Critically evaluate how cut-off-date-based eligibility shapes slum rehabilitation outcomes. Suggest a rights-based alternative.

A cut-off date limits rehabilitation to families who settled in a slum before a notified date. Delhi's Cluster Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2026 moves this date to 1 January 2025, covering about 4 lakh families [2]. The cut-off is administratively useful. But it shapes outcomes more through the people it leaves out than through the people it houses.

Positive outcomes

• Planning certainty: a fixed list lets agencies cost projects across DUSIB's 685 JJ clusters (3.5 lakh households, about 800 ha) [3].
• Deters fresh encroachment on public land and lets DDA assess which clusters are viable for in-situ redevelopment [3].
• Land as a resource: a verified headcount lets ISSR cross-subsidise free flats through private participation [6].

Negative outcomes

• Moving goalposts: the cut-off was proposed as 1 June 2014 in 2015 [1] and is now 2025 [2]. Each revision creates a new group of "encroachers" and invites litigation.
• Paper-proof bias: needing continuous documents at one address penalises renters, migrants and families evicted earlier.
• Flats are not rehabilitation: only 37% of sanctioned ISSR houses were complete by December 2024, and only 30% of those were occupied. The Standing Committee blamed incomplete infrastructure, houses not being allotted, and allottees unwilling to move [4].
• Rights deficit: Olga Tellis linked shelter to livelihood under Article 21 [5]. Exclusion by date alone permits eviction without rehabilitation.

Verdict: a cut-off is a necessary filter but a poor measure of need. Used as the only test, it produces exclusion and empty flats.

Rights-based alternative

• Survey before eviction: write the Delhi High Court's Sudama Singh and Ajay Maken requirements (survey, meaningful engagement, rehabilitation before demolition) into the policy [7].
• Tiered entitlement: ownership flats for surveyed long-term residents; rental housing (ARH vertical, PMAY-U 2.0) for later arrivals [4]. This removes the reward for squatting without making anyone homeless.
• In-situ first, relocation last: relocate only from untenable sites, and only within reach of residents' work.
• Outcome-linked funding: release the final central instalment only once water, sewerage, transport and schools are working.
• One accountable agency per cluster, with a public beneficiary register open to objections.

A cut-off decides who is counted, not whether they are actually rehoused. Moving from a date-based gate to a needs-based, tiered entitlement rooted in Article 21 and SDG 11.1 would make the rehousing of 4 lakh families a working "Housing for All", not just a set of handed-over flats.