Bombay's Demolition Drive (2004-2005)

Mumbai Hutment Dwellers' Struggle: An Update - June 23, 2005

2005-06-24T07:45:00.000+02:00

From: Sukla Sen
Date: Thu June 23, 2005
Subject: Mumbai Hutment Dwellers' Struggle: An Update

[The monsoon has already set in. There's no move to provide immediate, even if temporary, relief. This is a very serious omission.

The enumeration, if carried out as an exclusively bureaucratic process, would result in huge exclusion. The process would also be vitiated by usual corrupt and extortionist practices. The state government is hell bent on doing precisely that. At the next hearing, on July 11, the court must be requested to intervene a fair enumeration by forming a monitoring committee having representatives of the people's / hutment dwellers' organisations and also institutions like TISS / Nirmala Niketan, in addition to the bureaucrats. The committee must have power to lay down norms and hear grievances.

This is a great opportunity to push for a rational and humane housing policy and true makeover of Mumbai - with affordable housing for the toiling multitude eliminating the abysmally subhuman living conditions those obtain today. Activists and experts must put their heads together to put forward a serious people's plan, at least in broad outlines, for true Mumbai makeover. Mere rejection of the government actions/moves would just not do.

Vilasrao had gone to the court to use it as a foil against the directives from Sonia Gandhi. But things apparently are moving in a very different direction. The activists must be ready to make the fullest use of the unforeseen and unanticipated opportunity. It's time to put forward and assert the right to shelter as a basic human and also constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right in a constructive and positive manner.]

NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS (NAPM) Haji Habib Bldg., First Floor, A wing, Naigoan Cross Rd., DADAR (East), MUMBAI 400 014.

----------------------------

Press Note: Mumbai, 22. June 2005

Today the Advocate General of Maharastra raised the issue of Mumbai's slumdwellers in the High Court of the honourable Chief Justice Shri. Bhandari and Justice Shri Vajefdharke. The State filed a notice of motion in a case from 1999. They wanted the approval of the Court in extending the cut-off date for providing temporary rehabilitation during the monsoon to slum dwellers that have resided in the city from
1-1-95 to 1-1-00. They have proposed to house the slum dwellers in Mankhurd Mandala in the eastern suburbs and Ambujawadi in the western suburbs.

The Court said that the State has the right to decide about the aforementioned issue. There is no need to involve the Court. The Andolan has been making this point since the beginning, but the State government has been taking the stand that the approval of the Court is required. This has resulted in the delay of rehabilitation of evicted slumdwellers and in the non-compliance of the notices from Smt. Sonia Gandhi. Due to this, thousands of families have not yet been rehabilitated, despite the onset of the monsoon.

The Advocate General of Maharastra has submitted that they want to rehabilitate families who arrived in Mumbai by
1-1-2000. The exact numbers will be affirmed after the ongoing survey is completed. The Court, without mentioning any cut-off date, stated that every citizen has the right to shelter and housing. No one can stop any citizen from entering Mumbai and there can't be any restriction on movement of people in a democratic state. Furthermore, the State has said there has to be an affordable housingpolicy for the poor. The State has to also provide houses to those that cannot afford to pay. The Chief Justice commented that the Court has not stopped the government in providing any form of immediate relief. He also requested the State, in order to fulfill its constitutional obligation of providing shelter to every citizen, to draft a comprehensive housing policy and submit it before the Court. The next
hearing will be on
11th July. The Court asked the Advocate General to also initiate a dialogue with the concerned organisations within the next four days so that a consensus can be reached.

The slumdwellers were represented by Advocates Mihir Desai and Vinod Shetty. The organisations Cityspace and Agni were represented by Shri Aspi Chinod and Shri K. K. Singhvi represented the BMC.

The State has been talking about and is committed to providing immediate relief only to people who have proved that they have been residing in Mumbai prior to 1-1-2000, not until the end of the year 2000. But in reality, the State has made no arrangements. With only the pre-2000 slumdwellers in mind, the State has only said that each family will receive 150 sq. meters [it's actually sq. ft. and that too against payment of Rs. 15,000.00], but the land has not been leveled yet to allow for settlement and no structures have been built. It would have been better, if during the monsoon period, if the government would have permitted the people to resettle temporarily on the land from which they were evicted.

The struggle will continue until the people are adequately resettled and their rights to housing are recognized.

Mohan Chauhan
Kaushilaya Salve
Medha Patkar

Dispute Tears at Mumbai: House the Rich, or the Poor?

2005-05-17T23:20:00.000+02:00

(The New York Times - May 17, 2005)

Dispute Tears at Mumbai: House the Rich, or the Poor?

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: May 17, 2005

MUMBAI, India - In the belly of this island city, the textile mills are overrun by weeds and their chimneys point at the sky like so many sooty elephant snouts. A glassy new high-rise glistens incongruously nearby. A construction crane peers over a giant crater where a mill has been demolished to make way for four luxury apartment towers.

Scott Eells for The New York Times
In striving to become a modern commercial center, "a city of the future," Mumbai has leveled many slums.

Paul Hilton/Bloomberg News
Where slums and abandoned textile factories once stood, high rises, office buildings and expensive shopping malls are going up in Mumbai.

For over a century this neighborhood, known as the Mill Lands, drew migrants from the countryside, fostered a politically powerful trade union movement and turned what was once a cluster of fishing villages into India's buzzing commercial capital.

Today the mills are dead, the lots on which they stand are among the few patches of property available in a bursting city, and the debate over what to do with the land goes to the heart of what kind of city Mumbai expects to become.

City officials, citizens groups and, lately, the courts are fiercely wrangling over questions like how much land will be set aside for parks and affordable housing, what will happen to the mill workers, who are central to Mumbai's creation myth, and whether developers should be allowed to turn the old factories into nightclubs and luxury apartments.

What is at stake is the future of the city's past.

Already, a 29-story luxury hotel has sprung up in the Mill Lands, as well as several new office blocks and an exclusive shopping mall.

Environmental groups have gone to court in an effort to set aside a chunk of the remaining 600 acres for public use. In April, a Mumbai court put a temporary halt on development.

[In a reversal in early May, the Indian Supreme Court gave its blessings for construction to continue, initially on seven large parcels.]

The wrangling comes at a time when Mumbai, or Bombay, as the name was spelled for centuries, a city that is as alluring as it is frustrating to the roughly 14 million residents, is engaged in a larger debate about identity.

Will it remain a magnet for strivers from the countryside? Will it be able to draw foreign investment? Will it stand out as India's global city?

"Bombay is a city of the past," declared Narendra Nayar, an industrialist and the chairman of a business lobby called Bombay First. "It must be a city of the future."

Mr. Nayar's group is in large part responsible for setting off the spat over Mumbai's future. Armed with a report prepared by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, it called over a year ago for a radical $40 billion makeover of the city: clearing slums, and building a new subway, public toilets and an airport tarmac without shanties on the margins. Titled Vision Mumbai, the report dangled the prospect of transforming the city into a Shanghai on the Arabian Sea.

The dispute that Vision Mumbai unleashed served to demonstrate amply why Mumbai is not Shanghai now, and won't be anytime soon.

"Now, you can't straightaway say we want a world-class city and we don't want anything ugly," said Neera Adarkar, an architect and a passionate foe of Bombay First's notion of the city. "Just because you don't want to see them, they're not going to suddenly disappear."

The government's efforts to demolish slums earlier this year caused such a ruckus that it stopped after two months, and prompted the state's chief minister to be summoned to New Delhi for a talking-to. (The Congress Party-led coalition that governs India, after all, owes its victory largely to the poor.)

Citizens groups have gone to court in an effort to save the Mill Lands for public space. Weekend tours of demolished slums have been organized to show solidarity with the displaced. Freedom-of-information requests have been filed to reveal which properties are actually publicly owned. Citizens have quarreled endlessly over Vision Mumbai.

"I hate that word," complained Charles Correa, Mumbai's most acclaimed architect and urban planner. "There's very little vision. No one really knows. They're more like hallucinations."

Vision or hallucination, the charged debate points as much to the city's vitality as to its desperation. More than half its citizens live in slums. Railroad tracks serve as toilets because there are none for those who do not have proper homes. The sardine-can nature of living means the rich simply cannot ignore the poor, as they can in many other cities. To commute every morning from the fancy northern suburbs is to drive past thousands of shanty dwellers, brushing their teeth in the streets.
"Bombay is where India meets the world," declared Gerson D'Cunha, a retired advertising executive who founded an influential citizens lobby called Agni Mumbai. "That's what has made people say, enough is enough, we've got to do something."

The paucity of land in Mumbai - what Mr. D'Cunha calls "a famine for land" - makes the fate of the Mill Lands a highly charged debate.

From his milk stand across the street, a former mill worker named Ganpath Shankar Gorgaonkar, 65, threw a rueful look at the up-market High Street Phoenix mall, where the famed Phoenix Mills once stood. In the fading light, the silhouettes of construction workers could be seen erecting another high-rise tower.

"When I see this, I feel very sad," he said. "No middle-class people can stay here."

In the back room behind his shop, his son, Sunil, a commercial photographer, edited digital photos on his desktop computer. Never, he said, had he considered following his father into the mills. Occasionally, he hung out with friends at the Barista Cafe inside the mall. He understood, nonetheless, why men like his father felt out of place here: "He's from the old times."

He understood, too, he said, how times had changed for the working men of Mumbai. In his father's day, a mill worker could feed his entire family. Today, he said, entire families work to feed themselves.

The textile factories flourished for 150 years before they were finally killed by industrial strikes in the 1980's. Over the next two decades, the mill owners converted their properties into lucrative ventures and managed, in 2001, to tweak an older municipal law that required them to set aside a third of the land for public use. In the end, the law stipulated that only a small fraction be set aside.

[The latest Supreme Court ruling has given mill owners and developers a shot in the arm. "It is a wonderful judgment," said Niranjan Hiranandani, one of India's largest developers. "This will add a lot of area for development, which is very much needed in Mumbai."]

Of the nearly 60 mills that once operated here, more than a dozen have been converted into office towers, shops and apartments. About 40 are left.

For the city's developers, it is like manna from a real estate heaven. For urban planners, it is a bounty with which to resuscitate the cramped city center. For those who live there, it is a scary prospect of change.

"There's a great deal of money to be made, and everybody is struggling with their greasy fingers," Mr. D'Cunha said. "The question is, which political view will prevail?"

Fact file about the Slum Demolitions, Bangladeshis et al.. (NAPM)

2005-05-12T23:12:00.000+02:00

Factfile

1.

REPORT OF THE ENQUIRY INTO THE LATHI CHARGE ON THE DEMONSTRATION BY DISHOUSED SLUM DWELLERS

ON 6TH APRIL 2005 IN MUMBAI

PREAMBLE

The Indian People‚s Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) requested us ˆ Justice (Retd.) R.B.Mehrotra and J.B.D‚Souza, former Chief Secretary, Government of Maharashtra ˆ to hold an unofficial judicial enquiry into the lathi charge by the Mumbai police on the 6th April 2005, on a morcha taken out by people whose homes had been demolished by the State and municipal authorities in Mumbai in December 2004.

The scheduled dates of enquiry were notified as the 23rd and 24th April 2005. We made our enquiry at three places, one in Mumbai‚s eastern suburbs and two in the western suburbs. We submit this report after examining people who were injured in the lathi charge, media persons who were covering the demonstration, social activists and eminent people, who gave eye-witness accounts.

Further, we made an attempt to secure the version of the Government of Maharashtra , and of the police, in particular. Letters were addressed by the IPHRC to Shri R.R.Patil, Deputy Chief Minister and Home Minister, Maharashtra, the Commissioner of Police, Shri A.N.Roy, Mumbai, Shri Naval Bajaj, DCP , Zone I, Mumbai, Sr.PI Shri Kaiser Ahmed, Azad Maidan Police Station and PI Sanjay Kadam, Azad Maidan Police Station, Mumbai. However, there was no reply from any of them.

Since there was no response to the request, we thought we too should address Shri Patil, to enable us to come to a correct conclusion. We suggested that the Minister might decide on a time and place for such a hearing. But no official came, nor did the Minister reply, so that we have no idea of the official version except for the Police Commissioner‚s statement which appeared in the press on the 7th April.

I

BACKGROUND

1.1 Suddenly toward the end of 2004 Maharashtra‚s Chief Minister announced that he would turn Mumbai into a world-class city. As a model to emulate he chose Shanghai. Pursuant to the goal he had chosen he decided to demolish squatter slums put up after 1995. (Slums created up to that year were protected by an earlier government decision.) In his quest for votes in the October 2004 State elections the CM vowed that if elected to power the government would regularize slums created up to 2000, but he resiled from that promise after winning the elections and assuming power. (The switch from 1995 to 2000 could possibly lead to his prosecution under Sec. 417 or 420 IPC, for cheating a slum dweller into voting for the Congress ˆ but that is not a matter that concerns us in this enquiry.) The Congress manifesto also promised that jhuggis built up to 2000 would be protected.

1.2 The growth of Mumbai‚s population is too readily ascribed to an influx of poor people from India‚s villages. That was true up to the 1970s, but since then it has been the natural increase of the city‚s existing population that has greatly outpaced the rural influx as the primary growth factor. There is still, of course, a steady influx, but even the CM, who is also the Minister for Urban Development, is quite ignorant of its pace. He has regularly claimed that 350 rural families immigrate into Mumbai daily ˆ an exaggeration by a factor of at least ten.

1.3 The principal reason for the continuance of the influx, such as it is, is the persistence of rural poverty. Villagers move to the city because gainful employment is scarce in their villages. Many in the lower castes move to escape the tribulations that afflict those castes more obtrusively in small rural communities. To these factors must be added the displacement of people, specially tribals, from land that governments acquire for large projects. Clearly the move to the cities is a consequence of circumstances that the government should itself have addressed during the half century after independence.

1.4 In their treatment of the rural influx, mostly of poor people, our governments have not tried to provide affordable shelter to accommodate them. So they are forced into squatting wherever they can find space in the cities, however wretched the conditions that prevail in such settlements. Successive governments‚ response to the growth of such slums in Mumbai has been simply a promise to tolerate those created before a certain date, a date that keeps moving forward in fits and starts when elections draw near. Up to mid-2004, that date was 1995.

As we have seen above, election fever led to its shift to 2000, a promise Mr Vilasrao Deshmuh tried to deny after he became CM at the end of 2004. Today the majority of Mumbai‚s citizens are forced to live in slums. In fact, as a recent Right-to-Information disclosure by the police department has shown, 4413 constables and 81 police officers live in slums.

1.5 Mumbai‚s municipal and revenue authorities sprang with alacrity into a massive program to demolish slums set up after 1995, and in an incredibly short period of two months made some 90.000 slum families homeless. In their haste, they destroyed large numbers of pre-1995 huts that had sheltered people who had papers like ration cards to prove the age of their residence. We visited Ambujwadi, one of the largest areas of demolition, on the 24th April, where we found many people whose names had been on the voters‚ list. Perhaps that was what inspired the pre-election Congress promise extending 1995 to 2000 for protection.

1.6 Our site visit also showed that large numbers of pucca constructions had been bulldozed during the demolition. The victims of the demolition bitterly complained that their belongings, including foodstuffs, utensils and ration cards had been destroyed.

II

EVENTS OF THE 6TH APRIL

2.1 The unfortunate incidents of April 6, 2005, into which we have been asked to inquire, commenced at about 11 a.m. at August Kranti Maidan. Some 8000 people assembled there. They collectively took an oath before the Gandhi statue, an oath to persist in their agitation against the large-scale demolitions, but to maintain peace throughout. They then walked in a morcha about 7 km. to Azad Maidan, which they reached about 2.30 p.m. All the way there they were escorted by the police, who could have warned their leaders if their meeting and movement to Azad Maidan were considered unlawful. On the contrary, a Canadian journalist deposed before us that they were cordial, capturing the excitement of the occasion.

2.2 When they reached near the BMC building opposite Azad Maidan they found that the Maidan was full, occupied by three or four other sets of demonstrators. Medha Patkar spoke to them over a microphone. She told them to sit down where they were, on the street and footpath, to wait till some space might be available in the Maidan grounds. Many of them were desperately thirsty after their long walk and tried to search nearby for water. While they were in the process of settling down, and Medha Patkar was in conversation with the police officers for a few minutes about the possibility of moving into Azad Maidan, the police presence around them ominously increased.

2.3 As the evidence before us unmistakably shows, the gathering was perfectly peaceful. There could have been no apprehension whatever of a breach of peace. This description was confirmed again and again by photographs taken at the time, and by the films shot by Anand Patwardhan and others, as well as by the narrations of those who deposed (over 80 of them), including independent observers, whom we list below :

· Sudhir Badami, structural engineer

· Sonia Nerkar, trainee journalist with Apla Mahanagar

· Sujata Gothoskar, Forum Against Oppression of Women ˆ beaten and medical report confiscated by police

· Sandhya Gokhale, beaten

· Maju Varghese ˆ works for ŒInitiative‚, beaten because he pleaded for women beaten inside the police station

· Vinod Hivaly, Apnalaya staff and Civil Defence Officer

· Chitra Palekar, film-maker

· Dave Ron, Canadian journalist, beaten twice.

· Ayub Shaikh, Reporter, Sahara Samay TV

Besides, we heard their accounts of the day‚s events from

Medha Patkar, who led the morcha

Anand Patwardhan, film maker

Subhash Baburao Marathe, President, Chembur Jhopadpatti Dharak Mahasangh

Praveen Ghag, member, Girni Kamgar Sangarsh Samiti

2.4 Suddenly the Deputy Commissioner of Police present there, Naval Bajaj, announced that he would shout "1 ˆ 2 ˆ 3" and the police would then disperse the crowd. Almost at once he screamed again "1- 2- 3" and the constables and inspectors (Kaiser Ahmed and Sanjay Kadam) began a lathi charge on the people seated there. Men, women (some of them pregnant) and children were thrashed indiscriminately, people stampeded in panic; many, particularly women and children, fell and badly hurt themselves. Participants in the morcha, who had sat on the ground in response to Medha Patkar‚s instructions, were beaten before they could rise. Medha Patkar was beaten and dragged into a police van. Patwardhan‚s camera, a target specially chosen by the police, was struck and flung to the ground. He too was dragged into a police van, his shirt torn to shreds. Some of the victims of the lathi charge were so badly injured that, two weeks after the incident, when they appeared to depose before us, they still had their arms or legs in plaster.

2.5 One of the children, Shabana, infant daughter of Salim Manihar, was so badly hurt that she died soon after reaching home. We visited the family‚s makeshift jhopdi outside the Ambujwadi demolition site, and consoled the child‚s parents. Salim had already addressed a complaint to the Azad Maidan Police Station in this respect on the 20th April. He verified its contents to us.

2.6 Large numbers of the demonstrators as well as others like Anand Patwardhan, were arrested. Some were beaten even after they were within the police station. One of them produced a receipt for Rs.500, paid to secure her release; she said she had actually paid Rs.2000.

2.7 We were given copies of a large number of medical treatment papers written up at St George‚s Hospital, Nair Hospital and G.T.Hospital. The rush of patients injured by the police lathis was so large that many persons seeking treatment were turned away. Some of those injured were treated at private clinics.

III

BRUTAL LATHI CHARGE WITHOUT CAUSE OR PROVOCATION

3.1 Was the demonstration on April 6 at any stage unlawful? We have carefully considered each of the five criteria listed in Sec 141, I P C, but find that none of them could characterize this demonstration. It was a demonstration aimed entirely at calling the attention of the state government and the public of Mumbai to the plight of the dishoused slum people, There was no force whatever, criminal or otherwise; there was no resistance to law or legal process; there was neither mischief nor trespass. The police had escorted the morcha all the way from August Kranti Maidan to Azad Maidan. Had the objective or the means of demonstrating been illegal it was surely the duty of the police to prevent the procession to south Mumbai.

3.2 And as to their conduct on arrival outside Azad Maidan, we have the evidence of independent witnesses, evidence that has emphatically convinced us that there was no truth at all in the claim by A.N.Roy, Police Commissioner, later that day, that the lathi charge was a response to stone throwing. The films shot by Patwardhan and others show no rocks or stones lying on the street after dispersal of the demonstrators. Even the Times of India report on the next day on the incident, ends with a contradiction of his claim. It is disgraceful that a senior officer of the Indian Police Service should descend to fabrication and falsehood to defend the indefensible.

