason. So then you have to show your city something that is like Singapore, something that is like New York. Every time when a politician comes and says, let's say Singara, Chennai, 2.4, we want to make our city like Singapore. So the question that needs to be asked is why should Chennai look like Singapore? Why can't Chennai be like Chennai? Why it should look like Singapore? What is the point of it? It is not just to put in such a, it is about giving a cosmopolitan character to your city and showing that this city can be something like your first world city. It will have all the facilities like first world city and people just forget that the first world cities are cities for the rich in the first world cities. You go to New York, you see people who are living in pavements. Homeless people are, because that's how the city is constructed. That is the case with most of the first world cities. So the idea here is also the same. So and also the idea is not about evicting these people from the land. It's not about just fake settlement. It's basically evicting a certain kind of poverty in the inner city. You are not just evicting those people. You are evicting the entire character that the city is built with. So you are evicting them so that in the inner city poverty won't be visible. And the poverty is now visible in one particular section. The idea of ghetto is not there in Chennai. If you look at Indian cities, we cannot say this is a ghetto. It's one or two places like Dharavi and which is a huge slum settlement. Particularly if you look at cities like Chennai, we have slum settlements, but they are small slum settlements. You have 2,000 households. You have 3,000 households. Next to a posh area. So when it is like that, when it is mixed, the public infrastructure, you cannot alienate the poor from that. Whatever the public infrastructure is enjoyed by the rich is also enjoyed by the poor. Because spatially you cannot do, you cannot alienate the and that's costly too. But now what has happened? You have evicted the poor and consolidated them in one particular space. So Kandeginagar has 30,000 households. Means how many slums that you have evicted. Perumbakkam has 30,000 households. So you have evicted slum populations within the city and packed them in one place. See that's why you can have a DLR right next to Perumbakkam. And Perumbakkam is completely different from DLR. Because the public services can be also different because it's 30,000 households. There's an economic scale that kicks in. So public services can be given differently to Perumbakkam and DLR. So this is the problem and this problem is not addressed in this draft policy. So one reason, one thing is to mention the size of the settlement. Let the settlement not be 30,000 settlement. Let the settlement be 2,000. Let it be small. Because once you have 30,000 households, there's a kind of social stigma that is attached to it. That is primarily because of the size, right? So if you do not have 30,000 households, you will not have such social stigma that is attached to these resettlement colonies. And there are probably we can discuss this further. There are multiple other problems that is there in this policy that is not helpful for the slum dwellers in Chennai or in Tamil Nadu.