Mumbai Is Creating Vertical Slums For Its Displaced Urban Poor

Salmma Ravathar, 55, lives in the largest such block. Her home in a slum in Mankhurd, an eastern suburb, made way for an additional train track in 2000. After five years in a transit camp, the family was rehabilitated a few kilometres further northeast from their illegal shanty at Mankhurd’s Lallubhai Compound. It was their dream home. For the first time, they lived in a real building. That excitement, however, didn’t last.

From top, the area appears as rectangular Jenga blocks laid in neat, tightly packed rows. Up close, it’s a cluster of 65 buildings separated by a few feet. There’s no space for even an ambulance or a fire tender to pass through, Ravathar said. Walls have cracks, plaster is peeling off and passages and stairs are broken. The backyards are strewn with garbage and sewage overflows. Inside, most of the 225-square-feet tenements have little ventilation or light.

Lallubhai Complex, according to a 2018 report by non-profit Doctors For You, was “designed for death”. A dubious tag it shares with the nearby Natwar Parekh Compound. At both the settlements, the study found a higher incidence of tuberculosis among residents within six years of moving in.

The two complexes are home to more than 75,000 people. And Mumbai has 49 such clusters. The total number of people living there isn’t known but, according to authorities, it was 3,00,000 at the last count in 2010. Such settlements rehouse homeless urban poor illegally living on government or private land, recognising their right to life. Anyone who can provide evidence of staying in an area before Jan. 1, 2011 is eligible. Yet, poor living conditions underscore how they ignore the quality of life even as Mumbai looks to unlock some of the world’s biggest slums for development.

Regulations were eased over the years to allow more construction in smaller areas for low-cost housing, according to Hussain Indorewala, urban researcher and faculty at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. Slum-dwellers can be squeezed into a small plot and, in exchange, developers get rights to build higher-income apartments. The government creates free housing and developers make money, he said. But for the people living there, he said, “This is the most nightmarish housing that one can imagine.”

‘Resettled, Not Rehabilitated’

The resettlement began in the late 1990s when Maharashtra started laying new tracks, building freeways, skywalks and monorail, widening existing roads and clearing squatters in the city. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority and Slum Rehabilitation Authority were the planning agencies.

According to Sulkashana Mahajan, urban planner and architect, the rules were changed in 1998-1999 to build homes for maximum possible resettlers in a smaller space. But the designs breach the National Building Construction Code by compromising on the minimum distance between the buildings and the density of people per hectare.

Maharashtra’s own development rules allow a maximum of 500 dwelling units in every hectare of low-income housing. According to the report by Doctors For You, the density is 1,076 homes per hectare at Natwar Parekh Compound and 803 at Lallubhai.

Moreover, uprooted people not just move to depressing, congested conditions but are shifted far away from their livelihoods as most such projects come up in isolated areas.

The project-affected people are resettled, not rehabilitated, according to Marina Joseph, associate director at NGO Yuva (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action) Urban Initiatives. “That results in lowering household income because they now spend a lot more time and resources travelling up and down,” she said. If parents are not earning as much as they did earlier, it impacts children, their access to education, healthcare and food choices, she said.

Emailed queries to MMRDA and the BMC on the condition of project-affected people and design of such settlements remained unanswered.

Fear Of Eviction

Like Salmma Ravathar, Narayan More lives in a squalid settlement in Chembur’s Vashi Naka area, home to more than 37,000 people.

Outside, vendors illegally sell vegetables, vada-pav, groceries, and fruits as the nearest market is at least seven kilometres away. Inside, it’s dark in the afternoon. More lives on the fifth floor but the elevator doesn’t work.

He flicks on the light to take the broken stairs. But that’s the least of his worries. His biggest fear is of being booted out of his home.

“In 2011, we were given 10 days to leave our homes in Gautam Nagar in Chembur to make way for the Eastern Freeway. They gave us keys to this house and said if we don’t move, they will demolish our homes. We had no choice,” he said. “They did not conduct a survey to identify beneficiaries. We were temporarily allotted tenements.”

Many of his neighbours were similarly shifted to the location. Without documents showing permanent residency, residents can’t set up a society and collect funds to maintain the building. And they live under a constant fear of eviction.