We are satisfied, on the basis of the oral statements before us, the written statements we received, the films and newspaper cuttings we were shown, photographs and a floppy produced by Dave Ron, that there was no provocation whatever of any type by the demonstrators which could excuse such brutal and inhuman lathi charge as occurred.

3.3 As stated above, to give the police an opportunity to establish their version they were invited to appear before us. They did not. If they have an explanation of their conduct, they were not prepared to share it with us, for reasons that we can well understand.

3.4 We also asked the Deputy C.M., who is the Home Minister, to let us meet him. There was no response.

IV

NO WARNING

4.1 Was the lathi charge preceded by a warning to the assembled crowd, a direction that they disperse? Such a direction to a peaceful crowd, however unjustified, might have converted the assembly into an unlawful one. The law requires that the police give such warning before a resort to force. Chapter IX of the Criminal Procedure Code is clear.

4.2 We have incontrovertible evidence ˆ not only from Medha Patkar and the aggrieved slum people who deposed but also of several independent witnesses ˆ that there was no warning whatever, unless a cryptic and peremptory "1- 2- 3" declaration by the DCP, Naval Bajaj (and addressed not to the crowd but to his policemen), has to serve as one.

V

USE OF EXCESSIVE FORCE

5.1 Authorities using force against activities they regard as disturbances of the peace are obliged to use as little force as they can, to bring the situation under control. There is a hierarchy of enforcement devices beginning with tear gas and water jets, with both of which, we understand, Mumbai‚s police are equipped. There is no justification for the police to have jumped straight to a lathi charge in their decision to disperse the slum dwellers‚ morcha. And when they did so, they did it in the most brutal fashion, thrashing children and women with babes in arms or after they had fallen in flight, accompanying their assaults with obscene abuse, of which witness after witness complained. One of the police officers, Kaiser Ahmed, even went to the extent of later trying to cajole into silence Salim Manihar, father of the deceased girl, on the ground that they were brothers, both Muslims, and he, Ahmed, would be of use in future. He got Salim to sign statements which were not read or explained to him.

5.2 Nor were the police justified in confiscating the medicines doled out to their injured victims. Para 62 in Volume III of the Bombay Police Manual, 1959, requires the police officers dealing with disturbances to arrange medical aid for those injured. Altogether, the police did everything wrong; they broke the law, they were barbarous, cruel and deceitful.

VI

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION

6.1 The constables who wielded the lathis so brutally, acted under the direct control and supervision of DCP Naval Bajaj and Inspectors Kaiser Ahmed and Sanjay Kadam, who personally watched the havoc they were wreaking. It is these three officers who are guilty of usurping powers they did not have and using them to harm innocent demonstrators. We are satisfied that (a) they deserve to be prosecuted under Sections 166 and 325 or 323, IPC, and (b) if the state government does not under Secs 132 and 197, CrPC, allow their prosecution, the High Court should be approached for a writ directing the government to do so.

6.2 It is a total breach of the law (and of para 113 of the Bombay Police Manual) for the police at the Azad Maidan Police Station to have refused to record an FIR about these incidents and for the Police Commissioner to have done the same when Medha Patkar approached him. Here too, we recommend prosecution under Sec 166, IPC.

6.3 We also recommend that those injured, and the parents of the child who died, be adequately compensated by the government, at the cost of the police officers who perpetrated this oppressive action and the Commissioner who tried to cover it.

6.4 We further recommend that those dishoused by the demolitions be provided with at least makeshift shelter at the same speed with which their homes were destroyed, to save them from the rigours of the monsoon.

The evidence collected by the Tribunal is available with The Indian People‚s Human Rights Commission, Mumbai. Contact : 9870042752

2.

NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS
Haji Habib Building, Naigoan Cross Road,Dadar (E), Mumbai - 14

Press release
08.05.2005

The role of Maharashtra Govt. regarding rehabilitation of slum dwellers is unclear even today. The discussion for planning the rehabilitation should be done only after rehabilitating all the slum dwellers on the same spot.

The chief Minister of Maharashtra, Shri Vilasrao Deshmukh has finally decided to raise the cut-off date from 1995 to 2000 which is viewed as a sign of the
Maharashtra Government moving one step forward.

According to the Chief Minister, it has been decided to bring the promise made by the NCP and Congress party in their election manifesto into reality. Only a few days ago, Maharashtra Pradesh Congress President, Smt. Prabha Rao, had stated during the May day celebrations that the mention of 2000 as cut-off-date in the election manifesto was a printing mistake. This has now been promptly denied. It is startling to note the contradictory statements issued regarding the basic rights of thousands of families from the labouring community who have been deprived of not only their houses but also their aily bread and are now perishing under the hot May sun. Also, the affidavit
produced by the State Govt. in respect of an older case (filed by the Relief Road Residents Association)is not completely satisfactory.

It is understood from the press that the Maharashtra Govt. has sought a ruling by the court through the affidavit, the hearing of which is due on 8th June,2005. The question is, can the govt. not overrule its own laws or earlier orders/decisions by issuing a fresh ruling in favour of the poor?

Various other laws like the Patent law, Electricity law are being bent at
free will. Wasn't asking for the court's permission possible or necessary before any such step? This raises doubts as to what is the real face or intention of the Government!

To the nearly 150 representatives of these poor families from Mumbai who met her yesterday i.e. on 7th May, 2005 Smt. Sonia Gandhi gave an assurance that the party has decided to rehabilitate all the displaced on the same plot of land as an immediate step. Whereas Shri. Gurudas Kamat, MP, has stated that everything has already been done in favour of the poor and declared the movement by the slum dwellers as unwarranted and a publicity stunt. In reality, the state Govt. has so far not paid any heeds to the Center or the party opinion and avoided giving relief to the poor families. Thousands of children, old,sick, hungry and thirsty have been left unprotected
in the open to face the cold, the sun and the impending rains.

Now, in the 7th May affidavit filed in the court, as per what the Maharashtra Chief Minister says, the families from 1995 to 2000 will be allotted
plots admeasuring about 150 sq. feet outside Mumbai by charging them Rs.15,000/- per family. This raises a number of questions.

1.What about the thousands of families whose houses have been demolished in spite of them belonging to prior 1995 period? These demolitions were not only unjust but also unlawful. Who will compensate for their loss and how?

2.Whether the Govt. will be responsible for leaving these people homeless, torturing them and depriving them of their constitutional right to live and
subsistence?

3. When their means of subsistence are within the city of Mumbai, close to where they were staying and from where they have now been evacuated, why should they be thrown out of Mumbai? Even today, there are thousands of hectors of land within Mumbai where the lease is already over, or which were leased to the rich for a pittance or land which was reserved for allotment to
the homeless under the Mumbai Development Plan or the land which was reserved under the urban land ceiling act and used unlawfully or land acquired by the rich and the able by trespassing CRZ Notification etc.

4.It is agreeable that the scheme for rehabilitation for the poor should be free from malpractices which enrich the already flourishing builders and give
costly accommodations to politicians at much cheaper rate. After allotting 150 sq. feet of land to the poor, it is agreeable to recover some amount from
them; but why in lump-sum? Why not on an easy installment over a period of time? Can the poor pay an amount of Rs.15,000/- at a time? While the Govt. is giving services and facilities like land-highway,infrastructure to the rich in the country, why not offer basic facilities like housing or other related amenities at a low cost or on easy installment to the poor? Can it be termed as a special obligation or against the welfare of the nation? In fact the Govt.is obliged to fulfill this constitutional responsibility.

5.Will the Chief Minister and the Govt. of Maharashtra, remove the police force and allow the families to resettle on the same plots from where
their house were buldozed in accordance with what Sonia Gandhi and her party has decided? The mansoon is fast approaching (less than a month from now) and it is an urgent need to resettle these poor families well before monsoon.

If the Chief Minister, Center and State Governments and the representatives of Congress-NCP-Republican Party do not take any decision in this matter after discussions with People's Movements, then we are in for a bitter struggle.

Suniti S.R., Sanjay M.G., Medha Patkar, Raju Bhise,
Kausalya Salve, Mohan Chavan.

3.

NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF PEOPLE‚S MOVEMENTS
C/o chemical Mazdoor Sabha, 1 st floor, A Wing, Haji Habib Bldg, Naigaon Cross Rd,
Dadar (E), Mumbai -400014).

Press Release: May 10, 2005

THE FAKE SCARE OF BANGLADESHIS TAKING OVER MUMBAI STANDS EXPOSED: Official Record Shows only 626 Bangladeshis in Mumbai

While both Bal Thakre with his son and nephew, as well as Vilasrao Deshmukh raised a hue and cry against the Bangladeshis taking over Mumbai, one got a feeling as the government tried hard to make us believe, that these "encroachers" are "terrorists" and "crowding" the country in large numbers. That they are "all criminals" and the country‚s peace, law and order, morality and culture- everything was at stake. The two senior-most of the opponent politicians in Mumbai must have felt threatened by this since both agreed on this common issue; one would have thought this was a crisis or a critical issue!

We therefore decided to get out any information on the Bangladeshis, if not their whereabouts, their anti-social activities as claimed by the government, starting with their number. The Right to Information Act came to our help.

The question raised has the official reply by now. There are (only) 626 Bangladeshis in the entire city of Mumbai, as of 2004.

Six hundred and twenty six out of one crore people in Mumbai and we‚re being made to believe they constitute an unprecedented threat!

And the slum-dwellers are to be defamed to get sympathy from the middle and upper class taxpayers, whose taxable property itself came through the blood and sweat of the poor, including poor Bangladeshis. They are to be evicted to snatch away the land. It is certainly to condemn the slum-dwellers as videshis and vagabonds that the Bangladeshi false allegation has been used.

The truth is that not the Bangladeshis but the desi corrupt builders and their protectors are the real threat to India. When American, European and other videshis are welcomed into our country, why not the Bangladeshis?

The hypocrisy and double standards of the government are evident and shameful.

Medha Patkar

Poor squeezed out by Mumbai's dream plan (Randeep Ramesh)

2005-03-01T22:10:00.000+01:00

[The Guardian - March 1, 2005]

Poor squeezed out by Mumbai's dream plan
India's biggest city is razing its shanty towns

Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai

All that is left of 13-year-old Parvin Tamhankar's home is the red-tiled floor. Built brick by brick over the past 10 years with the money his father earned by sweeping floors in a city hospital, it was flattened in minutes by government bulldozers earlier this month.

"My brother and I have our exams in March. Now I have no books, nowhere to sit. There is no water and no electricity. I do not understand why all this had to happen," Parvin said.

His home was in a slum colony called Bhimchaya, made up of 500 "hutments", structures constructed of brick, mud and asbestos sheets, spread over a couple of acres on the edge of a dense mangrove belt. The 3,000 residents had banded together to get water connected and alleys lit by electric bulbs.

Since the beginning of the year about 90,000 huts have been demolished and an estimated 350,000 people have been left homeless, in line with the city authority's announcement of its intention to make Mumbai the "next Shanghai" by 2010. The £20bn development programme is based on a report by the consultants McKinsey.

In Vision Mumbai, McKinsey says the number of people living in slums should be reduced to about 10-20%. Mumbai is the world's eighth most expensive city for property, and more than half its population live in shanty towns, unable to afford its rents.

Minar Pimple, director of the People's Movement for Human Rights, which has been campaigning against the demolitions, said: "Half the people in the city occupy less than a tenth of its total space. Mumbai needs the labour of these slum dwellers but the city authorities do not want them living in the city."

There is little chance of rehousing the huge slum population in Mumbai quickly, experts say. The government builds only 3,000 houses a year to house relocated people .

Mr Pimple added: "We keep on hearing about urban renewal. First we would be Hong Kong, then we were going to be Singapore. Now it is Shanghai. All that happens is that the poor lose their homes without the city offering any alternative."

After Bhimchaya was razed, municipal officials promised to return with offers of alternative accommodation.

But they have only returned to check that no one is rebuilding in the slum, and families are forced to keep their belongings under tarpaulin sheets spread across bamboo poles.

Radhabhai Margunde, sitting on a muddy floor feeding her daughter, said: "In the morning when the policeman and the bulldozers came and told us get out, there were women bathing. They were not given time even to dress properly. We lost everything. We had papers to stay here. Where should I move now?"

Supporters of the demolition claim that slum-dwellers are holding back the city's forward march. Bombay First, a business lobby, points out that 40 slum families have prevented crucial expansion of Mumbai's domestic airport.

Its chief executive, Vijay Mahajan, said: "The airports authority could not extend the taxi track unless they evict these families. In the process, 2.5 million air passengers suffer, and 2,000 litres of turbine fuel is wasted. Are its legal citizens going to run this city or the illegal encroachers?"

The airport authority let the bulldozers roll into the disputed spot 10 days ago. In nearby Bail Bazar its displaced residents rushed forward with papers showing that the city had given tacit approval and basic services to the "illegal" settlement.

"I paid 40,000 rupees for my home and have the papers to prove it," said Sultana Syed, a 32-year-old cleaner, waving sheets of paper as she spoke. She pointed to photocopies of voting cards, ration cards and land titles that prove residence since 1995.

"I have everything here. But the police did not listen to us. We will vote out these people who did this."

Conscious of the gathering political backlash, the Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi, intervened earlier this month. Congress and its allies run Maharashtra state, and Mrs Gandhi summoned her chief minister to New Delhi to stop the levelling.

The result was that the demolition was halted last week and protection extended to slums built before 2000. This is little comfort to those whose homes have already been bulldozed.

Many experts say that the idea of trying to replicate Shanghai's success is pointless. The Chinese city was created out of largely empty space and its population, 13m, is spread over 4,500sq km (1,373sq miles). Mumbai is an island and its 14m people occupy just 437sq km.

SS Tinaikar, who was the city's senior official in the early 90s, said: "One is a new city created largely by foreign investment and the other is an old city being redeveloped, new layers upon old layers."

The problem was really about migration, he added. The city, one of India's most economically vibrant, contributing a third of the national tax revenue, attracts 100,000 people every year from outside Maharashtra.

"A hundred thousand outsiders in search of a job and therefore in search of a house. But the houses that are built are too expensive for the poor. The result is slums.

"By demolishing slums before you build low cost public housing all that will happen is that the slum will simply slowly spring up again."

Mumbai's 'Shanghai dream' hangs in balance (Sumeet Chatterjee)

2005-02-27T18:49:00.000+01:00

Mumbai's 'Shanghai dream' hangs in balance (FEATURE)
By Sumeet Chatterjee, Indo-Asian News Service

Mumbai, Feb 27 (IANS) Shoving his belongings under plastic sheets and bamboo poles erected on a pavement here, Raju Tyagi shudders to think of the day when his tin-roofed shack was razed to the ground by a menacing bulldozer.

Tyagi, a migrant labourer from Bihar, is now waiting to be rehabilitated as the Maharashtra government halts the drive to demolish hutments that dot the landscape of India's bustling financial and entertainment capital.

A drive that is intended to free up space for development and make Mumbai "another Shanghai".

"Those people tore down the house where I was living for the last 11 years in just a few minutes," says a livid Tyagi.

"We want the government to give back our houses...they can't evict us from our homes like this in the name of development. I too paid a price to buy that house and I have a right to work and live in this city," he says.

With up to 60 percent of Mumbai's 16 million people living in slums ringed by towering condominiums and gleaming shopping malls, questions are being raised about the demolition drive that began December last year.

Over 90,000 hutments have been smashed to modernise this choking metropolis and reproduce the recent transformation of Shanghai, China's showpiece business city.

The Shanghai makeover was first talked about during the Maharashtra assembly elections October last year.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had then said the government would transform Mumbai into "another Shanghai" by 2010 as part of a larger plan of urban renewal, which is so far missing in most of the country's crowded and infrastructure-deficient cities.

"It's very unfortunate that the development of Mumbai, which was once India's most westernised city, has fallen prey to politics," says Narinder Nayar, chairman of Bombay First, an NGO.

"Forget about turning the city into the next Shanghai, the way things are moving the city will collapse very soon. Mumbai is decaying and nobody seems to have a clear idea what to do to stop this," he says.

The demolition of slums was stopped last week after the central government asked Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to extend the protection to slums built till 2000.

Earlier, slums built till 1995 were protected by law, and the recent demolition drive targeted hutments that sprang up between 1995 and 2000.

According to Nayar, cleaning up illegal slums is the only way to ease pressure on the city's transport, housing and other utility services.

"Nearly 1,000 migrants come from poor states to Mumbai every day because they are told it is easy to get a job here. And once they are here, they manage to put up a hut by paying the slum mafia.

"The city's infrastructure has not grown to accommodate this influx. Nineteenth century infrastructure is supporting a city in the 21st century," says Nayar.

Mumbai's commuter trains, which link the suburbs with the main city and are considered its lifeline, carry over 700 people in one coach during peak hours.

Experts say the international norm is 200 passengers.

Despite an elaborate train service that rests only a few hours after midnight, Mumbai sees kilometre-long traffic jams on all major arterial roads.

Clearly the infrastructure hasn't been able to keep pace with the growing number of vehicles.

With the population exploding, homes are fewer and costlier than before.

The cost of real estate in Mumbai is the highest in the country, says consulting firm CB Richard Ellis.

The occupation cost, which comprises rent, local taxes and service charges, is ruling at $52.74 per square feet a year. In national capital New Delhi, it's $40.72.

Urban planners say the exorbitant real estate cost forces people even with reasonable incomes to live in slums.

"We have created a situation where the people are invited to encroach on public land. There is a nexus that nobody wants to break. As a result, the city has far exceeded its carrying capacity," says environmentalist Debi Goenka.

Arputham Jockin, president of the National Slum Dwellers' Federation, says it's wrong to blame the poor slum dwellers for the haphazard development planned by the authorities.

"The way people were evicted from their shanties and thrown out on the streets was inhuman. It doesn't happen anywhere in the world," Jockin says.

"If the slums have to be cleared, a proper rehabilitation plan should be first chalked out. Why can't the government make available large-scale low-cost houses for these people?" he asks.

Urban planners say there is enough space on the city's outskirts to construct one million low-income houses for the slum dwellers.

And let everybody who made Mumbai their home live the "Shanghai dream."

Indo-Asian News Service

Fire and earth (Dilip D'Souza)

2005-02-27T17:54:00.000+01:00

[Magazine section - The Hindu, Feb 27, 2005 ]

REFLECTIONS

Fire and earth

Visiting the site of a demolition drive in north Mumbai, DILIP D'SOUZA found his mind going back a few weeks: to a previous encounter with `fire', rubble and, yes, awe.

SHAJU JOHN
Nature's fury ... this destruction saw the waves bringing "fire" and mud.

SOME distance from where I'm standing, with my new friends Dilip Kale and Mohammed Muslim Pathan, is what used to be the Osmania Masjid. At least one or two thousand people would sit inside here to read namaz, they've told me more than once. It was "registered", says Mohammed, though what it means to "register" a mosque, I have no idea. But given that it was "registered", he goes on, the Municipality should never have torn it down.

Mohammed seems more disturbed by the demolition of Osmania Masjid than that of his own home, whose flattened remains we have just picked our way through. I can't share that sentiment, but I keep that disinclination to myself.

`This was my home'

We are in Ambujwadi, an enormous area of North Bombay that used to be swampland and then was a slum for many years, and through December and January has been utterly razed to the ground. Razed, not by a tsunami, but by my Municipality's own men and their equipment. Vast destruction, not in far-off Tamil Nadu or Indonesia, but right here, 45 minutes from my home; and in many ways more complete than the tsunami managed. This was my home, Mohammed tells me. On a beach in Tamil Nadu only weeks ago, a man called Palani had said the same thing. Now as then, I get a feeling of wonder. Because where Palani pointed to, and where Mohammed points today, I can't even imagine a home. There's just a patch — sand there, sand here — that each man outlines with a reaching finger, and I'm supposed to mine their memories and construct for myself what they once called home. Imagine some kind of structure standing on a bare square of land. Sand. It's hard.

`Equal opportunity' demolition

Several mosques, temples and a couple of churches succumbed to Municipal bulldozers here. Equal opportunity demolition, this. In turn, my companions take me to each such site in the area and paint air pictures — like of their once-homes — of what each worshipful structure looked like, looking expectantly at me each time for some exclamation of religious horror. I still can't oblige: really, homes that were destroyed, people sitting on rubble, upset me much more than these once-abodes of the gods, such as they were.

But as we near the hillock of bricks, tiles and concrete lumps that once was Osmania Masjid, I head for it from one side, planning to clamber over the debris and survey what remains of the mosque. "Not that way!" shouts Mohammed. "Come round here!" He leads me along what used to be the path beside the mosque, to what used to be the main entrance. "Please," he says quietly but very firmly, "please enter from here."

