Rehabilitation

How should we distribute land areas between amenities— schools, hospitals, parks—and private plots for homes and jobs? What is the ideal proportion for each? We need to do this for two different situations, greenfield sites and brownfield sites. In greenfield sites, where we start with vacant land, we have considerable freedom to choose our proportions, and the ideal we have selected will be a very useful guide for new area planning. Even for brownfield sites, a notion of what would be ideal proportions for land distribution between amenities and buildable plots would be a useful guide. The article attempts to extract guiding principles and concludes with a detailed study of the redevelopment of BDD Chawls at Worli, Mumbai.

The success of the planned repatriation of Sri Lankan refugees from India depends on resolving several issues left over from the two earlier rounds of repatriation. The issue also brings to the fore the importance of having formal guidelines in India to deal with the problems of rehabilitation, repatriation and resettlement of refugees.

With continuing work on the project more than 20 villages have been submerged this year and acres of standing crops lost while the new reservoir is filling up. The years of protest by the local people who have yet to be adequately rehabilitated remains unheard.

Events such as the devastating Kutch earthquake shake people's consciousness, change their thinking, and reformulate their relationship with nature, restructure the system of settlement and indeed, the character of social life. Operating on these human adjustments and continuing dialectics between humans and nature, the social scientist as ethnographer has to attempt to understand how people perceive these events, interpret them and formulate settlement patterns and modes of social life.