Last month, the Uttar Pradesh government completed a demolition drive in Lucknow’s Akbar Nagar locality with the destruction of 1,169 homes and 101 commercial establishments. The demolitions of this decades-old, predominantly Muslim locality is for “beautification” under the Kukrail riverfront project, which seeks to transform the area into an eco-tourism hub. The demolitions were first initiated in December last year, and as of May, it had received the sanction of the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court of India. In our latest piece, we discussed the term “extrajudicial demolition,” which will be the focus of our research at The Demolitions Project. But in this newsletter, we find it crucial to highlight the social, economic, and human repercussions of even judicially sanctioned demolitions. The Lucknow Development Authority demolished the Akbar Nagar homes for encroaching on the Kukrail river, and the judiciary upheld this argument. But in the simplicity of this…

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