AP
Destroyed as part of urban renewal.

Even as rubble, Mohammed reveres this place. I clamber over the debris that used to be the main entrance, into what used to be this mosque.

Not far away, the Hanuman Mandir is now a broken and badly burned pile of mud, bricks and assorted other rubble. Dilip Kale says the Municipal workers tore down the temple and then set fire to the debris. Somehow, the idol survived. Charred along one side, it sits forlorn, on a mound of bricks.

What happened here, I ask.

After they were done doing what they had to in Ambujwadi, the workers and the police who accompanied them came back to the pile that was this temple. They dug out the idol. They set several bricks carefully on top of each other. They put Hanuman, charred Hanuman, reverently on the mound. Then they stood back, their heads bowed in respect and remorse. "Forgive us, Hanuman-ji," they prayed, "for what we did to you."

None of Hanuman's more-human, more-mortal, fellow-residents of Ambujwadi got such an apology. And I find my mind going back a few weeks: to a previous encounter with fire, rubble and, yes, awe.

* * *

What was the colour of the wave, I ask Thirumurugan. The colour ... he looks around, searching. He points to the painted strip on the side of a smashed fishing boat that lies nearby. A dull orange, the strip. That colour, says Thirumurugan.

Not mannu but bhoomi

I don't know if it's because of this colour, or because of the great destruction the tsunami caused, or something else altogether. But every time Thirumurugan and his friends here refer to the tsunami, they also say, quietly, that there was "fire" in the water. As in, the wave brought "fire" as it swept into their village, Bommaiyarpalayam, and back out again. (Much of the destruction happened when the wave receded, because it went out faster, and even more forcefully, than when it came in).

This idea of fire is almost as hard for me to understand as a wave being orange, though perhaps the two are related. Still, the people here speak of it. I look around me at the effect this wet fire-like thing had on this beach hamlet north of Pondicherry, and I know: it's an interesting metaphor, and given what happened here, a telling one. But the wave brought something less metaphorical else as well. Mud. Black, stinking, ugly mud. Wandering Tamil Nadu after the tsunami, we've already seen lots of the stuff — mud inside clocks, inside pots, lying on the floor of a room like a diseased carpet, underfoot in a Dante-esque stretch near Nagapattinam that was littered with bodies. Mud everywhere. But here in Bommaiyarpalayam, when the fisherfolk refer to it, they don't use the usual Tamil word for it, mannu. They speak of it as bhoomi (earth).

No Indian needs to be told the connotations of that word. And when they speak of bhoomi, when they speak quietly of fire, I cannot help but wonder: is there almost a tone of admiration here? The wave was monstrous in what it did, of course; but now, a week later, do these people have a respectful awe for the ocean that lashed at them? Is it as if they are saying, we take so much from this gentle empress that lies out there in the sun, sometimes she must take back?

I don't know, but I wonder.

Thirumurugan speaks of the bhoomi with his hands cupped and lifting upwards, as if referring to an emotion that comes boiling up from somewhere deep inside. Clearly, what he means is that the wave scooped up the very bottom of the sea, the muddy bottom of the sea that smells so awful, and flung it violently at them.

Nearby stands Palani Arumugam, holding his daughter Madina. She is two years old, pretty and alert. When the wave came, she swallowed some of that mud. Over a week later, Palani tells me, she still brings bits of it out after she eats. He uses the same hand motion to describe this that Thirumurugan does, to describe the wave. As he does, Madina smiles at me. I try hard not to think of black bhoomi coating her delicate stomach, nor of it belching its way out.

And when this bhoomi-filled wave came into Bommaiyarpalayam like a tongue of fire, it surrounded all the houses. Then it rushed back to sea, taking big chunks of Bommaiyarpalayam with it: cupboards, fridges, parts of walls, boats and more. And how far out did it go? Two kilometres, says Thirumurugan. Yes, after the sea roared into Bommaiyarpalayam, it receded two kilometres towards the hazy horizon. A low tide, Thirumurugan tells me in a hushed voice, like Bommaiyarpalayam had never seen.

And all that bhoomi at the bottom of the sea was visible for a long time.

Whose city is it anyway ? (Satish Nandgaonkar)

2005-02-27T17:49:00.000+01:00

[The Telegraph, February 27, 2005]

WHOSE CITY IS IT ANYWAY?
- ‘Present slum area not more than eight per cent of total land’
The airport cannot be extended unless the chawls are cleared. The slum-dwellers claim they developed the land — it’s theirs. Satish Nandgaonkar reports on the stand-off that has divided Mumbai

Mumbai makeover: Recent razings have left thousands of slum-dwellers homeless; Vilasrao Deshmukh (below)
Spread over 25 acres of reclaimed land, Ambujwadi looks like a patch of earth hit by a twister. Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) light blue dumpers move on it like ants on a mound. Watchmen and BMC helpers scrounge for bamboo, rooftiles, plastic sheets — taking away any material that slum-dwellers can possibly use to reconstruct their hutments. Women and children mill around trying to save what they can. “They have even sealed the bawadis (water tanks). We don’t have water to wash or drink,” says Jayashree Shinde in a tired voice.

All her life, Shinde has moved from one slum to the other. She sold jalebis, and single-handedly brought up her two sons in this slum located on the edge of Mumbai’s civilisation. Her husband, who left her when the children were small, returned three years ago only to suffer partial paralysis. Just when she thought her sons, now temporarily employed, would lift the family out of this morass, the BMC bulldozers wiped her hutment off the map.

Shinde’s hutment is one of the 10,000 dwellings razed by the BMC in Ambujwadi, though the official figure stands at 7,000. Ambujwadi — which juts into Malwani’s mangroves in the Malad suburb — is the largest of the 28 sites flattened by the bulldozers. About 90,000 hutments were demolished since December 2004 and NGOs estimate at least four lakh people are homeless now.

The levelling juggernaut — one of the largest ever of any Maharashtra government — still continues. Many homes have been erased without warning and without explanation, even though some victims allegedly furnished proof that they had been living in the area for over 20 years. Miloon Kothari, who is United Nations’ special rapporteur on adequate housing, sums up the situation: “I have witnessed many demolitions in different parts of the world. But this is one of the most brutal evictions that I have seen.”

The erasure of shanty towns is the outcome of a new economic vision for the city as envisaged by its ruling elite. It is about Mumbai metamorphosing into Shanghai by 2013. Huge infrastructure projects — metro rail links, trans-harbours, state-of-the-art flyovers, ring railways and upgraded airports — are in various stages of completion across the western megapolis.

But a crucial part of a report, ‘Vision Mumbai’, which is more or less the roadmap for transforming Mumbai into a world-class city, is about “bringing down the number of people living in the slums from the current 50-60 per cent to 10-20 per cent”. And Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh seems determined to pursue that goal. Even though many are asking the question: whose city are they really planning for?

Classes apart

It is a question that has divided the city on class lines. The pro-demolition lobby — the city’s builders, real estate agents and those who feel that slums hold back Mumbai’s transformation into a world-class city — wants speedier action. They believe that the city’s prime land has been encroached upon and the state has been a mute spectator so far.

Since the first slums survey in 1977, successive governments of different political shades have regularised the shanties on the eve of the elections. “The Sena-BJP government set up a 1995 cut-off date (that is, regularising slums built up to 1995), and now Congress wants to push it to 2000. Unless you stop it, Mumbai can only become Slumbai,” says Vijay Mahajan, chief executive officer of Bombay First, an independent body backed by corporate heads and Mumbai’s prominent citizens. Bombay First had roped in consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., to study and draft Mumbai’s proposed Rs 31,000-crore makeover with its Vision Mumbai 2003 report.

To illustrate the point that illegal slum-dwellers cannot hold Mumbai to ransom, Mahajan tells you the story of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) which has been fighting a long, legal battle to evict 40 slum families staying near the Santa Cruz domestic airport. “The AAI cannot extend the taxi track unless they evict these families. In the process, 2.5 million air passengers suffer, and 2,000 litres of turbine fuel is wasted. Are its legal citizens going to run this city or the illegal encroachers?” asks Mahajan.

But several NGOs and human rights groups have challenged this very concept of encroachment. Many slums came up in erstwhile marshy land with no government-sponsored infrastructure such as drinking water and electricity. Over the years, through the slum-dwellers’ efforts, these areas have grown into shanty towns — now worth crores of rupees in prime land — and are now being eyed by the real estate lobby and the land mafia.

Not surprisingly, there is a sustained campaign against the slums. Half-truths, such as the fear that slums will swamp the city, abound. But contrary to popular perception, only six per cent of Mumbai’s total land area (2,525 out of 43,000 hectares) is occupied by slums, as the state government’s own Afzalpurkar report (1995) shows. “Even if one assumes a 10 per cent increase, the present land occupied by the slums will not be more than eight per cent. So much for Slumbai,” says Deepika D’Souza, executive director, India Centre for Human Rights and Law.

Fear psychosis

A common thread running through the pro-demolition lobby is that slums are a heavy burden on the city’s overstretched infrastructure. The McKinsey Report says, “Slums have proliferated and congestion, pollution and water problems have skyrocketed.” However, a 2001 survey by NGO, Yuva, shows that only 5.26 per cent slum-dwellers have access to individual water taps and 62 per cent of them use public or shared toilets.

But with the campaign against slums being linked to the beautification of Mumbai, much of middle-class Mumbai has been silently supportive of the drive, a fact that the ruling combine hopes will help in countering the loss of the poorer voters.

But the razing’s impact goes beyond politics and economics. Few in the government are calculating the social and psychological trauma of the displaced. “We need to look at the impact on specific groups such as women, children and Dalits,” says Kothari.

That apart, in a city with a history of communal riots, any large-scale dislocations needs to be carefully thought out. “Especially, since we are creating separate zones for the rich and the poor. We are creating a true apartheid city,” he says.

Environmentalist Darryl D’monte, who authored the first comprehensive book on the decline of Mumbai’s textile mills, says that a survey done 20 years ago showed that a Mumbai slum-dweller moved house five times in a lifetime. He questions the skewed economics of the Mumbai makeover. “The Rs 10,000 crore to be spent on roads will benefit eight or nine per cent rich whose cars account for 60 per cent of the pollution, while public transport remains ignored. If you spend this on irrigation, it would probably stop thousands from migrating into Mumbai,” says D’monte, who believes that migrants entering Mumbai are not “pulled” by the city, but “pushed” out of the countryside.

Incidentally, Mumbai’s ongoing plastic surgery has also created strange political bedfellows. The Congress-NCP government has found an unlikely ally in the Shiv Sena. Among the political parties, only the Republican Party of India and the Left have voiced their opposition.

The real opposition on the ground has come from NGOs and social activists such as Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar and actor Shabana Azmi, president of the Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti. The NGOs want the Deshmukh government to stop demolitions and involve the slum-dwellers as a stakeholder in Mumbai’s proposed development plan. Says Shakeel Ahmed of the NGO, Nirbhay Bano Andolan, “You cannot have development policies only for the rich. We want the government to hold public hearings of the plan and involve the poor in the debate.”

Not everybody is considering such alternatives. South Mumbai Congress MP Milind Deora believes that the government needs to take a zero-tolerance policy towards further encroachment by implementing the Slum Encroachment Act, 2001 and punish anyone — politicians, slumlords, police, bureaucrats — who abet proliferation. “Otherwise, in 2015, you will be regularising slums to come up till 2010,” he says.

But as urban planner Chandrashekhar Prabhu points out, the cut-off deadlines become relevant only when there is a housing plan for the poor available in the formal sector. “Today, a slum-dweller has no option,” says Prabhu, a former member of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

Road ahead

The road to a Shanghai-ed Mumbai promises to be a rocky one. Funds and land are the two major worries of Deshmukh heading a cash-strapped government. His problems increased earlier this month when Congress president Sonia Gandhi told him that the party cannot renege on its election promise of regularising slums that have come up till 2000. Rehabilitation land would cost Rs 700 crore, house construction Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 4,000 crore would be required for creating infrastructure —in all, Rs 24,700 crore. But Deora is optimistic. “Once you demonstrate reforms and the will to implement them, money can be generated. The World Bank or even the Centre will give you funds when you show the reforms first,” he says.

Only, Jayashree Shinde doesn’t understand Mumbai’s macro-economics and the McKinsey Report. And she cannot comprehend that just across the mangroves and the marshes lying beyond her demolished house, the dragon of development has arrived.

Demolition DATA

• 41,900 hutments demolished between Dec. 2004 and Jan. 2005, NGO Yuva’s January survey says. Out of these 2,405 were built before 1995 and were legally authorised

• 247 police vehicles, 128 BMC vehicles and 87 bulldozers were used, says the same survey. A total of 3,989 BMC and police officials were deployed for the demolitions

• At least five per cent of Mumbai’s population lives on the roads. Around 2.5 million live in buildings officially labelled as dangerous

• Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) regional plan (1996-2011) says the city needs 85,000 housing units. There is a deficit of 45,000 units.

(With additional reporting by Avijit Ghosh in New Delhi)

India: Respect Rights of Slum Dwellers, Devise Resettlement Plan

2005-02-25T12:16:00.000+01:00

Asian Center for the Progress of Peoples
1/F, 52 Princess Margaret Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2714 5123 Fax: (852) 2712 0152 E-mail: hotline@acpp.org Web: www.acpp.org
HOTLINE ASIA URGENT APPEALS UA050225(1)
Respect Rights of Slum Dwellers, Devise Resettlement Plan - INDIA
25 February 2005

Summary
In a demolition drive that began on 8 December 2004 and
still continues, the Maharashtra government and the Brihan
Mumbai Corporation (a municipal government body)
demolished 70,000 huts, which they claimed illegal. In the
process, 306 acres of land were cleared, dislocating over
300,000 people and affecting thousands of others. People are
suffering in cold nights, children were exposed to health
hazards and school attendance in various areas nearby
dropped drastically.

On 8 February 2005, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Mr.
Vilasrao Deshmukh announced the plan to beautify Mumbai
into an international city like Shanghai - an ambitious plan
totalling 315 billion rupees (US$7.6 billion) for better roads,
public transport and removal of encroachment. This
contradicts the promise of the Congress Party in its election
manifesto in the recent assembly elections - to protect slums
built before 2000, a promise widely believed to have
garnered electoral support among Mumbai's poor.
Unless immediate steps are taken, slum dwellers will
continue to be exposed to cold nights and other physical
dangers. The government, instead of providing basic care to
its people, is planning to de-list them from the electoral rolls.
*** Please respond before 10 March 2005 ***

Action Requested
Please write polite letters condemning this demolition drive
in Mumbai and request the authorities to:
· Devise a proper resettlement plan before government
authorities begins further demolitions.
· Make urban development and rehabilitation plan more
people-friendly by involving cooperative societies and
local bodies in the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme of Slum
Rehabilitation Authority, and planning urban
development that will benefit the poor.

Send letters to:
Prime Minister of India Fax: (91) 11-2301 9545
Hon. Mammohan Singh (91) 11-2301 6857
South Block, Raisana Hill
New Delhi 110011, INDIA
Email: manmohan@sansad.nic.in OR pmosb@pmo.nic.in
Send Copies to:
1. Shri Vilasrao Deshmukh Fax: (91) 22-2363 3272
Chief Minister of Maharashtra
Vilasrao Deshmuk, 6th floor
Mantralaya, Mumbai 400 001, INDIA
2. The Chairman Fax: (91) 11-2338 4863
National Human Rights Commission
Faridkot House, Copernicus Marg,
New Delhi-110001, INDIA

3. Ms. Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of the Congress Party
Email: soniagandhi@sansad.nic.in
4. Diplomatic representatives of India in your country
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send copies to us separately for monitoring purpose.
Thank You for Your Continued Support

Background
Lack of Proper Housing Policy in India
According to the Maharashtra State government data
quoted in Economic Political Weekly on 5 February 2005,
around 60 per cent of Mumbai's population live in slums;
73 per cent of its households live in one-room apartments
and 18 per cent in two-room structures.

There has been no standing policy to deal with housing for
the working class and the poor. A city of commerce and

We are shocked to learn about the recent demolition of slums
in Malad, Kurla, Mankhurd, Cuffe Parade, Chembur, Govandi
and other areas in Mumbai by the government of Maharashtra
and the Brihan Mumbai Corporation, in an attempt "to turn
Mumbai into Shanghai". It is believed to be one of the largest
demolition drives in the city, causing a lot of suffering for the
300,000 evicted, including children and the elderly.
We are aware that the action contradicts the promise that the
government made to its people for 'reforms with a human face'.
In October 2004, the Congress-NCP coalition secured a
majority of assembly seats in Mumbai on the promise that all
the pre-2000 slums in Mumbai would be protected and
regularised. However, after the election, Chief Minister of
Maharashtra, Shri Vilasrao Deshmukh of the Congress Party
has ordered the demolition of all post-1995 slums in the city.
It is sad that reports show the government of Maharashtra,
instead of taking immediate action to remedy the suffering,
plans to remove slum dwellers from the electoral rolls. Such
refusal to hear its people's voice, is an embarrassment and is
surely not pleasing to your Excellency.

May we also remind your good government's ratification to the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights in 1979, which states that "The States Parties to the
present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an
adequate standard of living for himself, including housing."
(Art. 11)
In order to fulfill the promises and obligations, we request your
Excellency to intervene and ensure your State Chief Minister:
- devises a proper resettlement plan before civic body
begins further demolitions; and
- makes urban development and rehabilitation plan more
people-friendly, e.g. involving cooperative societies and
local bodies in the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme of Slum
Rehabilitation Authority and planning urban development
that will benefit the poor.

enterprise, Mumbai has always been a magnet for those
looking for work not only in Maharashtra but also from
other parts of India. Over time, vacant land has been
encroached, marshland has been reclaimed and the
homeless have occupied pavements, and empty strips
along railway lines and water pipes.

Instead of increasing affordable housing facilities in the
city, successive governments have resorted to piecemeal
solutions to the problem. The most popular one has been
setting a "cut-off" date - i.e. settlements built after the
"cut-off' date will not be entitled to alternative
accommodation. According to the Slum Redevelopment
Scheme (SRS) brought in by the Maharashtra Government
in 1998, those who can establish that their houses are set
up before the "cut-off" date are entitled to free alternative
accommodation if the land is re-developed by contracted
developers or used for other public purposes. It was
premised that slum dwellers had invested in developing
the land and the structures, thus they will be compensated
with "free" houses. However, often the slum dwellers
have to pay charges to the housing society once they
moved into the arranged accommodation. These housing
societies are registered entities under a societies
registration act, and comprise of households within a
single or multiple storey structure or a cluster of them.
Members of housing society are required to share the land
tax. Often, slum dwellers cannot afford this tax and are
forced to sell the premises and return to slums.

In addition, the cut-off date has been manipulated by the
present State Government in Maharashtra (Congress and
the Nationalist Congress Party). During pre-state election
period (August- September 2004), they promised that the
cut-off date would be extended up to 2000, but it was
instead hastily backtracked to January 1995 after election
victory in October 2004.

Lack of Empathetic Approach and Rehabilitation Plan
Demolitions were conducted in abrupt manner that cares
little for the settlers. In the past, the demolition squad
would come with sticks and axes and manually break
down structures. This gave the settlers time to save their
belongings. Recent demolitions, however, took place with
bulldozers and earthmovers appearing overnight, aided by
the police. Structures are flattened within few hours,
providing little time for settlers to save their belongings,
including papers that prove huts existed before the cut-off
date.

Life of the evicted settlers was deeply affected since the
recent demolition drive in December 2004. Children's
health and education were badly affected. According to
Indian Express of 25 January 2005, civic schools near
demolition sites across Mumbai are witnessing a drop in
attendance, implying thousands of children failed to attend
formal education. Several children were recorded to have
died from pneumonia after suffering the cold nights, while
some experienced bad stomach and vomit due to
unhygienic food and water exposed under open area.

Adults were also affected: parents are afraid to go to work
and old people are suffering the cold nights without indoor
accommodation.

Instead of considering rehabilitation measures for the
affected, the government further attempted to disregard
slum dwellers' opinion. In an article dated 22 January
2005, State Home Minister of Maharashtra, Mr. R. R. Patil
was quoted: "When we launched the (demolition) drive,
we never thought of their rehabilitation. Legally speaking,
that is not the responsibility of the government."
According to a report in the Indian Express dated 11
February 2005, the Election Commission (EC) plans to
remove squatters from the electoral rolls. The EC has
reportedly asked the Brihan Mumbai Corporation to send
in a list of "illegal" slum dwellers, who have moved in
after the "cut-off" date or those who have no proof (e.g.
government ration card, electricity bills, bank accounts) of
residence prior to 1995. These people will be removed
from the electoral rolls. The Chief Electoral Officer Mr.
Madan told the media that according to the Representation
of Peoples Act 1950, voters' names could be deleted from
the electoral rolls if they cease to be residents of the city.

