This colony may well have been the inspiration for the “magician's ghetto” in Salman Rushdie's “Midnight's Children”.
With its narrow streets and narrower alleys, this colony is among the Delhi government's first experiments in the so-called in situ development strategy under which residents of jhuggi jhopdi clusters transition to temporary housing while the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) reconstructs the settlment, and then shifts the slum-dwellers back onto the original plot and into improved housing.
