Residents of Shakur Basti receive aid from AAP workers

Around 2 pm, a long queue was witnessed waiting outside a temporary food store for their turn to get free food and blankets.  The store packed with food items which was manned by a dozen AAP workers, aimed to help the families who had lost their home.

“Free food, blankets and refreshment are being distributed by the AAP-run charity which is lending a healing touch for most of us in the area,” Ishraful, a local resident said.

Another resident, Shankar Tripathi, lauded the relief work carried out by the party and said: “We are being given food items like rice, pulse, wheat and flour along with the blankets and plastic sheets.”

“We are providing food items for two meals a day for everyone staying in the area. The volunteers engaged by the AAP are working restlessly since the day of demolition,” Mithilesh Pathak, an AAP volunteer said.

Mohinder Singh, another party worker, said: “In order to ensure that only the affected individual gets the goods provided by us, we are asking them to come up with their valid Identity Cards (ID) and in turn, we are giving them a token which is to be shown while collecting the food and other stuff.

“Families have been given tents with more in line to get relief materials. Blankets have been provided, several mobile toilets have been stationed and drinking water and food packets were also distributed by the Delhi government,” a DUSIB officer said.

However, confused and bewildered slum dwellers were rushing to contact the NGOs for help as they feared the loss of their homes, despite the promises by the government.

According to an NGO, in the absence of any clear rehabilitation policy, the slum dwellers are under a constant fear.

For more than 500 families of North-west Delhi’s Shakur Basti, life came to a standstill when over the weekend their homes was razed.

With the row over the death of a kid during a demolition drive to free encroached Railway land in Delhi, the Railways came under fire from the Delhi high court on Monday for clearing the Shakur Basti jhuggi cluster “without alternate arrangements” for rehabilitation of its residents “in the biting cold”.