Current Situation

Since the demolition began over 300 acres of land have
been recovered, but the government has not announced
any future plan for these vacant lands. The civil society
criticized that such failure to develop lands is the exact
reason why these lands were encroached in the first place.
Local groups have been struggling with this battle without
much support in the last 2 months. Only recently, the
movement has started getting momentum with further
pressure from trade groups and political groups. Meetings
and protests were held at various locations across the city
to discuss the issue. However, the struggle goes on.

Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader Medha Patkar
and social activist, Vidya Chauhan were arrested on 12
February 2005, along with 120 others while protesting the
demolition of slums. On 21 February, Medha was
arrested again with 8 others and still being detained.
The demolition has stalled since 19 February 2005. Upon
the insistence of the Congress Party leader, Ms. Sonia
Gandhi, the cut-off date has been set at 2000, as promised
in the election manifesto. It is reported that talks on
rehabilitation of the evicted are being carried out.
Yours sincerely,
Linda Noche
Coordinator

Sources:
Local newspapers: Indian Express, Times of India, The Hindu
Magazines: Economic Political Weekly, Outlook, Frontline
Websites: Infochange.com, NDTV, Rediff.com
For photos and interviews, please visit "Slum Bay- Found &
Lost" http://specials.rediff.com/news/2005/jan/14sld7.htm

Thank You for Your Continued Support
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Press Release - Zhopadi Bachao Sanyukt Kriti Samiti

2005-02-21T18:31:00.000+01:00

Zhopadi Bachao Sanyukt Kriti Samiti
C/o Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, Sayani Road, Prabhadevi, Mumbai-400025
------------------------

Press Release: February 18, 2005

Decision to Legalise Slums Welcomed: Now Compensate

With the decision of the Government of Maharashtra to legalise the slums from
1995 to 2000, the struggle against the unjust demolition of 70,000 houses has
reached a new high.

We welcome this decision. This is a result of the strong resistance to the
demolitions and due to the direct intervention by Sonia Gandhi and Margaret
Alva, who gave a patient hearing to the poor unorganised sector workers along
with all the organisations involved in the struggle.
People thank all those Congress as well as NCP representatives who joined our
struggle and protested against the demolitions. However this should not have
happened, as this is a blatant violation of the pre - election promise given by the
present Government, leading to such a human-madeTsunami - like situation all
over Mumbai.

Keeping in mind the promise given during the election through its own manifesto,
it is the duty and responsibility of the government to compensate the affected
families for the damage to their houses, belongings and livelihood. With this
demand, all affected families affiliated to our movements will keep the
agitation going until our demands are met.

We strongly condemn the anti - poor and provocative pronouncements of the Shiv Sena,
which was supportive of the demolitions and against the destitutionalised Hindi and
Marathi speaking communities.

At the same time, we demand that the government should start a participatory,
people - oriented, just development planning process. It should also ensure
participation as well as their rightful share in the benefits of development.

We will continue our struggle for the alternative development, based on
decentralised and rural - focused development, alternative employment at the
village level to check the migration and equitable and just development by
linking the rural and urban poor.

Sanjay M. G. Raju Bhise Shakil Ahmad Medha Patkar

Forget Shanghai, remember Mumbai (Kalpana Sharma )

2005-02-20T22:01:00.000+01:00

[The Hindu - Monday, Feb 21, 2005 ]

Forget Shanghai, remember Mumbai

By Kalpana Sharma

We need to put aside our obsession with becoming "world class". Let us make our cities liveable for all the people.

THE CENTRAL Government's announcement that it will soon establish an Urban Renewal Mission is long overdue. For, the reality facing India's planners is that over one-third of the country's population lives in its towns and cities. And the numbers are growing. These are also the centres of growth, driving the country's economic engine. To neglect them is to neglect not just the economy but also a sizeable population.

Yet even as the Urban Development Ministry prepares a plan for 60 cities in India under this mission, the central question it will have to address is that of priorities. How will it decide what is more important and what can wait in a situation where everything has to be done almost simultaneously?

Few cities illustrate the difficult choices facing anyone undertaking urban renewal better than Mumbai. The present Democratic Front Government, led by Congress Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, has made the conversion of Mumbai into a "world-class city" one of its principal planks. But already it has tripped up by going in one direction without being clear about the whole picture.

Mr. Deshmukh has had to face brickbats from many in Mumbai, including members of his own party, because of the recent mass demolition of slums. At the same time, business, industry, the middle-class have applauded his "determination". While the Chief Minister maintains he has done nothing wrong, he has been forced to step back after being "summoned" to Delhi this week where he was basically told that the party could not afford to alienate the urban poor electorate. Even if this has given a temporary reprieve to Mumbai's urban poor, there is no indication that the Government has an alternative plan or strategy to deal with the absence of housing.

While the Opposition, particularly the Shiv Sena, is thoroughly enjoying the Chief Minister's discomfiture, its own record in matters urban has been far from exemplary. Even though it was the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party Government that launched the massive Slum Redevelopment Scheme (SRS) in 1995 with the intention of resettling lakhs of slum dwellers, very little was achieved by it in five years. The scheme ran into problems largely due to the politics of money that overrode any merits the scheme had on paper.

So far, there is little to indicate that the present Maharashtra Government is clear about its priorities on urban renewal. The areas that are getting immediate attention are the cosmetics. Thus the makeover of the airport and the building of freeways are being given top priority. On the other hand, two important issues that affect the majority of the people — public transport and housing — are hardly discussed.

One hardly needs to emphasise that the world over, cities with good and affordable public transport are also the most liveable. Yet in Mumbai, the plans envisage building capital-intensive and long gestation projects such as freeways instead of short-term cheaper solutions that build on the existing public transport network. In the meantime, 90 per cent of the city's residents are packed into suburban trains and buses that, despite the load they carry, are still more efficient than the public transport systems in other Indian cities.

The best cities in the world are also the ones that have affordable housing for all classes. Yet is there any Indian city that has a well-conceived housing policy? In the "Vision Mumbai" document prepared by the private consultancy firm McKinsey, which is being used as a framework within which the plans for Mumbai's makeover are being formulated by the State Government, housing is mentioned in the context of mass housing on the salt pan lands outside the city. This area is not just environmentally fragile but is also poorly linked to the city. Poor people are expected to live in this distant area with no thought given to livelihood or other needs. Meanwhile, significantly, the plan envisages developing hundreds of acres of prime land, formerly occupied by textile mills, now available in the heart of Mumbai as "islands of excellence" with high-class housing, clearly for the rich.

This alone exposes the fractured vision of our planners when it comes to making over cities such as Mumbai. The city developed as an industrial centre that was crucial to India's economy when the British made available land in central Mumbai, at hugely concessional rates, to entrepreneurs willing to set up textile mills. Thus grew the textile heartland or Girangaon, as it is still known. Within the compound of these mills as well as around them were hundreds of buildings with one-room tenements where the workers lived. The entire area was until quite recently an almost exclusively working class enclave.

The history of the way the land on which these mills stood has been surreptitiously diverted, with the collusion of governments, is a story that speaks of not just an absence of vision for the city but a complete disdain for the needs of the working class and the poor. It is important for people in other cities to be aware of these developments because they illustrate how governments change policies to benefit the rich and the powerful even as they speak in the name of the poor. And textile mill lands waiting to be developed exist in many cities, including Delhi, Bangalore, Kanpur, Allahabad, Kolkata and Coimbatore.

Mumbai's textile industry dates back to 1854 when the first mills were established. At one stage, in 1961, these mills employed almost two and a half lakh workers. Today, there are 58 mills employing fewer than 20,000 people. Of these, 32 are privately owned, 25 are owned by the National Textile Corporation and one by the State. Twenty-nine of the privately owned mills are already closed after going through various stages of industrial "sickness".

In 1991, in response to the plea of mill owners that they be allowed to sell some of their land to generate revenues to pay off debts and workers dues, the Maharashtra Government introduced Section 58 in the Development Control Rules that permitted mill owners to sell or redevelop one third of the land they owned. However, one-third had to be given to the municipal corporation for open spaces or other public facilities. And one-third was designated for public housing.

The formula remained on paper and only very few of the private mills actually sold their land to pay the workers their dues. The stories of mill workers still waiting for their dues, committing suicide because they saw no hope in the future, and having to fight for each instalment of what had been agreed upon, are legion. In any case, what was due to the workers constituted barely 10 per cent of what mill owners would have gained by selling their land.

This is where the Government steps in again. In 2001, Mr. Deshmukh, in his earlier tenure as Chief Minister, passed an amendment to Section 58 of the Development Control Rules. Instead of all the land occupied by the mills being divided up, the new rule laid down that only land that was vacant, that is, with no built-up structure, would be so divided. In other words, the mill owners got to keep most of the land on which their closed mills stood and the city and workers got less than six per cent between them.

And this is in a city that is crying out for open space and for more land for public housing. What is the justification for this bonanza for the mill owners when land is desperately needed for public housing?

It is evident now that this change was not done inadvertently. The amendment was passed without discussion. In recent years, there has been a spurt of new construction on the mill lands. None of it is public housing. Most of it consists of luxury housing and shopping malls. Earlier this month, Mr. Deshmukh appointed a committee to visit this controversial issue again and come out with a report.

But even as the committee, which does not have any representative from the workers, deliberates, the municipal corporation is clearing plans to redevelop hundreds of acres of mill lands. What use will this report be when it comes out and if and when it is ever implemented? Once again, one has to question the intent of the Government. Surely these choices are not innocent.

Cities such as Mumbai, or any other, cannot be "renewed" if no attention is paid to crucial areas such as affordable and environmentally benign public transport systems and public housing.

We need to put aside our obsession with becoming "world class", or like Shanghai or any other city. Let us make our cities liveable for all the people. That itself is a big enough agenda for the future.

Fact Tentative Sheet Related To Large Scale Slum Demolition In Mumbai (National Alliance or People's Alliance and Shahar Vikas Manch)

2005-02-20T21:53:00.000+01:00

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 19:23:52 +0000 (GMT)
Recieved from: Sanjay Sangvai

Fact Tentative Sheet Related To Large Scale Slum Demolition In Mumbai

Mumbai was known to be a major center for Industrial production and manufacturing industry in India. A major shift in this perception started in the late 1980s. Several attempts were made for the slum development before 1993-94

1993-94: The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Plan (MMRDP) was prepared, envisaging shift from manufacturing, production to the center of service industry. It also envisaged a shift from an organized sector to the unorganized or informal sector.

Accordingly, various suburban developent plan like Vasai-Virar plan, Kalyan-Dombivili plan started.

2003-2004: During the Chief Ministership of Sushilkumar Shinde, Mumbai First, an organiation of the builders, industrialists, and former higher bureaucrats, initiated the Development Plan for Mumbai through the multinational consultation company, McKinsey and insisted that Mumbai be developed accordingly. The state government adopted the plan, without any wider consultation or consulting the Legislative Assembly. The state government appointed an Special officer for the implementtion of this report, who is directly answerable to the Chief Minister.

The Mckinsey report had no plan for the housing of the poor. It advises to reduce the slums in Mumbai down to 10% . The Maharashtra housing Development Authority (MHADA) stopped constructing the low-cost houses, after 1990.

At present, roughly, about 15-20% of the land in Mumbai is (was) occupied by the slums, housing 60-65 % population of the metropolis.

The Congress-Nationalist party alliance promised regularization of the hutments upto 2000.

The Mumbai First and related groups propounded the idea of 'developing Mumbai' and complained that there was not much land available for the real estate development.

The Chief Minister unveils plan to change the Mumbai's face and entire body (kayaa-paalat) in the Assembly Session at Nagpur on December 8, 2004, and claims that the Prime Minister has assured all possible help in this endeavour.The new Mumbai development plan would cost Rs. 31, 823 crores for five years. he set aside the assurance given in the manifesto and declared that all the slums after 1995 would be demolished. He claimed tht Maharashtra is the most favoured destination for foreign investment.

December 8, 2004: The newly elected Congress-NCP government launched the first such massive slum demolition operation It was a preparation on war footing for clearing post-1995 slums. The Mumbai Commissioner Johny Joseph takes charge, which would start simultaneously at several places, with massive police force and State Reserve Police. Instead of going into legality, he declared, of every hut individually, the entire slum would be cleared once it was found that it was established after January 1, 1995.

Shiv Sena Chief Bal Thackeray fully supports the demolition of post 1995 slums.

Thousands of huts were razed and people were left in biting cold, without food, water and health facilities. Almost all the political parties, barring some minority and Dalit leaders, all the major media ˆ both English and even the Marathi one- supported the move.

Dec 9: Rajendra Srivastav, slum citizen in Anand nagar, Andhei (W) committs suicide, as a resistance to the demolition. No FIR was filed.

December 15, 2004: First signs of resistance; daylong dharna of evicted slumdwellers in Azad Maidan

December 17-18, 2004: Stone pelting by people on the demolition party at Govandi, massive police bandobust and 59 people arrested. Stone throwing by the evicted people in Byculla. Thane city officials and police on alert as these evicted people should not some there.

Dec. 18: Two girl-children were killed during the demolition operations in Bandra slums.

Dec 20: Rajendra Chaddha dies of burn injuries in Mangelwadi, Juhu slum. Police report this as suicide.

December 22, 2004; Long March by Zopadpatti Bachao Parishad against the eviction and demolition. Declared that the slum clearance is being done to benefit the builders and capitalists. Token protest by ruling party leaders. CM Vilasrao Deshmukh reprimands the party leaders and reiterates his resolve to demolish the slums.

Dec. 21: The state Finance Minister assures the Indian Merchant Chambers of slum clearance without any abetment. He lauds the Vision Mumbai plan of industrialists and talks of Shanghai Model of development for Mumbai.

Dec 22: The state government decides to allow the construction in the No-Development zone of 38 crore square feet land, disregarding Development Plans, Urban Land Ceiling Act, Revenue Code, Mumbai Stamp Act (Mah. Times, 22.12.04)

Hutment on protected (Reserved) land in Rafiq Nagar, were demolished for dumping ground of the massive operation.

Dec. 22: In a day 8000 huts in Malavani cleared. Shiv Sena mouthpiece reports that all these were illegal Bangladeshis and had TV, freeze, mixer, washing machine etc.

De 24: Officers plead inability to demolish the unauthorized construction of high-income group people. They expressed displeasure over the insistence on this aspect by the Deputy Chief Minister RR Patil. The new Governor, SM Krishna also supported the slum demolition. Republican party convention opposes the demolition. Fencing to the Malvani land.

Dec 31: Twenty-two organizations in city form Zopadpatti Bachao Samyukta Kriti Samiti.

Jan 4, 2005: 50,000 huts demolished., 300 acre land valued at Rs. 1500 crores is 'liberated'.

Jan 5, 2005: Elite Citizens Action Group meets Chief Minister, Dy. Chief Minister, applauds their resolve in clearing the slums and gives whole hearted support to all such actions. CM Vilasrao Deshmukh expresses his resolve to make Mumbai a world-class city, and to punish those encouraging illegal slum building. The Mumbai Development plan, accordingly, consists of Metro Project, Ring Railway, Trans-harbour project.

Shankar Potgire, from Subhash Nagar, Ghatkopar dies of severe cold, as police do not allow any shelter or medical aid.

Jan 8, 2005: The Citizens Action Committee felicitates the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who cme in the city for the Pravasi Baratiya (NRI conference) and commends for the resolve shown in slum clearance. The Prime Minister also assured them to convert Mumbai into Shaghai within five years and said that people would forget Shanghai! Present at the occasion were the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister, Mr. Sunil Dutt, Prafulla Patel ˆ both Union ministers from Maharashtra, Gurudas Kamat MP., industrialists Mukesh Ambani, Adi Godrej, builder Nanik Rupani, editor of Loksatta Kumar Ketkar etc. The industrialists also demanded doing away with coastal regulation zone- CRZ Act and new international air port near Mumbai, new highways. They express concern over the slum encroachment on government land.

Jan 8: Officials again deride the insistence by Dy.CM, RR Patil on demolishing the 592 unauthorized constructions of rich people.

Jan 13: Over 100 evicted people storm Mantralaya and CMs office

After nearly two months, the massive operation resulted in demolition and destruction of over 80,000 hutments , displacing about 40 to 35 million (4 to 3.5 lakh) people. Since then many children and elders died, are sick, broke their limbs, The state government complains tht it had to spend Rs. 84 crores on slum demolition. About 3989 police persons were used. thousands protested. Various Dalit organizations and parties have declared to launch agitation.

Jan.31: Largescale protest of 22 organiations of slum dwellers and the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) near Mantralaya. Two daylong Dharna. People start reoccupying the cleared slums, to rebuild houses on the evicted land. House was built in Rafiq Nagar, elsewhere; many resist bulldozers in other land. Over 70 people were arrested and cases for rioting, forceful entry etc were registered.

February 11, 2005: Over 500 people were arrested and then released Govandi suburb. But some 12 activists were again arrested by hurting and humiliating women activists. Police lathicharge the 300 strong demonstration.

February 13: Over 500 people lay siege on the office of the ruling Congress office in Mumbai, Tilak Bhavan in Dadar. The All India Congress General Secretary Mrs. Margaret Alva expressed shock and disapproves the slum clearance. The delegation of the organizations meet the State Congress Chief Mrs. Prabha Rau. The party assures immediate stoppage of demolitions and relief to the evicted people.

The Main Demands of the Zopadpatti Bachao Samyukta Kriti Samiti:

Stop inhuman demolitions at once. Withdraw the police force and private security guards harassing and committing atrocities.
Respect electoral promises and protect all slums prior to 2000 and rehabilitate dwellers where necessary.
Rehabilitate all people in the same place. Constitute a joint Task Force with government, non-government organizations working in the affected area and community representative acceptable to us.
Accept identity proofs like ration card, photo pass, survey receipt, and other government documents along with voters' identity card as eligible identity proof for rehabilitation

STOP inhuman demolitions at once. Withdraw the police force and private security contracts harassing and committing atrocities till date.

Respect the electoral promise and protect all slums and houses built prior to 2000, improving the slums and rehabilitating dwellers where necessary.

Rehabilitate all people in the same place. Constitute a joint task force with government, non-government organisations working in the affected area and community representatives acceptable to us.

Accept identity proofs like ration cards, photo pass survey receipts and other government documents along with voter‚s identity card as eligible identity proofs for rehabilitation.

Issue immediate photo identity pass to slum dwellers who have been surveyed before 1995 or later

Pay compensation worth at least Rs30, 000 per family to those whose houses and belongings have been demolished and recognise the importance of their electoral and human rights in a democratic society.

Transfer ownership of land on which the hutments stand, onto the names of the hutment dwellers and plan and execute low cost housing scheme for the affected through people‚s cooperatives, keeping builders out.

Enact a national rehabilitation policy for any type of displacement and forced evictions.

Implement the Supreme Court order on right to food issued till 2004 and execute the concerned schemes for people below the poverty line
The cases files against slum dwellers and activists should be immediately withdrawn unconditionally and all who are in jailed be released

Implement the Urban Land Ceiling Act and acquire 2500 acres of land belonging to the Godrej, Jeejeebhoy Beheramjee Trust etc and utilise it for housing for urban poor.

Amend the existing law for allowing the transfer rights of hutments prior to 1995(SRA) and give full rehabilitation rights to new occupants of the same structure.

In the city development plan, there should be a provision to ensure that every person who comes to the city of Mumbai should be provided affordable housing and demarcate separate land for slums, poor and marginalized sections

Protect the lives and livelihoods, shelter and land belonging to and occupied and utilized by the mill workers and fisher people who are the original, generations old inhabitants of Mumbai. In planning the Vision of Mumbai, keep in mind the culture of the city, its history and other indicators of human development, especially taking into consideration the vision of the poor 60% of Mumbai‚s population. It should evolve out of dialogue with labourers ˆ organised and unorganised, pavement and slum dwellers, tenants etc. The Mumbai vision plan and all specific projects with foreign and Indian funds must be put into the public domain and public hearing especially in the affected communities, must be organised. MMRDA Act must be followed in this direction, immediately. The final decision should be based on these hearings and special consultations with the people‚s organizations.

