Neha (pseudonym), 24, a resident of Delhi’s Shakur Basti, has just received a new pair of jeans from Meesho, her latest go-to shopping app. But before she even unfolds them, her focus shifts to the packaging they arrived in. With utmost care, she cuts out the invoice, smoothing its edges before tucking it beneath an envelope inside an old, metal trunk. 

The trunk holds more than just miscellaneous papers; it contains the entire paper trail of her family’s existence in the city—ration cards, Aadhaar cards, her school certificates, and now, a growing stack of e-commerce receipts.

Neha doesn’t remember exactly when she started shopping online, but over the past few years, it has become routine. “At first, we ordered only things for the house—tiffin boxes, utensils, and a tarpaulin for the roof,” she recalled. “Gradually, we started buying clothes too.” 

But while the items themselves are useful, it’s the invoices that matter most. For the past two years, Neha has meticulously saved every invoice from her online purchases, regardless of the product or its price. To her, these are not just receipts but proof—tangible evidence that she, her parents, and her two brothers exist in this jhuggi, in this lane, in this settlement. 

“You never know when this might come in handy,” she told me, her voice carrying the uncertainty that has long been woven into the lives of informal settlement dwellers of the city. “No one knows when the bulldozer will come, when it’ll be our turn.” 

Neha’s family has lived in Shakur Basti, in northwestern Delhi, for at least forty years since migrating from their village in Madhya Pradesh, with Neha knowing nowhere else as home. Yet, the security of their jhuggi remains fragile, constantly threatened by whispers of demolition. 

“There’s a bulldozer here almost every other month,” she shared. “Sometimes we get eviction notices that lead to nothing. Other times, fires mysteriously break out—who knows why? Maybe just to drive people away.”

For thousands of slum dwellers across Delhi, the looming specter of eviction is an everyday reality.

“Day after day, it’s a relentless cycle of police harassment,” said Kalki Singh, 39, a woman from the Gadia Lohar community who has lived in a makeshift hut in the south Delhi neighborhood of Chirag Dilli for decades. “The anxiety of knowing that our home could be demolished at any moment is unbearable.”

“When they[the authorities] come to demolish, they always say, ‘These people have just arrived, they are newly settled,’” Neha said. “But we haven’t just arrived. We have been here. This is our home. And if they ever ask, we need something to prove we belong.”

Bastis and a Brief History of Evictions and Demolitions 

By various estimates, 15-30% of Delhi’s population resides in low-income informal settlements—bastis—that occupy just 0.5% of the city’s land. Despite their minimal spatial footprint, residents are criminalized simply for holding on to this sliver of land.

The history of slum evictions in Delhi is rooted in decades of top-down urban planning and periodic “beautification” drives, particularly since the 1990s liberalization era, and major global events like the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Informal settlements—though often established through political patronage or municipal tolerance—are routinely labeled “encroachments” in official discourse.

Courts have at times reinforced this view; the landmark 2000 Supreme Court judgment in the Almitra H. Patel case infamously described slum dwellers as “pickpockets” of urban land, strengthening the legal basis for evictions.

Legally, an eviction in India must follow due process, including giving proper notice, consulting residents, providing alternate housing or compensation, and protecting residents from violence and harassment during demolition. In practice, however, most evictions in Delhi are forced—carried out with little or no warning, without court orders, resettlement, or basic safeguards. These actions violate the right to housing, which India is obligated to uphold under the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

 According to 2024 estimates by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), at least 337,990 people in Delhi are currently at risk of becoming homeless. The report also documented 49 instances of forced evictions in 2023, averaging nearly one every seven to eight days, displacing 278,796 people across the city—the highest in any location in India in the year. 

The demolitions have continued into 2024, displacing residents across Delhi, from settlements across Khyber Pass, Civil Lines, Shaheen Bagh, Raghubir Nagar, Okhla, Ghazipur Dairy Farm, Chilla Khadar, Yamuna Pushta, and Sangam Vihar.

Forced evictions have also taken center stage in Delhi’s political discourse. In the run-up to this year’s Delhi elections, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal alleged that if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, it would lead to the erasure of all slums in the capital. The BJP eventually won and has been running the bulldozer in its full form.

For basti residents, tenure security and legal recognition depend on inclusion in multiple government schemes and access to crucial documents. In a city where the displacement of the poor and minorities is widespread— notably punitive demolitions of Muslim neighborhoods—    the questions of tenure security, rehabilitation, and resettlement are not just about policy—they are about who is considered worthy of a place to live.

But What Defines Eligibility?

In the 2010 Sudama Singh case, the Delhi High Court ruled that it was the State‘s “constitutional and statutory obligation to ensure that no jhuggi dweller is forcibly evicted and relocated” and that those set to be evicted have a right to “meaningful engagement.” 

After this judgement, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) Act was passed in 2010, establishing DUSIB as the nodal agency for the rehabilitation and relocation of Delhi’s slum dwellers under the provisions of the Delhi Slum & Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2015.

Where DUSIB is responsible for providing rehabilitation and resettlement on land owned by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) oversees central government-owned and its own land. 

A dweller eligible for rehabilitation should possess at least one of the twelve identity documents listed in the policy, proving their occupancy. These include a passport, ration card, electricity bills, driving license, a government-issued photo identity card, a passbook from a public sector bank or post office with a photograph, SC/ST/OBC certificate from a competent authority, among others. 

Housing rights activists working with slum communities in Delhi have long encouraged residents to secure essential documents—such as voter ID cards, ration cards, and Aadhaar cards—registered at their current slum address rather than their native villages. Such documents often determine eligibility for rehabilitation, resettlement, or land entitlements under various government schemes. 

