your SAVAD
Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:36:11 -0700
www.yamunagentlyweeps.com
Yamuna Gently Weeps is a film on the Yamuna Pushta slum
demolitions, written and directed by journalist, author, and
documentary filmmaker, Ruzbeh N Bharucha.
Yamuna Pushta in Delhi was one of the oldest and largest slums in
India. In reality, a chain of 22 small slums, located on a
three-kilometre stretch along the Yamuna River, the settlement was
home to 40,000 families, which housed more than 1,50,000 people
and was in existence for decades.
Yamuna Pushta was virtually a township, where a world within a
world existed.
In the guise of resettlement, encroachment, pollution and
beautification of the city, in early 2004, in a matter of weeks,
40,000 homes were demolished, without any rehabilitation plan and
the past, present, future of 1,50,000 people were bulldozed to the
ground. Neither the Judiciary, those in power nor the implementing
agencies, had heard of the concept called Rehabilitation.
Barely 20 percent of those displaced were allotted plots, on a
barren piece of land in Bawana: forty kilometres away from
civilization. A land that had no civic amenities and was so far
away from the main city, that there was no source of earning a
livelihood. The remaining 80 percent were forced to take refuge on
the streets along with their salvaged belongings, until they found
some way out of their miserable plight.
The film takes the reader into the lives of those poor families,
whose homes and future were brutally razed to the ground. The
director, present throughout the demolition process, as well as a
witness to the heartlessness of those in power, through interviews
with slum dwellers and politicians and interviews with eminent
town planners, environmentalists and activists, makes his point of
view bluntly clear.
The director, also through the eyes of those who lost it all,
tells a heartrending tale of tears, courage, determination and
most importantly, brings to light, the hollowness of the system
and all that, which was once was held, sacred and beyond
reproach.
The role (or the lack of it), of the Judiciary, the Media, those
in Power and the implementing agencies are brought to light.
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>SAVAD RAHMAN
>subeditor,MADHYAMAM daily,
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