BENGALURU : On Saturday evening, Zakir returned home from work like every other day — only to find his home razed to the ground.The home, where he had been staying for the last six years was demolished along with 500 houses in the vicinity by his own colleagues of five years — the employees of BBMP. He is employed as a garbage collector in ward 87, yet has not been given an explanation why his house was destroyed. He says all these houses were bulldozed without prior notice.
Now, Zakir is homeless, and worse, he belongs to the hapless BBMP tribe of unpaid workers who have not received salaries for the last five months.“After working so hard for them, they don’t pay the salary, and now they come and even take my home away,” he laments.Over 500 houses have been demolished, displacing over 1,000 people in the strip of land next to Sakra Hospital in Bellandur.The area is known as Kariyammana Agrahara and is situated right next to a posh apartment complex. The people who were displaced say it is the complaints from the apartment residents resulted in demolition of their settlements adjacent to the building.
Lailee and Jasmine work as domestic workers in the apartments, they too allege it is the complaints from the apartments that led to the demolition.“Their gym faces the houses we stayed in, and they said they didn’t like the view of our houses and would complain that we are creating a nuisance. We work for them, and now they asked for our houses to be removed, there’s nothing else to say,” says Jasmine who has been staying here for the past five years.
Lailee, another domestic worker, has now found temporary shelter at a nearby house. Looking back at where her house once stood, she says, “Two days before Eid, look at what they have done to us.”
BBMP officials, defending their position, said several warnings had been given to them as they were living as squatters on private land. “There were enough announcements asking them to vacate the spot before demolition was taken up on Saturday,” a senior BBMP official said. When contacted Mayor Sampath Raj, he said their stay was ‘unauthorised’.