Nadwa slums brutally demolished
Today at the behest of Bahujan Samaj Party’s Satish Chandra Mishra, the local administration came into swing to brutally demolish the slums in Nadwa (daliganj), Lucknow . More than 250 poor people were rendered homeless when UP’s Chief Minister Mayawati on her birthday had claimed that every poor will get a home.
When the senior activist and Magsaysay Awardee (2002) Dr Sandeep Pandey was on his way to intervene, police forcibly stopped him from going to the Nadwa slums and detained him at the Hasanganj police station. Representatives of many social organizations and invidivuals came to the Hasanganj Police station and Nadwa area where slums were being demolished. Heavy police was deployed to ward off any intrusion in Gomti Action Plan under which the slums were being cleared off from the coast of Gomti river. Activists of National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) and Asha Parivar took the centrestage in the demonstation against this brutal onslaught on the underserved communities in Lucknow.
The residents of Nadwa slums are mostly dalits and have been saving from their daily earnings to qualify for housing under Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP). But the local administration demolished the slums even when these alternative housing facilities are not yet ready to use.
In the afternoon Dr Sandeep Pandey was allowed to go out of the Hasanganj Police station. By
this time the slums were already completely demolished. When the displaced people of these slums were marching towards the Vidhan Sabha to stage a protest to demand their alternative housing facilities, a woman among those displaced went into labour pains. Due to timely intervention by Additional District Magistrate (ADM) OP Pathak, a government ambulance reached in time to take this woman to a hospital.Residents of Lucknow , representatives of various social organizations and those displaced due to the demolition are demanding that government should immediately provide temporary housing facilities to the displaced communities, meantime the construction work at BSUP should be expedited so that these people can move into their houses at the earliest.