The spectacle of Bono and other glossy celebs singing for tsunami victims was a somewhat quease-inducing sight on the box the other night. As P Sainath points out in indiatogether,”Number of homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam: 30,300. Number of homes destroyed by the Congress-NCP Government in Mumbai: 84,000. The elite wants a society geared to deal with rare disasters – but shows no urgency at all when it comes to the destruction of the livelihoods of millions by policy and human agency”.Dunu Roy points out that many slum clearances “are as much to do with the space they live in as with the work that they perform, and have been promoted by the bilateral and multilateral funding agencies”. Squatter Citycontains excellent coverage of these issues.