Prepared by:

National Alliance or People's Alliance
and Raju Bhise of Shahar Vikas Manch

February 2005

In perspective : Slum Demolitions in Mumbai (Vidyadhar Date)

2005-02-20T14:09:00.000+01:00

[www.sacw.net | 20 February 2005 ]

In perspective : Slum Demolitions in Mumbai
by Vidyadhar Date

The current controversy over the demolition of thousands of huts in Mumbai reminds me of Shakespeare's classic play King Lear. In one of the greatest scenes in world literature King Lear realizes the plight of the poor and the houseless in his kingdom when he himself is thrown out of the door by his daughters.

Lear discovers that there is a far bigger tragedy in the world than his own personal suffering He realizes that he has taken too little care of the poor in his kingdom. He wonders how the poor houseless heads were defending themselves in cruel weather.

The realism of the play is so stark and it disturbed the establishment so much that for nearly a century after 1661 the play's tragic ending was changed and a happy ending was provided during performances.

Lear undergoes a radical change in his outlook when he experiences suffering himself. King Lear is Shakespeare's most mature play with a wide social outlook. No other play of Shakespeare has such words as poor, beggar, wretch, bare, charity, houseless , at least not to any significant level..

Like Lear our rulers too need to understand the plight of the houseless. This is not to suggest that all encorachers should be given protection and allowed to live in Mumbai.What needs to be understood and emphasized is that people migrate to Mumbai because life is much worse in rural areas. But the ruling class does not want to admit its utter failure to solve problems in the villages where India still truly lives despite all the urbanisation.

So, the government should pay more attention to solve problems in rural areas, that would take care of problems in urban areas, there would be no or less migration. For those talking of converting Mumbai into Shanghai the latest issue of Time magazine should come as an eye opener and a setback. It depicts the brutal way the city is being built at the cost of the ordinary people and life. It quotes an architecture professor Mao Qizhi as saying that "if other cities copy Shanghai we would have disaster on our hands." More ironical is the fact that the city is being developed by the son of Albert Speer, the architect of Adolf Hitler who is notorious for ugly fascist architecture.

Our ministers need not themselves become houseless like Lear to realize the gravity of the problem of houselessness. But they could certainly start experiencing the problems of the people in other ways.

When the government was criticized recently for the move to buy Skoda luxury cars for ministerial use, chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh posed a counter question "are ministers to use buses or trains if not cars ?" The answer would be yes, at least on some occasions the ministers can do that.

Ministers is so many European countries are known to walk to work or travel by trains or bicycles. There is no earthly reason why this cannot be done here at least occasionally and not as a stunt. Vested interests always say such things cannot be done here, this is a different country but the same people think nothing of imitating the worst Western models here.

In the land of Mahatma Gandhi a simple life style should come naturally to most people. Gandhiji seldom used the motor car and when he travelled by train, he chose to travel by third class and he was not happy with trains too as he felt they travelled too fast and in a way did violence to nature.

His simple but architecturally excellent ashrams have inspired many architects and no history of Indian architecture can be complete without a detailed reference to the ashrams. Mr Nripen Chakraborty, former chief minister of Tripura, who died recently, had only a steel trunk for his possession when he started his tenure as chief minister and that was his only possession when he left office. He was a dedicated member of the Communist party of India (Marxist).

The leadership of most right-wing parties is far removed from people . In Mumbai state legislators think nothing of taking a special bus provided by the government to travel the short distance from the MLAs' hostel to Vidhan Bhavan, a distance of not more than 200 metres.

Many bureaucrats live bang opposite Mantralaya but take a car to travel that distance.There is so much talk of car pooling, which is a good idea, and there is no reason why this cannot be done occasionally in the case of ministers residing in their sprawling official bungalows at Malabar hill.

The two Congress parties have now woken up to the issue of slums because municipal elections are approaching. The problem is they look at people as vote banks and not as human beings, so it is better for the parties to keep people living in uncertainty and filth and threat of removal so that they can cash on their votes.

Mr Bhaskar Ghose, a retired IAS officer, former union secretary for cultural affairs and sensitive human being, recently wrote of the insulated lives bureaucrats live. Everything from their travel arrangements to household work and getting things repaired is taken care of by the state machinery. Mr Ghose said when he retired he realized what it means to live a life like ordinary people as he did not have any help in doing everyday chores and other jobs.

Ministers are in an even more privileged position. Far from setting an example in simple living, they are displaying wealth and celebrating marriages with pomp. The wedding of public works minister Chhagan Bhujbal's nephew at Bandra Reclamation ground recently is a pointer. Mr Bhujbal , an OBC, has suffered because he is not a Maratha. But as a follower of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, the social reformer, he has added responsibility of performing a marriage ceremony in the simple manner which was part of the the Satyashodak Samaj movement.

It is a pity that the progressive legacy of Phule has been negated by some of his followers. The most recent betrayal of this movement is the embracing of a new religion called Shiv Dharma by some people led by Mr A.H. Salunkhe, a scholar who had won considerable respect with his rationalism and writing which included the depiction of the subsidiary status given to women in India since ancient times.

The priorities for ministers are quite different. The union minister for civil aviation Praful Patel laments that our airports are neglected and there is absolute need to provide connectivity by air. That would be fine provided the basic needs of the common people are taken care of. Unfortunately, even basic infrastructure is ignored when it comes to the people. It is a scandal that the pedestrian bridge at Charni road station broke down recently and a major accident was averted. There is no proper connectivity even for walking for ordinary people.

I was in Shrirampur (formerly Serampore) in West Bengal famous for the work done by William Carey , a protestant missionary in the 19th century, in translating the Bible into several Indian languages and writing their grammars. This is a district town and I found at the railway station that it has no overhead bridge. As a result people are forced to cross railway tracks at great risk to their lives. Some people are worried about traffic jams and the inconvenience caused to motorists. Do they realize that there are major jams on railway bridges too because the space is so small and commuters are so many. That is the state of infrastructure in this country when it comes to the ordinary people. It is all right to have modern airports, but it does not mean you impose the most humiliating conditions on ordinary commuters.

Coming back to the housing question, last week I saw an excellent film 'A Raisin in the Sun' at the American Center featuring Sidney Poitier among others. The film made in 1961 shows among other things a black or rather Afro-American poor family's struggle in a white-dominated society. The family buys a house in a white locality and soon a white man comes to them talking sweetly and saying they should live among their own folk, it is much better for you guys. Moving to the white locality would create problems, the crafty fellow says.

Similar sorts of words are being used by some of the defenders of globalisation now to the urban poor. They are being told, you should not stay here, your are illegal and you should relocate yourselves. This city is only for us, the better off, the middle class and the like. The Mumbai high court showed some humanitarian concern when it observed earlier this week that night shelter should be provided to the poor, if not housing.

Recently, an architect made a sinister argument, blaming Medha Patkar and leftists for promoting the growth of slums in Mumbai.

All sorts of arguments are being invented to turn the attention from the real problem, government's failure to carry out its basic function to provide housing to the people or at least to ensure that ;prices of land and other sectors are checked ..

Slums and homelessness is not just a local problem confined to Mumbai. If it was the handiwork of a few people as some would argue, how is it that this is increasingly becoming a more and more acute global problem ? It is caused primarily by economic inequalities and the policies of globalisation. Let us face it.This comes from none else than the United Nations body UN Habitat in its exhaustive report. . But some people refuse to accept the bitter and harsh reality of the failure of governance.

Some people may not agree with Medha Patkar's agitation but it is a good sign that she has broadbased her struggle to include issues other than the displacement caused by the Narmada dam. She is already collaborating with activists involved in other struggles and heads the organization called National Alliance for People's Movements.

Slum Politics (James Westcott)

2005-02-18T18:51:00.000+01:00

Slum Politics
By James Westcott, AlterNet. Posted February 18, 2005.

The squalid mini-city states known as slums now house at least one billion people across the world, living outside normal regulations. As their ranks swell, some are saying that it's time to start thinking of them a little differently.

In the last three months, the Bombay Municipal Corporation has demolished 80,000 shanties in a city where 3 million people are slum dwellers. The local government recently granted legal status to homes built before 1995, and bulldozed everything else. The devastation is "tsunami-like," according to the Indian Inter Press news agency. Three hundred and fifty thousand people have been made homeless but only 50,000 new apartments have been provided. The program is part of Bombay's plan to re-model itself on the ruthlessly prosperous Shanghai, which has tried to eradicate its slums.

But Shanghai's slums remain, as they do in other cities, as part of an inexorable global trend: 200,000 people a day are carrot-and-sticked from the countryside to cities that then refuse to accommodate them. In Bombay they end up in shacks by the road, on railway tracks and next to the airport – embarrassingly visible from landing planes. In Lagos, two-thirds of which is made up of slums, a shanty town has sprouted up on an enormous, slowly burning garbage dump. In Kibera, the slum surrounding Nairobi, raw sewage flows over the few water pipes, and latrines are so scarce that people simply defecate in plastic bags and then throw them as far away from their dwelling as possible – a phenomenon called "flying toilets."

Eighty-five percent of the developing world's urban population now lives in slums, and 40 percent of slum dwellers in Africa live in what the UN calls "life-threatening" poverty.

Elsewhere though, squatter communities are so well developed that they can't properly be called slums. With multi-story buildings, shops, businesses and offices – even a squatter town hall – Sultanbeyli in Istanbul is now almost indistinguishable from the adjacent "legal" city. Despite the varying conditions, the world's squatters hold certain things in common: they live in semi-sovereign, if squalid, mini-city states, paying no taxes and leaching services like water and electricity and, occasionally, some rights, from the legit world. They operate in an illegal or informal economy, and have only the most tenuous relationship with the state. According to the UN, by 2030 a quarter of the world's population will be living like this. In the midst of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe of slum-growth, we could be in for some major social, political and economic consequences that are only just starting to be discussed.

The rock star philosopher Slavoj Zizek has called the growth of slums the "crucial geopolitical event of our time," and an "opportunity" for a truly "'free' world." Slum dwellers, though in sore need of health care and minimal means of self-organization, are free in the double sense of the word, says Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books: "'free' from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state." Zizek warns against idealizing squatters as a new "revolutionary class" – their freedom really is another word for nothing left to lose – but in the next breath he marvels at how beautifully squatters seem to fit into Marx's definition of a proletarian revolutionary subject.

With the apparent collapse of the anti-globalization carnival and the impotence of the anti-war movement, could the left be on to something, at last, with squatters – not the anarchists in developed cities who do it as a lifestyle choice, but the billion ex-peasants, entrepreneurs and derelicts who are starting to numerically dominate every city in the world outside of the northern and western hemispheres?

Two new books touch tentatively – inadvertently even – on this possibility, without endorsing it. It might seem pretty callous to speculate from the comfort of the West about political "opportunity" in third world slums when people don't have clean drinking water or flush toilets. Or is it utterly necessary to move beyond the standard pity and fear of slum-dwellers and start recognizing them as political agents, not just victims?

This seems to be Robert Neuwirth's aim in Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (Routledge), although he doesn't actually note or promote the development of squatters' political capital. Neuwirth, a journalist based in New York, spent two years living in some of the world's burgeoning slums. He was dazzled by squatters' resourcefulness and doggedness, but these individualistic qualities don't seem to lend themselves to the building of co-operation within or between communities. While living among relatively prosperous squatters in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro's 150,000-strong shadow city, Neuwirth says that people hardly noticed the army's forced eviction of squatters in the capital, Brasilia – "Their solidarity did not extend much beyond their street."

The most interesting section of Shadow Cities isn't the reportage, which is often robotic and impatient, like a 30-second TV news piece. It's the chapter on "Proper Squatters, Improper Property," where Neuwirth discusses political scientists Hernando de Soto and Peter Marcuse's views on squatters, which represent the difficulties of grappling with the phenomenon of squatting in traditional ideological terms. De Soto, a free marketeer, wants to release the "dead capital" that squatters' property and entrepreneurship represents by immediately granting legal title deeds. Then the credit cards and consumerism will come. Marcuse, looking from the left, surprisingly seems to have rather less hope for squatters. As a result of their selfish pursuit of their own betterment, Marcuse says that squatters' communities – if they can be called that – are disorganized and inefficient, no model for a radical urban future.

There are further complications to the seductive idea of squatters harboring – or already enacting – some revolutionary potential. Rocinha, the largest of Rio's 600 favelas, now has all the trappings of normal urban life: grocery stores, banks, video rental stores, restaurants, a nightclub, even three health clubs and a postal service. Rocinha also has a small McDonald's, credit card companies, loan shops, and a cable TV supplier – there are more TVs than fridges in the favela.

This is asfaltizaçâo: the inevitable, probably welcome, gentrification of slums that will eventually happen everywhere if governments – made to feel insecure by people who apparently don't need them – can resist the temptation to tear down these rebellious neighborhoods. But does asfaltizaçâo mean that these lawless, propertyless rugged individualists simply can't wait to integrate their slums into Mall World, where the rest of us live? Who can blame them?

In Planet of the Slums (Verso), another new book (to be released in June) on the urban poor, sociologist Mike Davis is cautious about perceiving slums as bubbling political volcanoes: "the [l]eft [is] still largely missing from the slum," he says. Islam and Pentecostalism are the unifying forces in the slums of Morocco, Latin America and Africa, occupying "a social space analogous to that of twentieth-century socialism and anarchism." While squatters don't fit into old-fashioned categories, or demonstrate much political solidarity, Davis notes that slum dwellers are "the fastest growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth." We didn't forecast the catastrophic growth of slums, and we may not be able to predict the political implications either – but there must be some.

Are we really seeing an accelerated version in the developing world of the slum stages that western cities went through, as Neuwirth intimates? Or are we seeing a humanitarian crisis of a different order, one caused by neo-liberal pressures on agriculture and simultaneous loss of jobs in cities? Planet of the Slums is a more foreboding book than Shadow Cities: Davis sees an under-recognized humanitarian catastrophe, and not much redeeming political opportunity, yet. Worse, it's a catastrophe that is irreversible under present conditions: "The labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neoliberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?" The development of Rocinha offers one such scenario of integration – or appropriation – of the outside world into the (former) slum, but this is only a tiny sliver of the humanity that has been rendered surplus. Who knows if this model of slum gentrification will transplant itself, and should we care if it neuters the possibilities of new models of ownership and informal economic activity latent in the world's slums?

After speaking to Celine D'Cruz, one of the founders of Slum Dwellers International (Zizek would surely find the name encouraging), such intellectual and theoretical questions suddenly seemed frivolous in the face of the immediate and perpetual crisis her organization deals with. SDI was founded in South Africa in 1996 to give more than a token voice for the urban poor in the decisions made by lofty NGOs, development agencies, the UN, and local municipalities. There are now dozens of groups affiliated with SDI across the global south, but according to its web site, the primary focus of the group is "emphatically local."

I phoned D'Cruz in Bombay shortly after she had visited one of the freshly demolished slums. People had started to rebuild their homes, she told me, but that day the Municipal Corporation had paid another visit and attempted to remove the roofs of the hastily reconstructed shacks. "When the city comes with force like this it's very difficult to resist. People get pissed off," she said. "They sometimes throw chile powder in [city officials'] eyes, scream and shout, stand in front of their house. Today they had a big fight, the [corporation] guys got frightened and they left. But it's no fun guarding your house every day."

SDI is trying to negotiate the proper resettlement of Bombay's squatters. This means including them in the process – not, as has happened in the past, housing fishermen and vendors in high-rise new tenements where they can't carry their equipment up the stairs. When you don't ask squatters where and how they want to live, D'Cruz says, "you deliver and construct houses that aren't good enough for the poor." So it's no wonder they often just sell the property that was given to them and move to another shanty town where they can determine their own lives again.

Still, D'Cruz is wary about "romanticizing" the impressive defiance of the squatters (something Neuwirth occasionally lapses into in Shadow Cities). She insisted that none of them relish their place on the margins. "Speak to any woman: she doesn't want to live on the street or on railway tracks. She dreams of a better home for her children. She doesn't want to leave them plastic sheets when she's dead."

Eighty percent of the membership of SDI is women. "That's a big difference from conventional movements," said D'Cruz. "I think housing is something that's very important to women. A man can come to a city and live under a bridge, a sheet, anywhere. But if a city can't provide for a woman, she's extremely vulnerable. Women have a much greater stamina for dealing with the complexities" of securing housing rights.

The composition of SDI is one aspect of an unfamiliar but also unassuming radicalism. D'Cruz says that slum dwellers don't necessarily have a macro view of the neo-liberal conditions that shape their lives, "But they are surely able to make choices in their cities that work for them without holding the city to ransom." SDI seeks local and immediate solutions – they're don't seem to be interested in big rhetoric or new theories – and then shares their knowledge internationally: "Our point is if a Japanese businessman can go to the other side of the world to do business, what's to stop a slum dweller representing themselves in another part of the world?" With that, D'Cruz had to leave, with a delegation of slum dwellers and NGO representatives, to catch a plane to Kenya for an international SDI board meeting. On the agenda: AIDS, demolitions, the loss of a lot of their leadership in the tsunami, and resettlement of its living victims – the harrowing practicalities that come before theory.

Sit - in Demo (22 Feb) Bombay Joint Platform against Eviction

2005-02-18T10:40:00.000+01:00

From: "Gautam Sen"
Subject: Programme on Eviction
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:30:51 +0530

Friends and comrades,

You all know that we have been taking various programmes against Eviction without rehabilitation and for Rehabilitation for all the evictees for more than three years. We have been doing this more or less consistently. But we are far away from getting our basic demands won, though here and there some concessions and relieves have been achieved. In spite of the clear-cut declaration in the Common Minimum programme of the UPA govt (which is ratified by the Left Front) both the Central and the State govt. have been continuing their eviction programme. Recently they have announced that they are going to evict thousands of families residing at Ballygung-Tollygung railway side jhupris in the first week of March, 2005. It may be added that the local jhupri residents are doing their best to continue and develop the resistance movement.

In this situation we are calling all concern citizens and organisations to join hands to strengthen the anti-eviction movement, in general and the ensuing railway colony eviction, in particular.

We also invite you to participate in the following programme toawrds the same.

14 February, 2005

Convenor
Joint Platform against Eviction

Sit-in Demonstration at Hazra Crossing

(The concern citizens along with the evicted and would-be-evicted persons will be present)

22 February, 2005 3 pm to 9 pm

Documentation films on the agony and protest of the affected people in Tolly Nullah, Beleghata and Rabindra Sarovar will also be shown.

Contact: 2465 2507, 94331 30349

Immediate Relief for the State-initiated Tsunami Victims - Letter to Sonia Gandhi

2005-02-17T12:23:00.000+01:00

To
Smt. Sonia Gandhi,
The President,
The Indian National Congress,
New Delhi.

Sub : Immediate Relief for the State-initiated Tsunami Victims in Mumbai

Madam,

It is rather heartening that, as it appears from various media reports, you have taken some time off from your busy schedule and opted to take note, even if somewhat belated, of the terrible human disaster that is at the moment tormenting Mumbai. It provides us a small consolation that the myriad protest struggles being waged by the hapless affected, and the numerous petitions sent to you, have eventually been able to draw your attention to the ongoing human tragedy of massive proportions.

As you are aware, around eighty thousand poor working class families, contributing their mites in a number of meaningful ways in building and running the megapolis, have been stripped of their ramshackle shelters at the peak of the winter season in the name of beautifying the city by literally bulldozing the ìillegalî hutments which allegedly came up after 31st December, 1994. In the process even those who were staying at the same place for well over a decade have lost their meager homes and means for survival.

The drive, as you know, was launched in early December by a government which had just come to power with an impressive show in the city in the assembly election held about six weeks back on the basis of the general promise that the Congress will stand with the common people and the specific commitment that all the hutments built till the end of 1999 will be regularised.

Madam, youíd surely remember, you yourself had actively participated in the election campaign, and road shows in the city, to lend credibility to these promises.

Consequently, this ongoing inhuman drive on the part of the State, to destroy the lives of a large number of its poor and vulnerable citizens instead of actively intervening to protect, spearheaded by a Chief Minister, who not so long ago had been publicly dallying with the Shiv Sena, is just not soiling the image of your party ñ it is a downright assault on your personal credibility as well, with an all-India and long term ramification.

There is a widespread belief that the ëbeautificationí drive is nothing more than a clever ploy to line the pockets of those occupying the high offices and their blood brothers in the building industry at the cost of the common citizenry. This impression gets further strengthened if one looks at the role of this government in gifting away precious mill lands, which had been leased out by the State for carrying out productive activities, to the mill owners again blatantly revising the government stands taken earlier to the detriment of all other stakeholders. The move towards scrapping the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCRA) and active lobbying by this selfsame government to bring about relaxation of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification by the Union Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF), even in the teeth of the terrible tsunami experience, are pointers in the same direction.