MMRDA has yet to respond to queries about the eligibility of the residents.

“We have all the documents to prove our eligibility,” More said. “Despite complaining to almost every authority, nothing has moved.”

Yet, More got a home. Many didn’t get that choice.

Waiting For A Home

About 185 people live In Bandra East’s Indranagar slum. A photo of Ananta Hiwarale, 45, hangs in one of the shanties, holding Abram, son of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan.

Hiwarale said he then worked for the firm that provided security to the actor for four years. In 2017, his family was among the over 200 people who lost homes as civic authorities removed encroachments along the water pipeline. They were found ineligible for resettlement.

Slum-dwellers have to provide at least one of the seven documents, including photo ID issued during slum census, voter identity card, electricity bill and land use tax receipt, to prove that they have been living there prior to Jan. 1, 2011.

The BMC has yet to respond to emailed queries on why it found Hiwarale and others ineligible. A senior civic official, however, told BloombergQuint on the condition of anonymity that the corporation has asked them to submit documents and is scrutinising claims.

Meanwhile, the slum came back after the demolition but without power connections.

A Home They Don’t Want Now

While Hiwarale frets about not getting a home, those who were resettled aren’t better off either.

About 160 families from Indranagar were shifted to Mahul in northeastern Mumbai. Ayesha Shaikh, 22, was among them. In March 2018, within four months of moving in, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Like Lallubhai, Mahul has tightly packed 49 buildings. More than 30,000 people live among garbage, in buildings built so close that residents hardly get sunlight inside. But that’s nothing compared to life-threatening toxic air they breathe.

The area has oil refineries and several chemical factories spewing hazardous fumes. A study by the Indian Institute of Technology found people suffering from skin infections and chronic ailments, and suggested that the only solution was to move them out. The Bombay High Court ordered the local authorities find a new home for residents.

Meanwhile, Ayesha, who has now recovered, shifted back to the Bandra slum. “I am not at all upset,” she said. “In fact, I am happy.”

Bad Model For Future

Prior to 2016, 100 percent transferable development rights were granted in the north of the city under rehabilitation schemes. What that meant was a builder could construct 100 million square feet in a northeastern part like Mankhurd for the poor and build equivalent salable space in much-costlier suburbs like Bandra or Andheri, said Vilas Nagalkar architect and member of Practicing Engineers, Architects, and Town Planners Association (India).

In 2016, such rights were linked to the ready-reckoner rates or the minimum market in an area used for calculating taxes. That allowed builders to transfer the rights to anywhere in the city in proportion to the property costs, according to Naglakar.

In all such schemes, those displaced by new infrastructure have been worst hit.

Resettlement rules are uniform for all kinds of beneficiaries, according to Bilal Khan, an activist from Ghar Bachao, Ghar Banao Andolan, which works for the rights of slum-dwellers. For slum rehabilitation, developers use a portion of land to resettle people and build apartments to be sold at market prices on the rest to recover costs, Bilal said. But settlements for the project-affected are constructed entirely by offering transferable development rights, he said. “Therefore, they are often built in areas with low land and the construction quality is poor (to minimise costs).”

Hong Kong, facing a similar problem of squatters, built public communal housing in early part of the twentieth century. That gave way to self-contained flats in the second phase of rehabilitation. By the late 1980s, the nation-state had enough stock of quality housing that eventually paved the way for the demolition of Kowloon Walled City—a legacy the British didn’t want to leave behind. Not only did the poor get new homes but also compensation.

But Hong Kong is struggling again as there is no let-up in influx of migrants from mainland China. Public housing is inadequate. Scarcity of land means prices in the private market are among the highest in the world. While the property boom created enormous wealth, the poor are forced to live in “coffin homes”—apartments subdivided into cubicles. In fact, discontent against lack of housing is cited as one of the reasons for the current unrest.

In Mumbai too, according to Mahajan, things could get worse. Rather than looking at building better housing, the poor construction norms will apply to redevelopment of old housing colonies and BDD Chawls under the 2034 Mumbai Development Plan. Badly designed buildings, she said, will make people reluctant to give up their homes.

Salmma Ravathar is already regretting her decision. For her, her slum was better than Lallubhai Compound.