A Tale of Two Cities: How Delhi’s RWAs get the job done

Take Delhi, for instance. An hour’s drive across the city’s southern half will reveal two sides — gated societies with freshly trimmed grass next to localities with rivers of sewage.

Most of these societies have a Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA); they are considered NGOs by the government under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, and have no legal powers — but they do have social ones.

Since the 1970s, they have been considered powerful links between authorities and city dwellers. Former Congress CM Sheila Dikshit would famously meet RWA representatives during her tenure. The Aam Aadmi Party even promised them more funds in their 2020 and 2025 Delhi Assembly poll campaigns. WhatsApp groups are often full of demands by locals asking their elected RWA representatives to reach out to the civic authorities for road repairs, security, street lighting, or cleaning sewage pipes.

But there are caveats too. RWAs are often seen as conservative bodies, with only residents who pay to vote allowed to participate in decision-making. Young tenants frequently report monitoring non-vegetarian cooking, entry and exit of opposite-sex guests, and playing loud music.
Urban planning scholars like D Asher Ghertner have pointed to how RWAs may have made things easier for the upper class, but have excluded the poor from much of the decision-making that affects their lives.

Garbage on the road in Green Park in Delhi, (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

With Delhi’s administration changing political colours, The Indian Express travels to six localities around South Delhi — across income groups — to see how its RWAs, seen as the most influential in the city, are dealing with a range of issues.

The affluent colonies

In Greater Kailash 2, the primary issue seems to be encroachment. RWA president Ram Sharma says street vendors, who are supposed to only put up temporary stalls, have ended up making permanent structures — sometimes even building small huts in the back alleys of flats.

With the patronage of some residents, they share electricity and water connections or, in some cases, allegedly hijack them. “When there’s confrontation, we’ve even gone to the police and High Court. GK-2 is affluent but there’s so much dirt. People have started calling it gutter Kailash,” says Sharma.

“Sometimes vendors go away if we take the help of the police but they come back,” he adds.

“There was once a structure between flats with a woman and her mother living there. They started it as a mud structure, then made it pucca. We got their bathroom destroyed. They even offered money to stay here but obviously, we wouldn’t accept.”

The RWA has also written a letter to recently elected BJP MLA Shikha Roy, saying the colony is in danger of becoming a “glorified slum.”

Ratna Sahi, RWA president of Sheikh Sarai’s Triveni Apartments, has a similar complaint. While there are many issues of a civic nature — road or sewer lines not being repaired promptly — the biggest grouse seems to relate to drivers and domestic workers, many of whom work in the locality and come from the nearby Jagdamba slum.

Sahi says buses are parked outside the locality boundary late at night.

“In 2019, we moved the High Court to stop this illegal parking. In December, we even filed a contempt of court petition, with pictures of what goes on,” says Sahi.

“The traffic police commissioner came and fined them, but you know, a fine doesn’t work. You fine them Rs 500, the bus and truck drivers will share the cost. You take action with a crane or whatever, only then it works,” she asserts.

Security is a concern in Vasant Kunj’s C-9 block too. RWA Vice-President S K Kapoor says that while the body doesn’t try to deal with street vendors — they forward any complaints to the MCD — he has instituted regular documentation of anyone who enters and exits the block, particularly domestic workers and dailywage labourers.

Garbage on the road in Neeti Bagh area in Delhi (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

“Crime goes down with fear, not the police,” he says. “I’ve created fear with all this, registration of who’s coming in… If something happens, they know they’ll get caught. I’m just here to do public service.”

The other side

The view changes down the income ladder. Over in Kalkaji Extension’s DDA colony, for the erstwhile Bhoomiheen Camp slum-dwellers, the most common complaints are drugs being dealt to children, sewage discharge overflowing the streets, and seepage so rampant that houses risk falling.

Geeta Das, ‘ad-hoc’ president of the colony’s RWA, is often met with requests to get windows repaired, bathroom pipes unblocked, and pensions released from government coffers. She’s not the elected president as a formal RWA can’t come into place till all houses are constructed and allotted, but because of her promptness in getting rid of a mountain of rubble around the locality when she first moved in, the DDA ‘recognised’ her as a leader “who wants to take society in a good direction”, she says.

She, along with 12 other residents, has formed an ad-hoc body.

A major concern of the area is the sale of marijuana and alcohol out of the DDA flats, often to youngsters.
Das says she has written letters to the Deputy Commissioner of Police and DDA to investigate the identities of the men but hasn’t gotten an appointment with the latter’s chief engineer in months.

“There are 2,000 families living here and some of the flats have been rented (to outsiders). That isn’t supposed to happen. Some flats have four residents, some 12, but the size of the house remains the same – one bedroom and a drawing room…,” she claims.

At Aya Nagar, a village on the Delhi border, residents complain of dysfunctional tubewells, blocked sewage lines and roads so narrow that even ambulances find it difficult to enter if a family has an emergency.

But the biggest problem, they claim, is having to pay bribes to get any construction done in the area.

“We’ve written to the MCD and MLAs… but nobody has helped,” says Kush Kumar, President of the C-3 block’s RWA.

For other issues, like water supply and garbage collection, tanks and trucks are brought in at personal cost, with the RWA collecting money based on the issue that crops up. “The RWA is powerless (against the authorities),” says a local. “What will they do?”

But there are also stories of solidarity. Madanpur Khadar, another border village of Delhi, deals with many of the same issues. But Abdul Wari, public secretary of a local RWA, says the body bands together whenever government agencies fail to come through.

He says, “If garbage isn’t collected on a day, there could be any number of reasons – maybe the truck’s CNG tank didn’t come, maybe the driver fell ill – but we have a WhatsApp group with residents and authorities. We send photos, they say it’ll be taken care of.”

“Once, a resident wanted to bring a relative’s corpse back from the hospital but the ambulance needed Rs 1,800,” he says.

“We got a letter signed by the committee, didn’t ask for any donation, and used the money to help them out. We don’t get any government funds but we keep a record of all that we collect. If someone isn’t well, we try to help.”