Under the circumstances, you are once again requested to actively intervene in halting the devilish drive forthwith, ensure proper shelters for those whose homes have been destroyed, formulate a national housing policy and implement it expeditiously to provide affordable housing to urban and rural poor, and, the last but not the least, ensure participation of all sections of stakeholders in the process of town and city planning. Madam, saving the lives of lakhs must be considered far more important than saving the prestige of a Chief Minister of doubtful commitments and intentions.

Thanking you,

Sukla Sen

EKTA (Committee for Communal Amity),
Mumbai

Letter to India's Prime Minister re Slum demolitions in Mumbai (Ammu Abraham)

2005-02-14T18:07:00.000+01:00

To: Shree Manmohan Singh, The Prime Minister of India

and

Shreemati Sonia Gandhi, The UPA Chairperson and President, Congress Party,

Mumbai, 14-02-2005

Dear Sir / Madam,

As you know, the Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, with the support of the BMC and the Govt of Maharashtra, have been on a spree of slum demolitions, of allegedly post-1995 habitations. Until now, the people who lived in these habitations have not been given any shelter, however temporary; their children cannot sit for exams, they cannot cook food and eat. They sit around all day long under the sun, hoping for something. Most of them are working people and they have been unable to go to work as they are sitting around guarding their belongings.

There is a conviction among the middle class in Mumbai that these people are a great strain on the infrastucture of the city. This is far from true. Thousands of acres of mill lands coming free and being sold in the old textile area of Parel etc are going to have huge high rises on 80 to 90% of it. That is going to put a great strain on the infrastructure and bare necessities of life in Mumbai, especially water. The slums cannot rise very high, and as such are not that much of a strain on infrastructure.

As for the 1995 cut off date, we are told that many people who lost their dwellings and whole bustees were there before 1995, some for a very long time. The Congress made a pre-election promise that the cut-off date will be moved to 2000; many slum dwellers who would have voted for a certain other party, voted for the Congress in the last Assembly elections on that promise. That is how the Congress has made such a come- back in Mumbai. By the sleight of hand of changing the Chief Minister, promises solemnly made should not be broken.

And irrespective of all this, these are citizens and citizenesses of India; they are being callously disenfranchized, struck off the electoral rolls. Soon they will not exist, for all legal purposes. Even illegal migrants, or even animals or any living thing should not be treated in this manner.

Apparently, all this is being done in furtherance of the "Shanghai-Mumbai" plan. But India is not China, and Mumbai is not Shanghai. It is not even Delhi, which has already been cleansed by chasing all the poor out. Mumbai has been the mother of all the displaced of India who are capable of working, but without a livelihood elsewhere.

We are not saying that people should be allowed to build habitations over crucial water pipes and so on; but that the demolitions should not be so indiscriminate, and that going ahead with this get rich scheme of builders in Mumbai will spell the end of Mumbai one of these days.

On Saturday, just 2 days ago, Medha Patkar of NBA, Prakash Reddy of CPI and a number of others have been also arrested, and incarcerated, in relation to a protest near Rafiq Nagar bustee, which had been demolished last December. 1000 families had been rendered homeless at one stroke. The women and children have been sleeping in a cemetery nearby since then. These are people who had homes, who had work, whose children were going to school. The government of Maharashtra and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation increased the number of homeless, jobless and school dropouts by 1000 families at one stroke. And we go begging every other day to the World Bank and ADB and IMF, for loans for development, especially of Mumbai. Where is all this money going? A lot of it was supposed to improve life for the suburban commuters of Mumbai, the miserable suburban population, spending an average of 4 hours packed into mind numbing misery daily. A whole lot of people squatting on railway lands have got new places; but has the commuters’ life improved? Not a jot. The bridges are higher; making physical exertion greater than ever, even for the ageing, the sick and the disabled; but the promise of one more line to separate out the outstation trains so that the commuters do not have to run up the stairs and down when locals are shifted to other platforms – even that has not been done; never mind Shree Govinda, Congress M.P. from Mumbai referring to his mother, taking a much advertized train ride pre-elections and challenging Shree Ram Naik of the BJP (quite rightly) etc.

If you cannot build for the people, alleviate their misery, at least do not demolish what they have already built, so heartlessly.

Stop the demolitions immediately.
Release all arrested persons immediately and call them for discussions about the demolitions and resettlement.
Put up some permanent camps in Mumbai for temporary shelters for the displaced, in every zone; do not leave people/children out on the streets.
Remove all the security guards - paid for by the builders’ lobby , from the demolished areas.
Compensate those whose homes have been illegally demolished.
Pay attention to the school-going children and make arrangements for them to continue to attend school
Make arrangements for the elderly and the sick; do a survey on how many are already dead due to the demolitions
Conduct an enquiry into how women are managing and arrange for counselling for those who are greatly distressed.
We are all crying for the Tsunami-hit people, calling for the establishment of democracy in Nepal.

These demolitions are violating several fundmental rights of the victimized people, according to the Constitution of India. What is the point of having a Constitution, if the most fundamental rights of the citizenry is violated, and the poor can be thrown out and not only their labour, but even their meagre possessions can be misappropriated any time by agencies of the state? Has some ledger been kept somewhere about what the belongings of each of these men, women and children are? Did someone keep track of how many notebooks, pencils, erasers of every child student in the demolished bustees were? If not, how can they even be compensated for personal property destroyed? Are they not human beings and are their dreams not as worthy as those of any of your children?

Please stop the demolitions immediately, and start taking stock of the destruction.

Yours truly,

Ammu Abraham for the Women’s Centre, Bombay.

Stop Further Demolitions - Press Note ZopadPatti Bachao Kriti Samiti

2005-02-14T17:46:00.000+01:00

ZOPADPATTI BACHAO KRITI SAMITI

C/o Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, Sayani Road, Prabhadevi, Mumbai-400025

Press Note/ 13.2. 2005

HUNDREDS OF EVICTED HUTMENT DWELLERS CONFRONT RULING PARTY IN MUMBAI: STOP FURTHER DEMOLITIONS, RELIEF & REHABILITATION FOR EVICTED

Hundreds of the evicted slumdwellers in Mumbai demanded the rulong Congress party that all the demolitions be stoppedc forthwith and the evicted people be allowed to resetle on the same land, and the state should provide food, shelter, clean water amnd compensation for the grave violation of human and democratic rights by the Maharashtra government, at the behest of the corporate powers. It called on the Congress party to stnad for the Œcommon people‚ as per its declared stance and restore, protect life and livelihoods of poor people.

Over five hundred representative men and women from over 15 hutment colonies and activists over 20 organizations comprising of the Zopadpatti Bachao Samyukta Kruti Samiti converged on front of the headquarters of Maharashtra State Congress Committee in Tilak Bhavan. Many women came with their children and many have left them behind to register their protest. Both the men and women had lost their livelihood and the older chidren and college-going youngsters had to face displacement and destitution when their examinations are nearing. Despite the destitution they have beewn facing for over two months, the people kept alive the fire to fight for their right to life. "We have no choice, but to fight for ourroght ti life. It seems that the Maharashtra government and the corporate and media elites care only for the rights of the rich people", said the agitated people. " The eviction of the hutment dwellers is a conspiracy against the Bahujan Samaj (the backward). We have brought these people to power; now they are serving the moneyed interests. We can drag them off the seat if power as well", announced the young Siddharth.

In the afternoon the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Comittee Chief, Mrs. Prabha Rau invited a 10-member delegation for discussion. It seems that Mrs. Rau and other Congress leaders were hesitant to assure the instant stippage of the eviction or relief to the already evicted. It was curious that the former ministerm Hussain Dalwai was non-commital about stoping the demolitions and was beating around the bush. He also blamed the previous Sena dominated Mumbai Metopolitan Corporation for ordering the demolitions and police atrocities! Another former minister Kripa Shanker Singh was at least apologetic but equally non-commital. They however insisted that the demolitions is a complicated issue.

In the end Medha Patkar made it clear that the state government should not wait for three days to stop the demolitions, provide relief if shelter, food, clean water, medical service and stoping the police teror and atrocity. She demanded that the Congress Party should make it clear whether it envisages any place for the poor people in the city development plan. " We would be watching what stance Mrs. Margater Alva and other Congress leaders take in the Mumbai-Vision seminar, sponsored by the builders and corporate powers".

Earlier the day, the delegation of the Samyukta Kriti Samiti met the General Secretary of All India Congress Committee amd the party in-charge of Maharashtra affairs, Mrs. Margate Alva. They gave a detailed memorundum and asked her to restrain the Maharashtra government. They criticised the so-caled development plam for Maharashtra prepared by the multinational McKinsey company. They pointed out that there has been unprecedented violation of the human rights of over 35 million people, by razing over 80,000 huts. It had adversely affected the education of about 10 million people. The people have been living on the dust, dirt and garbage, deliberately filled in by the Corporation to make it difficult for ti re-occupy the cleared land. There were large scale police atrocities, and still they are being harassed by the police. They asked Mrs. Alva to make the Congress party to honour the assurance made in the pre-election manifesto. They demanded that ˆ

Stop the inhuman demolitions, withdeaw the police and private security forces, respect electoral promises amd give the rights ti the hutment dwellers upto 2000; rehabilitate the already evicted at the same place giving them the land right, paying the compensation upto Rs. 30,000 for the damages. Th organizations asked for strictly enforcing the urban land ceiling act and free over 2500 hectares lamd from capotalists; they demanded the imediate and unconditional withdeawal of the cases against the hutment dwelers and the activists. They also demanded that the city development plan should have the plan for the housing of the poor people and that "separate land for slums, poor, and marginalized people" It made clear that while planning for the Mumbai the vision of poor 60% of the people‚s livelihods, shelter should be priotected and be given top priority.

Vidya Chavan
Vitthal Ghag
Raju Bhise
Sanjay Shinde
Dhruv Rerdkar
Vilas Rohimal
Anand Kamble
Shakil Ahmed others

Sample Letter of Protest for Faxing (drwn up by NAPM activists)

2005-02-12T18:03:00.000+01:00

SAMPLE LETTER OF PROTEST BELOW FOR FAXING.

To,
1) The Prime Minister of India - Fax : 011 - 23016857 / 23019817
2) Mrs. Sonia Gandhi - Fax : 011 - 23018651
3) The Chief Minister of Maharashtra -022 - 23631446
4) The Deputy Chief Minister, Maharashtra - 022 - 23631505

Dear Sir / Madam,

We are shocked and most perturbed to witness the most blatant human rights violations taking place in the enlightened and prosperous State of Maharashtra, committed by the State itself. I am sure that we need not spell out that all forced evictions destroy not just the families but also the communities, the livelihood of the residents, their culture and community life. Women and children are the worst affected. A number of children have died out in the winter, which has been exceptionally severe this year, their health, nutrition, security and sense of security, are lost for ever. Their education lies disturbed, their books lie crushed under the might of the bull- dozers sent by the State to turn its citizens into refugees in their own lands. Their parents take turns sitting guard ˆ night and day, over their limited belongings, instead of going to work.

The people thus bull dozed, live in slums for different reasons. Some are not even slums but „gaothans‰. Their families have lived there since four generations, some since 40 years, the trees they have planted are big and bear fruits which they offer the visitors, despite the dire straits they are in themselves. Originally, Bombay was a village of fisher ˆ folk, yet a place like Moragaon, a fisher folk's village, was bull- dozed and set fire to, destroying documentation and spreading terror.

Rafiq Nagar was bull ˆ dozed in December and about 1000 families had nowhere to go, so they have been sleeping amidst the graves in a cemetery. The residents of Rafiq Nagar had painfully filled in a " Nala" by their own hard labour and made land for their houses. Since yesterday, the original slum area is being converted into a dumping ground for garbage. When people peacefully protested, they were „lathi charged‰, arrested and locked up!! Even observers have been arrested.The police are ensuring that the "dirty slum dweller" is replaced permanently by Mumbai's " clean garbage ".

The story continues with very limited variations and 3 lakh Indian citizens are made homeless by a State which prefers to cater to the greed of a handful of rich at the expense and total destruction of the majority of the Indian population.

After coming into power on promises of legalising hutments built upto the year 2000, the Maharashtra government does not feel at all obliged to keep its promise. Infact the Municipal authorities have even asked that the people whose houses are demolished should be removed from the electoral rolls ! What a wonderful way of making sure that no backlash hurts the rulers even in the next elections !!!!!

Even at this very moment, more of the homeless and their sympathisers, including Medha Patkar, Raju Bhise,Prakash Reddy, Leena Joshi, Vijaya Chauhan, Kalpana Gowde from various peoples' movements and NGO's are being arrested.

* We demand that all further demolitions must stop immediately.
* All arrested persons should be released immediately.
* Remove all the security guards - paid for by the builders lobby , from the demolished areas.
* Compensate those whose homes are illegally demolished.
* Stop displacing people in the villages and destroying their resource bases if you do not want slums in the cities.
* Actively provide facilities in the villages, including employment - in the hinterlands.
* In your hurry to turn Mumbai into Shanghai, please do not make it into another Tianamen Square, Peking !!

It is the concept of „human dignity‰ that distinguishes humanity from the animal world. The Supreme Court of India has recognized that the Right to Life includes the Right to Food and Clothing, Right to Shelter and the Right to Livelihood. Deprivation of a single one of these leads to a loss of dignity, fundamental freedoms as also equality.

Kindly take immediate action and ensure that such attrocities never recur in our fair land.

Police Arrest and Lathi Charge Protesting Slum People - Press Statement by National Alliance of People's Movements

2005-02-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

National Alliance of People's Movements
Haji Habib Building, Naigaon Cross Road
Dadar (E), Mumbai - 400014

-------------------------------------------------------------

PRESS STATEMENT

Mumbai | February 12, 2005

Police Arrest and Lathi Charge Protesting Slum People

Senior Activist including Medha Patkar, Prakash Reddy Held

In a daylong sequence of events, police lathi charged (cane beating) a
gathering of over 1200 people near the Deonar police station today
afternoon. The people were protesting the demolition of their houses in
Rafiq nagar slum area and were demanding the release of over 300 people who were arrested earlier the day. Most of them were released in the afternoon, but nearly 30 people, mainly senior activists, were re-arrested.

The people who are under arrest include, Medha Patkar, Prakash Reddy of
Communist Party of India, Raju Bhise of NAPM, Vijaya Chauhan, Kalpana Gowda of Asha Ankur, Leena Joshi of Apnalaya, Nitin More of Apli Mumbai, Shakil Ahmed of Nirbay Bano Andolan and others from Rafiq nagar. They are lodged in Shivaji nagar as well as Chirag nagar police stations.

They are booked under sections 147, 143, 447 which are relate to rioting,
illegal gathering etc.

The police mercilessly beat the people, who were trapped in the gullies,
near Deonar police station. The number of people injured in the lathi
charge in not known at the release of this statement.

Rafiq nagar slum was reclaimed from a marshy land in 1996. There were about 800 houses before demolition. The police, aided with bulldozers, demolished the houses in last December. Since then, the people were living in open and make shift locations.

Rafiq nagar is only one of the many slums, which was demolished by the
government in the past 2 months. Over 80,000 houses were demolished so far.

National Alliance of People‚s Movements condemn this undemocratic action of the government and demand that all further demolitions must stop
immediately and all arrested persons should be released immediately.
Further, if the government is serious about checking the growth of slums,
stop displacing people and provide facilities in the villages, including
employment - in the hinterlands.

Pervin Jehangir | Maju Varghese | Joe Athialy

Urgent Action Appeal: 250,000 slum dwellers evicted last December in Mumbai (Housing and Land Rights Network of Habitat International Coalition)

2005-02-10T17:32:00.000+01:00

Mumbai's Expendable Poor (Anu Kumar)

2005-02-05T17:45:00.000+01:00

The Economic and Political Weekly
February 5, 2005

Mumbai's Expendable Poor

The current demolition drive in Mumbai by the Congress-led coalition government pushes to the wayside the poor of Mumbai who live in 'illegal' shanties. The government action goes against the grain of successful experiments of community involvement in resettlement and appears to reverse the slum development policy of the 1990s. Development cannot proceed without taking into account the needs of the slum dwelling populace who make up substantial numbers of the city. Sustainable growth is possible only if all stakeholders in the process including slum dwellers and the poor are given a say in schemes that affect them.

by Anu Kumar

Slum: ·. a squalid and overcrowded urban area inhabited by very poor people.› a house in such a place.

– (Concise Oxford Dictionary,
Tenth Edition, 2000)

In a demolition drive that began on December 8, 2004 and still continues, the Maharashtra government and the Brihan Mumbai Corporation demolished 70,000 shanties they claimed were illegal, clearing in the process as many as 306 acres of land, dislocating over 3 lakh people and affecting thousands of others. It was a demolition that went against the grain of what the Congress promised in its election manifesto in the recent assembly elections – to protect slums built before 2000 – a promise widely believed to have garnered electoral support among Mumbai’s poor. At the same time, the government through its advertisements continues to make the ironical claim that its actions constitute a chance at freedom for slum dwellers – who comprise half of Mumbai’s population. “The Slum Rehabilitation Authority through its various projects has been constantly working towards the upliftment of these citizens of our metropolis’’, proclaims one advertisement. The spate of demolitions, however, is an apparent reversal of Maharashtra’s longstanding policy towards slums.

Maharashtra Policy

After independence, efforts were initially geared towards rehabilitating the population of slums and improving their conditions of living. Between 1943 and 1956, the government of the erstwhile Bombay state disbursed small grants to various municipal bodies for improvement of slums. In 1956, this changed when the central government approved a Slum Clearance Plan. Bombay was one of the six pilot cities covered under this scheme.

The strategy of demolitions that began with the plan was pursued till the 1970s. However, it did not work because people, after some time, simply re-built their huts at the same location or, if there was too much harassment, at another unoccupied location nearby. Moreover, land-owning agencies were ill equipped to police their lands and lower level officials often connived with middlemen to allow encroachments. Even when the state government did try to resettle the poor, they were unsuccessful. Resettlement proceeded erratically, dependant on the whims and fancies of local municipal officials and the poor were completely excluded from any decision-making.

In the 1970s, the state first recognised the need for some form of resettlement for slum dwellers, after slums were demolished. A Slum Improvement Board (SIB) was set up, slums began to be viewed as housing solutions and the state began to provide water, sanitation, electricity and other amenities to these areas. After a census of huts on public lands was conducted in 1976, photo passes were issued to all those found eligible according as to whether they could establish that they were living in the slum at the time of census. Thus, 1,680 settlements with a population of 28 lakhs were identified. This was the first time slum dwellers were given any form of security. However, none of these programmes ever involved the poor in any stage of planning or implementation. Moreover, slums on central government and privately owned lands – which accounted for the largest chunk of land in the city – were excluded from the exercise. A second enumeration was carried out in 1983. 1,930 settlements with a population of 43 lakhs were counted. In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that eviction was a disturbance to the right to livelihood and hence infringed on the fundamental right to life. However, the court accepted the state government’s use of the 1976 and 1983 Census exercises to identify those people whose resettlement was guaranteed if eviction was necessary for public purposes.

In the 1980s, the World Bank’s Rs 53 crore Bombay Urban Development Project (BUDP) came into being with two programmes – the Slum Upgradation Programme (SUP) and the Low Income Group Shelter Programme (LISP). SUP consisted of giving a 30-year renewable lease of land to cooperative societies of slum dwellers (where the lands were not needed for public purposes), providing civic amenities on a cost-recovery basis and giving loans to upgrade people’s houses. Under the LISP, the state provided subsidised land to Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Low Income Groups (LIG) to build their own homes in accordance with a type design. Although 85,000 families benefited, conditions on the ground did not change significantly. With SUP, existing inequalities in size of holdings were left untouched. Under LISP, there was a shift in the role of the state from provider to facilitator but the scheme did not reach the really poor. Both programmes also suffered from an absence of genuine community participation. And again, the SUP could not be implemented on central government or private land. This has been a noticeable precedent in Mumbai – for in spite of the Slum Areas Act that enables local authorities to provide services in settlements already ‘declared’ slums, many government agencies still do not permit the BMC to carry out ‘improvement’ of slums on their land. Thus, central agencies do not give permissions for basic amenities, upgradation or resettlement and slum dwellers continue to live on these lands.

