The Yamuna Pushta massive township was demolished in a few 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. All this was done in the guise of resettlement, encroachment, pollution and beautification of the city, in a matter of weeks. Many of these families whose homes were demolished, were shoved forty kilometers away from the main city and civilization, onto a barren piece of land in Bawana, where there was no proper sanitation, no medical facility, pathetic water supply, no electricity, and worst of all, no scope of earning one's livelihood. All this and more in the middle of peak summer. Little did anyone care that these slum dwellers were being shoved to Bawana, an area with no civic amenities, which was so far away from the main city that there was no source of earning a livelihood. So much for equal rights of all citizens in a democracy. Suddenly the slum dwellers of Delhi were given a feel that they did not seemingly belong in their own country. The story of the slum dwellers of Bawana had started.

The story of the slum dwellers of Bawana is a heartrending tale of tears, courage, determination and most importantly, brings to light the hollowness of the system and all that which was once held sacred and beyond reproach.

As the slum dwellers moved from Yamuna Pushta to Bawana, the Robin Raina Foundation decided to move with these slum dwellers to Bawana and set base there. It seemed to be the most logical decision if we were to make a difference in the lives of these people.

As thousands moved to the area within months, the area had become the second largest slum in India. Thanks to the relentless drive of these under-privileged people to survive, the area soon had make shift grass huts sprawling all over. With little livelihood in the area, and little schooling in the area, the need for educating the children was paramount. Soon the foundation had set up a school for 400 children, in the slums of Bawana called the Raina-Prayas School.

In the year 2005, the Robin Raina Foundation started writing the blue print of a plan to build homes for these slum dweller families who by now numbered almost 10,000. The rather difficult part in this plan was the exorbitant cost of land required to build these homes. Later in the year 2005, the Delhi Government decided to pay some attention to these slum dwellers and came up with the concept of selling 10 feet by 20 feet plot sizes to each of these families for Rs. 7,000. In spite of the difficulty with paying that much cash, most of the slum dwellers managed to raise that money either through past savings, or through sheer hard work, or by borrowing money from high interest loan lenders (on an average at the rate of 84% interest per year) or from micro credit finance from Raina-Prayas.

In the year 2006, on an average there were two fires every three months in the slums of Bawana. Some of these fires were caused by cooking oil usage in grass huts, while some were caused simply by mischievous elements bent upon driving these slum dwellers out of the area so that they could take up their legally owned land and profit from it. Each time, the Robin Raina Foundation stood up with these slum dwellers to fight the fire and the havoc caused by these fires. Soon we realized that something had to be done on a war footing to provide these slum dwellers a home of their own – that can withstand the vagaries of fire, rain and rough weather. We went back to our blue print designs, pooled a number of architects, builders and designers to put together a plan to construct homes for each of these slum dwellers. We pooled in lawyers, volunteers and social workers to start arriving at agreements with each slum dweller to build their home. The eligibility for them to own a home free has been simple – they needed to have been legally allotted land by the government of Delhi and they need to submit actual papers for that. They should have lived in the same slum home for the last two years and needed to have a ration card or a voter registration card to prove that. They needed to ensure that their kids are going to school – both male and female without discrimination on gender grounds. They needed to sign an agreement certifying that they would not sell this house for the next 7 years. If they would do all this, which as we realized became true 100% of the time, then we would build them a home without any money coming from them whatsoever.