Post demolition drive, many Prem Nagar residents forced to sleep in open

Dehradun: It’s almost noon and 33-year-old Lakshmi Gehlot carefully places her kerosene stove on a heap of rubble, which earlier used to be her home, to prepare lunch. Lakshmi along with her two sisters has been sleeping under the sky since Friday.
The demolition drive in Prem Nagar over the past weekend not only demolished encroached shops and houses but also razed many dreams, Lakshmi’s being one of them.
Her parents are dead and she being the eldest, Lakshmi has to take care of her family. “Both my father and mother died five years ago and since then the three of us have been working as domestic helps in the area and saving money for the future,” Lakshmi said. “With our house demolished, we have nowhere to go. We have no other option but to sleep in the open,” she said, adding that it was only on Sunday that some neighbours helped her put up a bedsheet and a tarpaulin as a temporary roof.
The area is full of such examples.
Just a few metres away, seven-year-old Vansh is sitting on a large piece of concrete preparing for her exams. Vansh’s father, meanwhile, is trying to look for whatever valuable he can find in the rubble. “Our home has been demolished. When we don’t even have a place to sleep, how would we be able to provide space for him to study,” Vansh’s father said.
Such cases are numerous across Prem Nagar. A resident of the area, Vikas Giri, said that more than 50 homes have been demolished and around 150 people are sleeping in the open every day.
He added that Prem Nagar can be divided into two parts, one on left of Chakrata Road and the other on the right. On the left are families of refugees who migrated from Pakistan and the right side is inhabited by beneficiaries of the government’s sterilisation programme in the mid-1990s.
“After the government’s programme they were allotted plots by local pradhans. However, they did not get any documents. The actual beneficiaries further sold these plots to migrants from the hills and UP (like Lakshmi’s father). Most of them had no idea that they were living on encroached land until the officials told them,” Giri said, added that almost all the houses on the right have been demolished.
Residents said that they do not want to live as encroachers but the government and the district administration should have made some arrangement for them. “For three days we have been living under the sky. With homes destroyed, we don’t have any sanitation facilities either. The administration should at least provide us with some temporary toilets,” Lakshmi said.
District administration officials, however, said that they will make sure that necessary arrangements are made at the site but rehabilitation is not on the cards yet. “We will make sure that basic facilities are provided to the people but no such plans for rehabilitation have been formulated yet,” an administration official said.