Community Participation

In recent years, the development agenda has moved away from merely making ever-increasing demands on the state, to sustained advocacy by organisations of the poor for the formulation of pro-poor strategies in which the poor and the state are identified as potential partners. Since the 1980s, organisations, such as Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) have been working towards ensuring some security of tenure and the importance of recognising the urban poor as partners in tenure and making shelter improvements at global, regional, national and local levels.

This initiative saw some success in 1997-98, when organised groups of slum dwellers were able with SPARC to reach an agreement with the Railroad Transport Authority, and municipal authorities to relocate and resettle several thousand households living in slum settlements located along side railway tracks in Mumbai (as part of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project). SPARC and the National Slum Dwellers Federation helped slum dwellers to organise and form cooperative housing societies. 12,000 families were rehabilitated in the suburb of Mankhurd. Except for an incident in February 2000, when railway authorities demolished 2,350 slum houses, the community-managed resettlement programme was orderly. The sudden eviction of settlers without compensation actually galvanised the government into action and it made available 2,000 apartments in Mankhurd and other land for transit settlements, where settlers were accommodated till the tenement blocks they were promised were completed. This solution was possible because the railway settlers were organised and able to stop the evictions.

Both the MUTP and Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project (MUIP) together accounted for the resettlement of 50,000 to 60,000 slum families. A small figure, yet standards of resettlement in these projects will serve as precedents for future resettlement. The key lesson that emerged was the importance for low-income households and their communities of being organised and of the necessity of their being able to engage in every step of the resettlement process from formulating relocation plans and determining the actual logistics of the move. The railway resettlement programme set several benchmarks – community organisations were ceded some of the powers traditionally enjoyed by government agencies in resettlement schemes, including the power to determine the eligibility of families and second, allocation of housing units in the resettlement area. It also stressed the importance of women-centred (‘Mahila Milan’ or women together) community participation, not merely on grounds of gender equity but also on the demonstration of their skills as household and community managers. Thus around the same time, 30,000 pavement families in Mumbai also formed Mahila Milan groups that succeeded in stopping repeated demolition of their shelters. The community was also mobilised to construct 5,000 toilet seats in the slums, in addition to the development of micro savings schemes for income generating activities.

The railway resettlement project established also the importance of a two-phase resettlement strategy. In the first phase where transit accommodation is provided, project authorities get quick access to the land that they need cleared, thereby avoiding delays and cost over-runs. The second advantage is that when people move to the new settlement, albeit temporarily but with the assurance of obtaining houses with secure tenure, they identify with the resettlement process and willingly become full participants in the next phase of resettlement, when permanent buildings are constructed.

Redevelopment Scheme of 1990s

Public projects such as MUTP or MUIP provided for free tenements of 225 sq ft for each family. The same norm was picked up by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) set up in the 1990s. The Slum Redevelopment Scheme of the SRA aimed to provide enough incentives – such as increasing the Floor Space Index (FSI) allowed in slum areas and the ability to transfer development rights to other areas of the city – for private developers and builders to redevelop slums. The theory was that by selling the extra space in the open market, tenements for slum dwellers would be cross-subsidised and made affordable to them. The state government also introduced legislation that protected slum dwellers who could establish that they were living at a particular place as of January 1, 1995. The homes of ‘eligible’ slum dwellers thus could not be demolished without their first being resettled [Burra 2001, 2003].

Redevelopment was a unique strategy taken up by the state government, radically different from the slum upgradation approach followed elsewhere. It was a scheme very unlike the 1987 play, ‘Redevelopment or Slum Clearance’, replete with political allegory by the Czech playwright and former president, Vaclav Havel. The play, set in a medieval castle in a historic town in eastern Europe, includes a state functionary, an emotionally chaotic project director, and a group of architects who struggle to come up with a high-rise building scheme that will destroy the ancient town’s character and incidentally clear away its slums.

For all its progressive features, the slum redevelopment scheme still did not contain proactive provisions to resettle families nor did it specify the nature of resettlement and the kinds of entitlements eligible slum dwellers would receive. The SRA promised to construct eight lakh tenements in five-six years. However, only a little over 19,000 tenements were completed in the mid-1990s. When a new government came to power in Maharashtra in 1995, one of its main election promises was to provide eight lakh free houses for 40 lakh slum dwellers in Mumbai. In August 1998, the Shiv Sena-BJP government set up the Shivshahi Punarvasan Prakalp Ltd (SPPL). The scheme was a rehash of the earlier slum redevelopment scheme. Slum land was to be handed over to builders for the construction of commercial complexes, with the builders in turn using part of their profits to build new houses for the residents of the slum. A Rs 600 crore loan to fund the SPPL was extracted from an extremely reluctant Maharashtra Housing Area Development Authority (MHADA) and the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) [Bavadam 1998].

Unlike the earlier redevelopment scheme (where the SRA was only a facilitating agency), the SPPL actively took on the role of a builder. Private builders themselves were given the role of contractors to get them to participate in the scheme. Under the earlier scheme, the builders were expected to make the capital investment without any input from the government, and there were no profit margins. Under the SPPL scheme, the builders as contractors could provide for profit margins. The state government also soon scaled down the size of the project from eight lakh units of 225 sq ft each to two lakh units of the same size. One of the main failings of the SPPL scheme was that it depended on public land as a resource, most of which was already occupied by squatters. By the time the Shiv Sena-BJP government was voted out of office in October 1999, not even a fraction of the number of flats it had promised to build had come up.

One of the criticisms of the SRA scheme was that it promoted high-rise, high density redevelopment as it relaxed FSI norms substantially – 2.5 against the normal FSI of 1.33 for the city and 1 for the suburbs and extended suburbs. High-rise buildings were more expensive to construct and also expensive to maintain. Moreover, they are not suitable for the life-styles of the urban poor engaged in the informal sector of the economy. And again, slum residents were not consulted about their housing needs before building plans were prepared. Experience reveals that inappropriate design often forces slum residents to sell their holdings and set up new tenements elsewhere.

However, the SRA scheme is the only way for the urban poor to get access to land and a subsidy from the market. For one thing, the price of land is not affordable to the poor, the SRA has made it affordable. Again, the SRA scheme has thrown open the doors for cooperative societies of slum dwellers to participate in their own redevelopment and provided a financial mechanism to do so. The challenge remains to create conditions where communities of the poor can determine the process themselves rather than being objects of private developers’ designs.

McKinsey Recommendations

In September 2003, in yet another effort at resolving the metropolis’ insurmountable problems, Bombay First, an organisation with representatives from the corporate world, asked the consulting firm McKinsey to prepare a comprehensive plan that would turn Mumbai into a ‘world-class’ city by 2013. Estimated to cost Rs 2,00,000 crore, the plan focused on six key areas: economic growth, transportation, housing, other infrastructure, financing and governance. The McKinsey report – ‘Vision Mumbai’ of 2003 – identifies housing and land availability as Mumbai’s most controversial problems. The plan envisages eight lakh low-income group houses to rehabilitate slum dwellers. The report has been severely criticised by several urban planners, environmentalists and civic activists as it comes across “as a report by the builders’ lobby; the recommendations scream: privatisation, corporatisation and build, build, build” [cited in Katakam 2003].

The report recommends increasing the availability of land by 50 to 70 per cent. This is possible by relaxing the Floor Space Index (FSI) further, opening up mill and port lands, relaxing Coastal Regulation Zones (CRZ) II and III for Mumbai, and building the trans-harbour link. Furthermore, the report suggests redesigning the Slum Rehabilitation Authority project; construction costs of low-income housing could be recovered by charging slum dwellers a rent of between Rs 750 and Rs 1,500 a month. The creation of special housing zones, on the lines of the Special Economic Zones, would also avoid rental problems and therefore, create more housing. “Rescind the Urban Land Ceiling Regulation Act (ULCRA) and the Rent Control Act, as well as reduce the time taken for building approvals”, and the bulk of the issues relating to housing will be solved, it suggests [Katakam 2003].

Many states have repealed land-ceiling legislation already because of difficulties of implementation and an apparent failure of the law to achieve its objectives. But the government of Maharashtra has not yet scrapped the ceiling law because, it is widely suspected, of pressure from a builders’ lobby that wishes to impede the flow of land into the market, thus artificially inflating its cost. Keeping the law on the statute books is an opportunity for venal politicians and bureaucrats to make money in exchange for granting permissions and exemptions while, at the same time, exercising their patronage to distribute the few flats ostensibly built for the poor to relatives, friends and political supporters.

The current demolitions will do little to solve the problem – slums still exist, many remain because they are ‘saved’ by a government specified cut off date, yet housing remains an issue that has not been clearly addressed by successive governments. As authorities of demolition drive over two decades ago admit, several times squads would demolish illegal structures but still the plot would not stay vacant (interview with G K Khairnar, Indian Express, January 18, 2005). In 1992, an army of officials spread across every civic ward were together making Rs 300 crore annually from illegal constructions. In demolition sites across Mumbai, slum dwellers ousted from their tin and tarpaulin homes in the demolition drive seen in recent weeks, still sit guarding the concrete squares they paid Rs 30,000 or Rs 40,000 for. In 1984, it cost the BMC Rs 1,000 to demolish a single hut. If even a small percentage of the current demolition ‘target’ of 44,000 shanties reappears, it’s simple arithmetic to calculate the losses. But in the rush to development as (defined by the current group of urban planners), the ‘human angle’ has become a peripheral concern.

Judicial Pronouncements

As judicial decrees go, however, maintaining the ‘human angle’ is something even the judiciary has forgotten to do in recent years [Ramanathan 2002]. In the early 1980s, the judiciary recognised the right of every person to constitutional relevance. The Supreme Court in its Shantistar Builders (1990) and Chameli Singh (1996) judgments had ruled that housing constituted a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution – the right to life. The court held that the right to housing includes adequate living spaces, decent structures and clean surroundings. In a later judgment in 1997, the apex court specified that it was the state’s duty to construct houses at reasonable rates and make them easily accessible to the poor. “The state has the constitutional duty to provide shelter to make the right to life meaningful.”

In the 1990s, however, where conflicting interests were perceived, a certain reordering of priorities followed – that affected marginal sections such as the slum dweller, the working classes and the dam-displaced. In some later judgments, slums were directed to be demolished. In February 2000, the court observed, “Rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternative site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket”. This characterisation of the poor as drawn by the court, the likening of a slum dweller to a pickpocket was a definitive departure from the acknowledgment of the fact that the poor too strive to survive, and that their struggles deserve respect and support.

Demolitions and the government’s consequent announcement of delisting these illegal settlers from electoral rolls is a way of effacing without recognition an entire category of citizens, some of whom are reluctant migrants from elsewhere who provide essential services to the city. According to state government data, around 60 per cent of Mumbai’s population live in slums; 73 per cent of its households live in one-room tenements, and 18 per cent in two-room structures. One must work at redeveloping Mumbai with these percentages in mind and with some perspective.

Also as many studies have already established, blame for the deteriorating quality of life in the city lies elsewhere and not in the mushrooming of slums, that in any case takes up only 12.85 per cent of land (this, however, is real estate worth over Rs 80,000 crore). The proliferation of slums has meant that civic services have been stretched; even as large stretches of land lie vacant in the city. In 1970, the state government had acquired 50,000 acres of land from farmers and small holders and handed it over to the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) for the development of Navi Mumbai (interview with Mrinal Gore in The Asian Age, January 29, 2005). 4,850 acres of land still lie vacant and can be used for rehabilitation; under the ULCRA, the state government can acquire these lands, but thus far, the latter has been hand-in-glove with the builders.

It is the slowdown in economic growth that has been largely responsible for the deterioration of Mumbai. Since the 1970s, when the city’s manufacturing sector began a steady decline, the bulk of Mumbai’s population has lost the ability to earn a steady income. Economic growth has to be generated for employment creation, and that can be done through development projects. This could be done in high- and low-end service sectors and by converting the hinterland into a manufacturing and logistics hub. It is time therefore to brush away the dust from old master plans for the city that already exist, which talked of development of the hinterland and in ‘peri-urban’ areas such as Navi Mumbai, or the Thane-Belapur section. Moreover, no plan will work unless it involves the city’s people.

Need for Inclusive Growth

In the 21st century, the challenge is how to make cities more inclusive; to give those who are usually excluded, the poor and marginalised, a say in how things are run. The poorest are forced to occupy land illegally and to live in appalling conditions that put their health and safety at risk.

An important step is to recognise the role which civil society, local community organisations, citizens groups and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play. Community organisations can create a bridge between poor people and city authorities in planning urban developments that benefit the poor. In Naga city in the Philippines, for example, a people’s council works closely with the city council. As a result, new initiatives have been launched to clean up the Naga river, manage waste and revitalise the city hospital. In Porto Alegre in Brazil, groups of citizens scrutinise government spending, as well as deciding on priorities for the coming year in a participatory budgeting process. Urban planning and management can be made much more effective by devolving authority to the poor in their own areas. But the poor also need to gain access to finance and land. Banks and other lenders are waking up to the vast market for housing loans at the low-income end of the market and they are finding that the default rates on these loans are very low. In Thailand, the Urban Community Development Office, funded by the government, is providing loans directly to low-income community organisations and small informal sector enterprises [Patel et al 2002].

If squatters are given a sense of security of their tenure, their neighbourhoods become as good as any other neighbourhood. It may be a lot cheaper to live in a slum, but there is a different level of community interaction, a way of life, that is threatened whenever a resettlement project is discussed. Redevelopment in future, while providing for every facility of urban life, must ensure also a way of retaining networks of support that already exist among slum dwellers.

References

Bavadam, Lyla (1998): ‘A Controversial Scheme’, Frontline, Volume 15, Number 18, August 29-September 11.
Burra, Sundar (2001): ‘Resettlement and Rehabilitation of the Urban Poor: the Mumbai Urban Transport Project, A Case Study’, September, www.sparcindia.org.
– (2003): ‘Changing the Rules: Guidelines for the Revision of Regulations for Urban Upgrading’, www.sparcindia.org
Katakam, Anupama (2003): ‘A Blueprint for Mumbai’, Frontline, Volume 20, Number 24, November 22-December 05.
Patel, Sheela, Celine d’Cruz and Sundar Burra (2002): ‘Beyond Evictions in a Global City: People-Managed Resettlement in Mumbai’, Environment and Urbanisation, Volume 14, Number 1, April.
Ramanathan, Usha (2002): ‘Of Judicial Power’, Frontline, Volume 19, Number 06, March 16-29.

The unbearable lightness of seeing (P. Sainath)

2005-02-05T17:39:00.000+01:00

URL: www.thehindu.com/2005/02/05/stories/2005020500611000.htm

The Hindu
Feb 05, 2005

The unbearable lightness of seeing
By P. Sainath

How agonised we are about how people die. How untroubled we are by how
they live.

NUMBER OF homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam: 30,300. Number
of homes destroyed by the Congress-NCP Government in Mumbai: 84,000.

How agonised we are about how people die. How untroubled we are by how
they live.

Maharashtra's Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, says every Chief
Minister would like to leave behind a legacy. His own, he believes, will
be that of the man who cleaned up Mumbai. Mr. Deshmukh, in short, wishes
to be remembered.

He will be. His Government wiped out 6,300 homes on a single day. A
record the Israeli army would be proud to match on a busy afternoon in
the occupied territories. It is a figure their bulldozers, with tanks
and air force support, have not quite notched up yet.

The Mumbai mass evictions — now in pause mode — demolished a lot more
than slums. They reflected well an elite mindset towards the deprived
that fully matured in the 1990s. It is a lot about how we see the poor
today. About a view marked by contempt for the rights and suffering of
ordinary people. Unless that suffering is certified as genuine by the
rest of us.

Mr. Deshmukh now says the destruction of "some" houses was "an
accident." Not intended. Which perhaps places his Government in the
category of natural calamity. However, most of Mumbai's beautiful
people, some of whom attended `tsunami dinners' after expressing
satisfaction over the city's mass demolitions, are firmly with their
Chief Minister. No one from that fraternity has `adopted' a demolished
slum for adoring cameras. Nor organised relief operations for people,
including many babies shivering without shelter, in one of the coldest
winters.

Instead, Mumbai's elite now feels the need to carry the logic forward.
Last year, 11 prominent Maharashtrians moved the Bombay High Court to
bar slum dwellers from voting. This year, the city's Municipal
Corporation itself asked the Chief Electoral Officer to drop residents
of the demolished slums from the voters' lists. (A curious move in a
society contemplating voting rights for NRIs and PIOs.) No one uses the
real word — disenfranchisement. But it is what they mean. One way or the
other, take away their vote. That should teach them they cannot live
amongst us.

It would also blunt the one weapon ordinary Indians have and use.
Unlike, say, their American counterparts, the Indian poor have the
audacity to believe their votes can change things. They certainly did
that right here. Mumbai's slum dwellers played a critical role in
defeating the BJP-Shiv Sena in the 2004 Assembly polls. (Quite a few
local leaders of the Congress know this well and are fearful of a
backlash. What if slum folk attempt similar adventures the next time
around?)

Of course, excluding large numbers from voting involves minor problems
of constitutional rights. But the avant garde amongst the elite have
found the answer to that one: criminalise them. That would be a good
start. "Book them for trying to steal public property," is one bright
idea. The Mumbai police have obligingly promised criminal trespass cases
against dazed victims hanging around their razed homes. Satisfying, but
annoyingly it would still leave them with the right to vote.

Maybe India will move towards — as on most other things — the American
model. As a Human Rights Watch Sentencing Project report shows, 1.4
million African-American men — 13 per cent of their total number — are
denied voting rights because of their criminal records. As many as 15
American States bar former felons from voting even after they have
completed serving their sentences.

In Alabama and Florida, nearly one in every three African-American men
is permanently disenfranchised. In six other States the ratio is one in
four. All this in States with significant African-American minorities.
As the report notes, no other democracy denies as many people the right
to vote because of their criminal records. A feat that could be eclipsed
in India if the current mindset towards the poor goes the distance.

America has around two million human beings behind bars — more than any
other nation in the world. Of these, 63 per cent are African-American
and Hispanic. Consider that these two groups together form only 25 per
cent of the population. You are far more likely to go to prison — and
lose your vote — if you are African-American. Substitute poor for
African-American and it is an idea much of India's and Mumbai's elite
would go for.

Total disdain for even the foreseeable future is another element of this
mindset. According to a UN Habitat report, one in every three human
beings could live in a slum by 2030. Many of them Indians. Imagine how
many voters we could do away with by criminalising slum dwellers. Just
`reform' the laws. Adopt the Mumbai idea nationwide — and India will be
demolishing more homes than it has ever built.

"Many people will be inconvenienced and will have to make sacrifices if
the city has to develop..." says the Chief Minister. The city's builder
and real estate mafia will not be amongst those inconvenienced. The
sacrifices are to be made by the poor. The power of those driving the
process is immense. The protests and appeals of the slum folk themselves
are simply dismissed. Those of some 28 slum dwellers organisations,
housing rights and human rights bodies, political parties and trade
unions are sought to be played down. It was anxiety over the fallout (at
far higher levels of the Congress in New Delhi) that led to some slowing
down of the demolitions. And to Mr. Deshmukh's admission of "accidental"
evictions.

Class interests are asserting themselves across the major parties here.
The Congress elite is far more in tune with Bal Thackeray on this issue
than it is with its own panicking base. The Sena chief has praised the
Government for the terror visited on the slum populace. This is also one
issue that unites the otherwise bickering Nationalist Congress Party and
Congress. Hopefully, the coalition of a large number of organisations
protesting the action will create a basis for some relief and resistance.

A crucial part of the mindset is the idea that promises made to the poor
have no meaning. It matters little that millions of such people in
Mumbai helped the Congress win a State it would surely have lost. At the
Centre too, that party came to power riding a wave of popular anger
against the policies of the National Democratic Alliance Government. And
then quickly buried its anti-`India Shining' campaign. Today, a Montek
Singh Ahulwalia can signal moves towards the privatisation of water
without batting an eyelid. All earlier assurances on not making life
harder for the deprived mean nothing. That was an election. This is
reality.

That is why the better off — anyway miniscule in numbers — hardly bother
to vote. The rich run governments by other means. Not by electing them.
When governments have reneged on their most fundamental promises in the
past 15 years, the media have welcomed this as "pragmatic." It is
pragmatic to lie to the poor. It is also pragmatic to break your
commitment to the 1993 United Nations resolution which terms forced
evictions "a gross violation of human rights."

A vivid symbol of the pragmatic new world was the Sensex soaring to a
record peak — at the height of the tsunami damage. This phenomenon was
repeated across most of the tsunami-hit nations as "markets sensed" a
windfall in reconstruction spending.

