Indian cities such as Lucknow, Jaipur, Mumbai and Delhi are home to large informal settlements where millions of people live in slums and face the constant threat of displacement and disaster. These settlements cover large areas and are often affected by evictions, destruction and fires. Although these events are widely reported, little attention is paid to the gender dimensions of their impact.
I spoke to a woman from Lucknow who saw her hut burnt down Fire in Vikas Nagar in April 2026. She said the fire started suddenly and she didn’t have time to save her belongings. When asked how she planned to rebuild her life after the fire, she said she would have to go back to work as a day laborer and possibly take her children to work as the neighbors who had taken care of her in her absence would now focus on rebuilding their own lives.
What is rebuilt after resettlement is often the physical structure, the house, but not the informal trust networks between women that enable daily survival in these settlements. The government’s response to this type of displacement typically involves providing housing or compensation, but rarely includes supporting the informal systems on which women rely. This pattern repeats itself, cannot be ignored, and shows that evictions and relocations are not gender-neutral issues.
Infinite repression
Not every woman faces sudden displacement. For some women, it becomes a condition that lasts for years, forcing them to move between unstable homes and live without land or legal title to it.
A mother of four children who has not had a stable home for the last fifteen years described her problems with this in our interview. Fifteen years ago, her husband asked her to leave their home, along with their two daughters, then children, and forced her to live in a shack near a wealthy neighborhood. According to their report, the hut is made of bamboo poles and the thin tarpaulin walls offer little protection. She already lives in such unstable conditions and now fears that she will be evicted from this neighborhood again.
Since she had no one to look after her daughters, she took them to work with her. However, her earnings were not enough to teach her children. Hygiene brought its own challenges and dangers. Because there were no toilets, she and her daughters had to leave after dark to go to more distant open land, making the journey unsafe. To be safer, they traveled with other women from the nearby settlement. Some of the houses where she worked had washrooms outside the main house that she was allowed to use. If she and her daughters happened to pass a public restroom, they would use it, even though they couldn’t rely on it.
Something as basic as going to the toilet becomes a luxury for the people living in such settlements; a daily risk that women struggle with long before issues of safety and dignity are even addressed.
Something as basic as going to the toilet becomes a luxury for the people living in such settlements; a daily risk that women struggle with long before issues of safety and dignity are even addressed. The government has launched various initiatives such as the Swachh Bharat Mission, the key objective of which is to build toilets in rural and urban areas. But what about people who don’t have a home and for whom public toilets are too far away to reach?
Given the hardships they endured, she decided to marry off her daughters in the hope of giving them a better life than she could afford herself. She married them as soon as they turned 18. But the marriage of her daughters also came with its own conditions. She had to collect money for the dowry even though she could hardly afford it. She gave what she could, even if it meant taking extra work to cover the costs. To her, the dowry didn’t feel unfair; rather, it was a compulsion, something that was always followed.
Some of this financial burden was alleviated by her community and the households where she worked as a domestic worker. But the support that was evident during her daughters’ weddings waned as she tried again to rebuild her life. This dwindling support is not an isolated incident; Rather, it reflects something deeper about how hardship is often overlooked once the more visible crisis has passed.
Beyond the rubble
Both reports show that gender and poverty coexist and reinforce each other as a worsening reality. For a woman without land, without a steady income or without a reliable safety net, every setback means a double burden. For a long time, their work was not recognized and was invisible to politics. When an eviction or crisis occurs, the burden of this invisibility only increases.
If we are ever to address displacement fairly, we must consider what is not usually considered: women’s support networks, their informal workand their safety. Until then, the women are left alone to rebuild their lives, which often initially remain invisible.
Night is a final year BBA student at Isabella Thoburn College of Professional Studies, Lucknow, researching women’s informal work and urban displacement of women in India. She has authored two research papers, one on women’s informal work and one on forced displacement from slums, which were published on Zenodo. She is also a published poet whose works explore women’s lives and their resilience.