India, May 24 -- Against the backdrop of flattened homes and twisted metal sheets at Garib Nagar in Bandra East, some families on Saturday spent the day gathering whatever little they could salvage from the debris after a five-day demolition drive by the Western Railway left around 500 hutments in ruins days before Eid.

On the fifth and final day of the anti-encroachment operation, the Western Railway announced that it had completed "100%" demolition of structures standing on railway land earmarked for infrastructure expansion and capacity augmentation work linked to the Bandra Terminus project.

But even as railway officials spoke of fencing, barricading and concretisation work beginning near the cleared stretch, the mood on the site re...