A young girl works on a building project in front of the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium in the Indian capital, where the games will be held. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
The government bulldozers came to the school at 11am, after yoga and before English and Hindi lessons. The children and their teachers had three hours to clear the classrooms. By mid-afternoon, the Yamuna Riverbank school was rubble.
"They told us we were a security risk, so we had to go," headteacher Parminder Khaur Somal said. "All my children were crying. I don't know how we can be a threat to anyone."
Somal founded the school five years ago for 180 local slum children living on the banks of the Yamuna river on the outskirts of Delhi. In recent months, she and her pupils have watched a vast new complex of luxury apartments rise 500 metres away: the athletes' village for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games. "We never thought it could be a problem," Somal said.
The games, to be held in October, have sparked a wave of demolition across the Indian capital. The competition is the biggest such international sporting event held in India for decades and is seen as an opportunity for the nation to show off its new economic might.
Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, has repeatedly said she wants to the city to be "world class". There is even talk of trying to host the Olympics in the future. A particular target of the authorities is anything that could tarnish the "shining India" image.
Organisers of the games are acutely aware that the din and filth of the Indian capital could shock visitors. So, along with the construction of new sporting facilities, roads, flyovers, metro lines and an airport, dozens of long-standing slum communities built on public land, vacant lots, by railways or along rubbish-strewn stream beds have been destroyed; hoardings conceal others.
The children at Somal's school came from a community of workers on nearby vegetable farms. The nearest alternative was three miles away, across busy dual carriageways.
As the bulldozers destroyed the school, police also moved through the workers' shacks, scattering possessions and breaking down walls and ordering inhabitants to leave.
"The police just started beating me." Said Dharam Pal, a shopkeeper. "They dragged me 50 metres on the ground and then told me: "If you don't leave here on your own, we'll throw out."
Pal, 40, said the community was established 15 years ago and that he had "nowhere else to go".
Others complained of being assaulted. "Not only did they break the school, but they beat us too," said Harpyari Devi, 24, a mother of three children at the school. Senior policemen at the scene refused to comment. Officials from the Delhi municipal authorities were unavailable this weekend.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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