Demolition leaves 900 people out in the cold

Sonia, 25, lay on muddy ground trying to get some sleep in the cold confines of her hutment under the Mansarovar Park Metro line in northeast Delhi, when the bulldozers came rumbling in. She crouched to save her newborn — a daughter, barely hours old — as tenements around her crashed to the ground.

This was a day after Christmas, the coldest night of the season. Hours later the demolition was complete and the railway land freed of ‘encroachers’. Around 500 children were left shivering in the open, 250 of them aged three or under. Nearly 85 of them are enrolled in municipality-run primary schools and face an uncertain future.