Several residents of Faridabad’s Khori Basti staged a demonstration at Jantar Mantar here on Tuesday demanding that their houses be spared the Supreme Court-ordered demolition.
The demonstrators also submitted memoranda addressed to the President, the Prime Minister and the Home Minister seeking revocation of the demolition order to protect the lives of lakhs of people during the pandemic.
Holding placards that read, “Save Khori” and “Don’t render labourers homeless during a pandemic”, hundreds of residents of Khori Basti, which is spread over 170-acre forest land in Faridabad, staged the demonstration around 12 p.m. The demonstrators included a large number of women.
Social activist Sanjay Raj, leading the demonstration, said there were 30-odd religious structures, a gaushala, a burial ground, and a government primary school in the colony.
He claimed that the colony had around 10,000 houses and was inhabited by over a lakh labourers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Chattishgarh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and other States.
Mr. Raj said the residents of the colony were living under the shadow of constant fear and the power and electricity connections to the colony were snapped a fortnight ago.
Seeking a remedy to the court order, the residents, in a joint memorandum, said the Municipal Corporation of Faridabad is forcing the residents to vacate their houses citing court order was wrong from a “humanitarian perspective”.
‘Life and death’
They further said that the Haryana government should have made arrangements for their rehabilitation before carrying out the demolition. The residents said it was a question of “life and death” for them.