The board and the bank: Changing policies towards slums in Chennai

Arguing that the initial years of the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board were dominated by the priorities of the then ruling party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, whose government created it in 1971, this paper points out that shelter policies in the state had a formal orientation away from eviction and resettlement and towards in situ tenement construction, alongside an informal tendency to protect and reward those groups of the urban poor that the party was trying to court for votes.