[ ] Emma Tarlo's article attempts to construct a narrative of the emergency by

focusing on a section of Delhi that is not in the heart of the city, but rather the area
where people who had previously lived in the inner city slums were later relocated to
the resettlement colony. She was less concerned with slum clearance and more
concerned with the reality that many people were able to achieve their housing
rights through family planning.

The Welcome colony in east Delhi was a place where slum dwellers were relocated
(one wave in the 1960s and second in 1976). She went to the welcome colony since it
allows her to see things from a different angle. She goes to the MCD's slum and
Jhuggi Jhompri department because this is where all of the compiled file work for the
resettlements is maintained. The files gave her access to the official emergency
memory, which had been hushed during the crisis. She received file interpretation
aid from the clerks, which was critical in providing information about what was in the
file as well as material that was not officially documented in the files. By looking
through the files, she was able to deduce that not every slum was eligible for
resettlement.

When a plot of land or a built-up tenement is assigned to a family whose home has
been demolished, usually as a consequence of a slum clearance policy, but rarely due
to flood or fire, a slum department file is created. Because the papers relate to
allotments rather than demolitions, it's impossible to tell how many of the displaced
were unable to find a plot or tenement based on them. In 1960, a squatter census
was conducted to distinguish between two groups of squatters: those who had
settled in Delhi before July 1960 and those who had settled in Delhi after that date.
The goal was to relocate eligible squatters to resettlement colonies, where they
would be required to pay lease payments and small rentals. Ineligible squatters were
to be evicted from the city entirely, preventing future migrants from claiming they
could dwell in the capital. Due to the difficulty in identifying the eligible from the
ineligible, this difference was later dropped.

Many people sold their plots and moved back to jhuggis, sometimes even settling for
the second time. To put an end to this practise, the MCD lowered the size of
allotments from 50 to 25 square yards, lowering their value and making them less
enticing to developers. All of this occurred as a result of the jhuggi jhompri
eradication strategy, which was implemented in 1958 when the slum 'problem'
became recognised as a significant one. As a result, 'paper truths' served as
intermediaries between the officials' requirements and the demands of the
occupants. The demolition slips revealed that while most pre-emergency allotments
were from jhuggis, many came from ancient neighbourhoods of old Delhi, implying
that they were not recent migrants but long-term residents.