However, acquiring and maintaining these documents remains a major challenge, especially for families who have not yet been able to secure voting rights or other forms of identification in the city. Hence, activists also urge residents to preserve electricity bills, water connection receipts, and other records that can help establish tenancy at the settlement.

“Acquiring documents from the government has become increasingly difficult in recent times, especially as administrative agencies have taken note of how civil society groups are effectively fighting against housing rights violations,” said Sheikh Akbar Ali, a housing rights activist who has worked in Delhi’s slums for nearly two decades.

He further explained how increased government surveillance and anti-poor policies have made the process of obtaining eligibility documents—whether a voter ID, ration card, or even a metered electricity connection—far more difficult. “We have seen authorities revoking essential documents, uprooting existing electricity meters, and even canceling voter cards, effectively erasing people’s legal claims to their homes,” Ali said.

Human rights lawyer Jayshree Satpute highlights the growing challenges, stating, “As housing rights activists and lawyers secure court orders to halt illegal actions, the administration has adopted adversarial strategies. Authorities are finding ways to bypass the legal processes activists rely on.”

Ali’s claim about the non-issuance of these documents holds true, as multiple residents in Shakur Basti reported not receiving ration cards—some had even applied as far back as 2015.

The issue of pending ration cards remains a significant problem in Delhi. Shabnam and her family, who live in a jhuggi in South Delhi, lost access to subsidized food supplies when authorities unilaterally canceled the ration card issued in her husband’s name in 2005. When she approached the Delhi High Court in 2021, the court found that her application for a new ration card had been pending for eight years.

The reason: While around 84,000 new ration cards have been issued over the last five years, the process has been severely restricted due to the Centre’s cap of 72 lakh cards for Delhi—set based on the 2011 Census—which continues to limit broader expansion. Additionally, according to an RTI response, just like Shabnam’s, nearly 3 lakh applications for ration cards remain pending in Delhi as of 2023.

Getting one’s name on the electoral card, too, is an issue. But the problem extends beyond the failure to register new voters—slum residents are also seeing their voter cards canceled at an alarming rate. In the recent elections, while the BJP has accused AAP of expanding its voter base with “illegal voters,” particularly undocumented Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants, AAP has countered by alleging that the BJP is orchestrating mass deletions of legitimate voters, primarily migrant workers living in Delhi’s slum clusters and unauthorized colonies— often built on land not zoned for residential use. 

The Delhi Police conducts voter verification drives in neighborhoods like Shaheen Bagh, Jamia Nagar, Seelampur, and Kalindi Kunj, all of which have a significant population of Bengali-speaking migrants.

One ground report revealed the extent of the harm caused by the government’s deletion of voters. In November 2023, slums were demolished by the Delhi civic authorities in Sunder Nursery, which displaced 1,000 families. At least 628 people from the evicted settlement no longer appeared on the voter list published by the Election Commission that year. The official grounds cited legal reasons—mainly that the settlement was unauthorized and not eligible for rehabilitation as per the Delhi High Court order. However, local authorities and some reports indicated that the land was being cleared to make way for parking facilities and other urban infrastructure related to the redevelopment and beautification of the Sunder Nursery area. 

Further, essential documents are often lost or destroyed due to the precarious conditions slum dwellers face—forced evictions, sudden fires, floods, or even theft—leaving them without crucial proof of tenure and access to basic entitlements like food and healthcare.

From Paper Trails to Digital Footprints

As acquiring legal entitlements from the state has become increasingly challenging, slum residents have developed their own ways to stake a claim to the city—one of them being e-commerce transactions. 

“Through consistent training and legal workshops in slums, we have been advocating for the importance of saving crucial bills—electricity, water, and others,” said  Abdul Shakeel, who leads the Basti Suraksha Manch. “While we organize camps and awareness drives, over time, people have found their own ways of archiving their lives through e-commerce platforms.”

Like Neha, 29-year-old Kumar from the slums of Seelampur has also turned to online shopping as a way to establish proof of residence. His most recent purchase was a phone around Diwali last year. “If we want to buy a phone, I use Flipkart—it’s cheap, and things get delivered to our address, creating a record that we live in this jhuggi,” he said. 

Mapping themselves onto the city’s digital archives has become a widely adopted tactic in Kumar’s basti. “No one explicitly told us to do this, but it has almost become a norm,” he said. “We’ve always been advised to keep our documents updated, and now we see this as just as important. Plus, the records stay on our phones, so even if we lose physical receipts, we might still have a backup.”

Kumar is certain this should legitimately establish his presence. “Our deliveries are coming to this address, to this lane, to this very jhuggi—so we are not living in thin air,” he said when asked whether he thinks the courts or the government would recognize this evidence. “This is proof that we were here and still are”.

Vidyasagar Sagar Sharma, a sociology scholar at Bielefeld University in Germany, sees this digital footprint as a meaningful way for people to assert their presence in urban spaces. “As governments become increasingly desperate to make people prove their ownership or citizenship, an invoice generated from an online purchase becomes a blueprint of their existence in contested spaces,” he explained. 

“People recognize the state’s desperation to render them illegal, and in response, they are equally desperate to ensure they appear on some kind of list—even if it’s on an e-commerce platform,” Sharma added. “These digital archives are not just about recognition but also about belonging.”

But where rehabilitation and land titles remain difficult battles, Aakanksha Badkur, a human rights lawyer fighting housing rights cases in India, cautions about the limitations of this evidence. “If it is the sole proof, it may be challenging to use in court, as policies strictly outline the required documentation,” he explained. “The court may also question the methodology used to establish such claims. However, these invoices can help substantiate an argument if one already has some degree of government documentation in place.”

Beyond legal proof, in a time when slum dwellers live under the constant fear of bulldozers razing their homes, these digital records offer a sense of hope—something to hold on to.