Forced and illegal evictions are routine in India . Repeated evictions have pushed millions of urban poor into homelessness, destitution and vulnerability. On short notice or none, state demolition squads arrive at residential sites, bulldozing homes of poor families. These sections of the community struggle hard to access housing rights within the existing, limited legal framework. The plans and policies put forward by local authorities further squeeze them into sparse space. In a vicious exercise they are frequently relocated outside the city fringes in inhuman conditions, only to undergo the trauma of multi-displacement.

The Right to Adequate Housing has been widely recognised and accepted as a part of the right to life by the international community as well as in India . Despite having ensconced the right to housing as a part of the larger right to human dignity, right to equality, social and economic rights, the basic provisions, which form the spirit of the right to housing, are blatantly violated all across the country.

The living conditions of more than half the population in urban centres are marked by a basic lack of housing, access to potable water and sanitation, overcrowded, unhygienic hutments, amidst squalor and disease.

National trends indicate that instances of brutal forced evictions of the urban poor are sharply increasing in metro cities with new urban development policies and projects which will benefit only the rich and further exclude the poor. The number of homeless people who are forced to sleep on the streets, in railway stations, increases by the day in metropolises. At the start of this new millennium, India has witnessed one of the largest displacements. In Mumbai 300,000 and in New Delhi 150,000 persons have been brutally displaced.

With no provisions for alternative housing, the government and courts continue to sanction and supervise the bulldozing of the homes of the poor throughout the cities of India.