The mindset is visible in our dealings with tsunami-hit citizens, too.
We are now in the process of converting people's entitlements into our
charity. Health care, access to clean water, sanitation, schools — all
these might now happen because of our generosity. Not because human
beings are entitled to them. You might get a house because we feel sorry
half your family was washed away. Not by right of your citizenship of a
decent nation and society.

There is one thing larger than Mr. Deshmukh's bulldozers: The process by
which millions are uprooted from the countryside and forced to seek a
living in the nearest city. What India is building is not an employment
guarantee but an unemployment guarantee. As agriculture collapses and
people vote with their feet, the Deshmukh Doctrine is the best we can
think of. Mopping the floors with the taps all open and running.

The Indian elite wants a society geared up to deal with disasters that
may or may not strike once in a hundred years but shows no urgency at
all when it comes to ongoing misery not caused by nature. Towards the
destruction of the livelihoods of millions by policy and human agency.

We want effective and advanced planning for events distant and hard to
predict. But reject planning for the near future in favour of `the
market', which alone should be the one true guide. We want to build
walls against the sea all along the coast after having done away with
nature's own — the mangroves and sand dunes. Maybe we will build walls
around Mumbai next to keep the plebeians out. Mr. Deshmukh's legacy
would then be forever secure.

In Bombay Battle Over Slums (Scott Baldauf)

2005-02-03T17:38:00.000+01:00

The Christian Science Monitor
February 03, 2005

[Photo Caption / Credits] HOMELESS: Suresh Laxmi is one of thousands of slumdwellers whose homes have been bulldozed by Bombay in an effort to move poor residents into apartments.
SOMA PAUL

IN BOMBAY, A BATTLE OVER SLUMS
City wants slum dwellers in apartments, but demolitions have left thousands homeless.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BOMBAY – With government bulldozers idling outside his door, Suresh Laxmi and his family were given just one hour to clear away their belongings on the morning of Jan. 2. The bulldozers tore down in five minutes what it had taken 10 years to build, all in the name of modernizing Bombay and turning it into the next Shanghai.

Today, Mr. Laxmi keeps his belongings shoved under plastic sheets and bamboo poles. The government has built high-rise tenements for slum dwellers nearby, but Laxmi says government officials told him he doesn't qualify. So for now, Laxmi is staying put on the land he has called home for a decade.

"Society has abandoned us," he says. "But I'm not afraid. We'll fight for our rights. We have spent so much money to build our homes - do you think we'll just leave this place? We'll give a powerful resistance."

It is hard to imagine Bombay - or Mumbai, as the city is now called - without slums. Fly in to Bombay's Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport, and you'll nearly scrape the roofs of Dharavi, the world's largest slum, before coming down on the airport's smooth tarmac. Take a train, and you'll pass by thousands of shacks built right up to the tracks. Today, nearly 55 percent of the city's residents live in slums.

The city has long given tacit approval and even some basic services to the illegal settlements. But now, city planners - mindful of pressure from Bombay's middle-class to gentrify the eyesore - say the slums are an unacceptable problem. Their proposed solution, however, is causing as much tumult as the slum issue itself.

Movin' on up?

The current dispute stems from the government's plan to give tenement apartments to slum dwellers who can prove that they have resided in Bombay since 1995 or earlier.

Previous efforts to confer ownership backfired when slum dwellers promptly sold units for cash, only to seek out another slum. As a result, this program requires residents to own an apartment for 10 years before they can sell.

The government says it has built 50,000 apartments of 225 square feet apiece to house people relocated from sites in Bombay.

But slum-dweller advocates argue that the city has already torn down 73,500 shacks and has thus rendered nearly 350,000 of the city's poorest residents homeless.

"Many people will be inconvenienced and will have to make sacrifices if the city has to develop," Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told the Indian Express newspaper last week.

The chief minister admits that some of the slums have been razed by mistake, since those residing in Bombay since 1995 or before are protected from demolition. Yet he vowed to continue the campaign.

"The situation in Mumbai has deteriorated so much that there is hardly an inch of space left for migrants," he says.

Shabana Azmi, an actress and chairwoman of a slum dweller's advocacy group called the Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti (Protection for the Right to Shelter), says the city's demolition campaign is inhumane and will ultimately fail to rid the city of slums.

"What is important is not demolishing shanties, but upgrading them, giving them clean water, basic sanitation, and above all, giving them unconditional land tenure," says Ms. Azmi.

Azmi admits that it's difficult to build sympathy for the slum dwellers among Bombay's middle class, who mostly applaud the current antislum campaign.

But this same middle class, she comments, benefits from the cheap labor that slum dwellers provide in cleaning their homes, looking after their children, chauffeuring their cars, and cooking their food.

"The one thing I tell the middle class is, if you don't like slum dwellers, then the best way to get rid of them is to stop giving them employment," says Azmi with a smile. "Then your life will come to a grinding halt."

Campaign supporters

Riding a commuter train home to the Bombay neighborhood of Mankhurd, where most of the slum demolition has taken place, law student Rajesh Vartik says the demolition campaign should continue.

"What the government is doing is right," he says, as the train rides past stagnant ponds of sewage from a track-side slum. "For those who have come here illegally, I have no sympathy. They are trying to get something for free.

"But for those who came before 1995," he says, "they should be given compensation."

"All slum people should get an apartment," says friend and fellow law student Rajender Kumar, who also lives in Mankhurd. "But after there are no slums, it is the duty of government to prevent new slums from being built. The problem is that politicians are opportunists, and the slums are vote banks for them."

'Accidental' demolitions

In the slum of Ambedkar Nagar, part of a sprawling complex in Mankhurd district, most of the residents living in the ruins of their demolished shacks can point to photocopies of election voting cards, ration cards, and even land titles that prove residence here since 1995 or before.

By all appearance, they appear to be part of what the government of Maharashtra calls the "accidental" demolitions that have taken place in this campaign.

One of these slum dwellers is Raju Saroj, a migrant from rural Maharashtra who says that he has lost all faith in government officials, and particularly politicians.

Mr. Saroj says that Congress Party politicians came to power with the votes of slum dwellers by promising to protect their homes from demolition.

Now the Congress's promises have been dropped and the bulldozers have arrived.

"Okay, fine, we are here illegally," says Saroj, bitterly. "But why do you come to ask for our vote? If I am illegal, then my vote is illegal, and your election is illegal."

Om Prakash Jaishwar, another slum-dweller, carries the thought further.

"Now you want to take our names off the voting rolls," Mr. Jaishwar says. "Fine. So then can you give me my vote back?"

India's 'biggest slum demolitions'

2005-02-03T17:17:00.000+01:00

By Soutik Biswas
BBC News, Mumbai [3 February, 2005]

Mehrunissa stands in the ruins of what was her home in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) and loudly curses the men and machines that are pulling down her neighbourhood.

Home Truths: Providing Shelter to Millions on the Street (Bharat Dogra)

2005-02-02T17:44:00.000+01:00

The Times of India,
February 2, 2005

HOME TRUTHS: PROVIDING SHELTER TO MILLIONS ON THE STREET

by Bharat Dogra

No one remembers them during grand occasions like Republic Day. They are the homeless — people stretched on footpaths under torn blankets or less, on remorselessly cold and foggy nights. Discussions on improving urban infrastructure altogether negate their existence. Perhaps, their only consolation under this framework is to eke out a space below the flyovers littering the city landscape. They are taken note of only as undesirable elements that need to be weeded out of the city in order to improve its 'social infrastructure'. The Emergency happened only 30 years back, but today a Turkman Gate happens virtually each day all over the country without a murmur of disapproval. Have we really evolved as a strong, proud Republic?

Ironically, the callous neglect is visible in the very city that hosts the Republic Day parade. Despite the recent emphasis on poverty alleviation schemes, the existing night shelters in Delhi accommodate less than 5% of the city's 1,00,000 homeless, or 3,000 people. If the homeless go through hell in winter in Delhi, they face high water in the monsoon in Mumbai. The situation in smaller towns, away from public and policy focus, can well be imagined. It is an indication of the extent to which the urban homeless have been ignored that reliable estimates of their number are just not available. Census estimates have left out a big chunk of the homeless as they can only be contacted at night and not very easily.

Sporadic estimates suggest that the number of homeless is not less than three million, or about 1% of the urban population. The figures will rise if we include those who are precariously housed, or on the margin of homelessness. Some people are 'resettled' so far away from their place of work that they prefer to sleep in the open near the worksite despite the existence of a house or hut miles away. Shouldn't we consider them homeless?

Several studies have shown that it makes sense for the government to provide housing sites and basic services close to the place of livelihood. If only a few dwellings pose a problem — for example, to make way for a road or a drain — organisations of slum dwellers can help to find an alternative site nearby for these few. This was demons-trated by the Asha Abhiyan project in Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh).

Notwithstanding these facts, nearly three lakh people have been rendered homeless by a slum demolition drive in Mumbai in recent weeks. Chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh stands committed to changing the face of Mumbai, no matter what the human cost.

A two-pronged approach is needed to provide shelter on a large scale. The programme of creating night shelters should be stepped up significantly. Appeals should be made to make available buildings that are unused at night, so that these can provide shelter to the homeless, particularly in extremely cold weather. Such buildings can include religious and philanthropic places, schools and colleges. A means would have to be devised to link the organisations and people willing to donate space to those who actually need it. Voluntary organisations and citizens' groups can play an important role in establishing this link and ensuring that the homeless enter and leave buildings in an orderly way so that their day-use is not disturbed.

Ordinary citizens can play a more positive role. Their concerns at present only find limited expression — such as donation of an occasional blanket — due to lack of avenues to reach out to the homeless. However, if organisations dedicated to meeting many-faceted needs of the homeless emerge, these can facilitate a much more broad-based participation of citizens.

The Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan in Delhi has made an effort in this direction. It engages people in the needs of the homeless and provides spaces for them to link up with welfare activities. Many students have offered their voluntary services; some educational institutions have allowed their premises to be used as shelters at night; and commercial establishments as well as individuals have come up with job and training offers.

A move is afoot in Delhi and Chennai to provide the homeless with a voters' identity card. This would empower the unfortunate lakhs in their interactions with hafta -hungry policemen and hospital staff, while also bringing them into the reckoning when the government announces welfare measures.

The Tenth Plan document refers to according voluntary organisations a greater role in managing night shelters. The document emphasises building night shelters for women and children, who have suffered glaring neglect in the past.

Night shelter programmes should learn from earlier mistakes. The low occupancy at night shelters is explained not only by the unhygienic conditions, but also by the fact that the needs of special occupational groups are often overlooked. Rickshaw and cart-pullers need a place to keep their cycles and carts — their means of livelihood — securely before they can sleep peacefully in a shelter. Hence, a close interaction with the target group is needed so that the funds are well spent. Along with an increase in the budget for night shelters, greater transparency in funds use will go a long way in ensuring the best results. In sum, it makes more sense to provide for the homeless than to pursue policies which increase their number in the name of beautification and infrastructure creation. Only then can we say Saare jahan se achcha .

Mumbai: Aamchi Soweto? (Smruti Koppikar)

2005-01-31T17:36:00.000+01:00

Outlook Magazine | Jan 31, 2005

MUMBAI
Aamchi Soweto?
72,000 slums razed; 3.5 lakh homeless. In short, some Mumbaikars are outcastes in their own city.

SMRUTI KOPPIKAR

"Mumbai—The Apartheid City," whispered Miloon Kothari. He isn't the latest wordsmith off the block but the special rapporteur for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. On a windy afternoon, he stood amid the rubble of buildings and slums taking notes. His task: to document and intervene against mass displacement caused by one of the largest demolition drives that Mumbai, and perhaps India, has ever seen. "They are now refugees in their own city. The new ghettoisation is between the rich and poor. It's new urban apartheid," he warned as he surveyed the wasteland before him.
Backing the massive and ongoing demolition drive is the recently elected state government's diktat that all illegal construction and all post-1995 slums must go.

'There is enough land to rehouse all slums, the problem is that it's worth thousands of crores.'

A corrupt and sloth-ridden Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which had officially or otherwise presided over such illegal constructions, suddenly decided to get sprightly. The result: in a matter of weeks, nearly 72,000 slums and shanties were reduced to rubble,
about 300 acres of the city's most prized asset was "freed" and top officials congratulated themselves on a task niftily done.
Security guards keep watch over the "freed land" to keep it free. Each day, bulldozers hunt new grounds, the mild winter air is laced with the smug satisfaction of a few men who proved a point—Mumbai is not a dharamshala that everyone can come to and make his own; that some slums are welcome but others are not; that the government of the day and its well-heeled advisors will determine the golden cutoff year—moved from 1980 to 1985 and then to 1995—to bestow legitimacy.
The coldly doled out statistics missed out on a crucial piece of data: close to 3.5 lakh people—porters, drivers, hawkers, domestic help, cooks, tailors, kulfi-vendors and such, along with their families—are now without a roof over their heads. That's not all. The bulldozers flattened their bamboo poles and wood, ripped apart their makeshift chulhas and earthenware, broke their plates and TV sets.
There's more—children lost their toys, schoolbooks were torn, precious uniforms became part of the debris the demolition squads left behind. Most families managed to save a couple of sheets and vessels, if that, and that vital kitschy plastic bag of papers full of ration

'The new ghettoisation is between the rich and poor. it's the new apartheid.'

cards, birth certificates, bills, slum photo-identification passes proving their validity as citizens serviced by the same civic body.
After howls of class discrimination, the BMC turned its bulldozers and demolition squads to other illegal constructions—terrace restaurants owned or operated by the Page 3 set, illegal extensions of ultra-chic watering holes, garages converted into extra kitchen space by hotels, shops and commercial establishments that had encroached upon pavements, extensions of small factories, etc. So far, 75 such constructions have been demolished. Some slivers of middle-class Mumbai felt the tremors of the bulldozers but it's a tiny fraction compared to the slum population.
Going up the class ladder, the BMC's demolition drive appears to have lost steam. Most of the 30-odd plush bungalows on the idyllic Madh-Marve beaches that were served demolition notices for illegal construction managed to get a stay. Officials reveal the legal departments in the corporation and state government have been particularly lackadaisical in getting the court stays vacated. Then, there is a clutch of high-rise buildings across the city with illegal floors. The demolition process has been quite tardy—either notices have not been served on these buildings or notices haven't been followed up. And then there is the list of 154 high-rise apartment complexes where builders have violated the floor space index (FSI) allotted to them.

Tsunami-Like Devastation Hits Mumbai Slum Dwellers

2005-01-30T17:19:00.000+01:00

by Sandhya Srinivasan
[Inter Press Service, January 30, 2005]

MUMBAI, India, Jan 30 (IPS) - The scene left behind once the bulldozers had plowed through the slums, here, resembled the devastation wrought by last month's Indian Ocean tsunami. The slum dwellers were not forewarned and they just ran, grabbing anything they could save from the destruction - a schoolbag here, a cooking pot there.

When he visited ground zero on Jan. 17, Miloon Kothari, the independent special rapporteur on adequate housing for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, described it as the ''most brutal demolition drive in recent times.''
Some 300,000 people in Mumbai, including up to 100,000 children, have been made homeless by the drive against the slums that had become accepted as a feature of this port city -- regarded as the financial capital of India.
More than 50 percent of Mumbai's 12.5 million inhabitants live in slums and pavement dwellings spread all over the metropolis. Slum communities occupy about 10 per cent of the city land.
When Mumbai hosted the World Social Forum (WSF), in January 2004, row upon row of squalid slums reaching right up to the international airport served to give visitors a ready view of India's glaring disparities.
Much was then was said and written about how globalisation and development projects were widening those disparities and killing off livelihoods in India's vast rural hinterland.
This was forcing an endless stream of farmers and impoverished rural folk to the cities in search of jobs. Many were willing to do anything just to earn a pittance in order to survive.
But, a year later, the authorities have found a quick and simple solution: demolish the slums ruthlessly and like the tsunami, give no warning to the victims.
Nobody is holding fund-raising concerts for this colossal man-made tragedy. Instead, the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) has requested the chief electoral officer to delete from the voters' list the names of those slum dwellers whose illegal shanties had been razed.
According to BMC estimates, some 70,000 families have been evicted so far. ''If the BMC can prove it, we are looking at more than 100,000 people losing their right to vote,'' said an official.
The demolitions, which started early December, are being carried out to make way for a 3.1 billion rupee (71 million U.S. dollar) development project announced by state Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to ''turn Mumbai into another Shanghai''.
Up to three million people will be made homeless if all shanties built after 1995 are actually demolished as announced.
''What is going on is a patent violation of human rights,'' said Hosbet Suresh, a retired Bombay High Court judge and a panel member of the Indian People's Tribunal that is examining the demolitions.
''The government may need the land but India is a signatory to the 1993 United Nations Resolution on Human Rights. Under international humanitarian law they can't demolish people's homes without giving them alternate accommodation,'' Suresh told IPS.
The former judge said the cut-off date was fundamentally wrong. ''It only implies that rich people can come and stay here, and the poor must stay out.''
Early this month, an army of municipality employees used bulldozers and dumper vans to demolish more than 75,000 shanties in order to clear more than 350 acres of prime land, with heavy police protection.
Cleared areas are being fenced off by barbed wire and guards stationed to prevent reoccupation, even as the homeless linger outside with nowhere else to go.
In response to criticism that the poor were being targeted, the BMC carried out some token demolitions of illegal extensions constructed by a few up market restaurants but owners of expensive real estate managed to get temporary stay orders from the courts.
Authorised slums have been demolished, as have official rehabilitation settlements, such as the homes of 6,000 victims of the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots.
In one area, families had documentation that they were settled in the area in 1994 by dalit (India's 'untouchable' caste) leader Ramdas Athavale of the Republican Party of India.
Slum dwellers are particularly furious because Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh's Congress Party government came to power, last May, on the promise that all huts built before 2000 would be regularised.
''This government came into power on our votes - they have destroyed our houses, let them give our votes back,'' said Kaushalaya, a social worker from Shehar Vikas Manch relief group, at a public hearing on the demolitions.
According to Amrita Goswami of Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action, an NGO working with slum dwellers, more than 39,000 of the 42,000 demolished huts were built between 1995 and 2000.
Indeed, it is now evident that slum dwellers are not a powerful vote bank as suggested by some. Rather, they have been forced to vote for the politically powerful in order not to be evicted - only to find that promises were made to be broken later.
But the demolitions have been supported by a section of the middle class that views slum dwellers as criminals who deprive tax-paying citizens of public services. Some months ago, public interest litigation filed by eminent artists and writers argued that those settled on land illegally should be disenfranchised.
Prominent urban planning activist Darryl D' Monte has hit out against these cruel assertions.
''All those who criticise the homeless for being a drain on the city ought to remember how many services these hapless people perform for the well-off,'' said D'Monte, referring to the extensive household labour as well as the vendors, from whom the middle class purchase goods at an affordable price. (END/2005)

The Other Half: Mumbai's tragedy (Kalpana Sharma)

2005-01-23T17:35:00.000+01:00

Magazine / The Hindu
Jan 23, 2005

THE OTHER HALF

Mumbai's tragedy

KALPANA SHARMA

The reality of course is that a new Mumbai cannot be built on the corpses of its poor, the very people who hold up the city.

IN the much-talked about film "Amu" by Shonali Bose, the Censor Board decided to make some cuts. It cut some words spoken by widows from the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in New Delhi following Indira Gandhi's assassination by her personal bodyguards. The shot could not be edited. So the women mouth the words but no sound emerges. In many ways, the shot has been rendered more powerful. For the desire of the State even today, over 20 years after that entirely man-made tragedy, to stifle the truth of those killings speaks louder than the words of those women.

In Mumbai, the story of the anti-Sikh riots and the absence of justice is a reminder of the killings of 1992-93 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. As in 1984, the police and politicians were complicit. And as then, neither police nor politicians have been booked for their crimes of omission and commission. The irony is further compounded by the fact that Mumbai has been chosen as the place to try two important cases from the more recent Gujarat killings of 2002 where, once again, the role of the police and of politicians was central.

Part of contemporary history

These tragedies are a part of our contemporary history. They cannot and should not be forgotten. But every day there are other tragedies in many of our cities that we virtually erase by not even recognising them. One such has occurred in Mumbai even as we grieved for the thousands who died in the tsunami. For while the latter was an unexpected natural disaster, Mumbai has witnessed an unnatural "tsunami", one that has flattened thousands of homes and left an estimated two lakh people homeless.

Made homeless

Maniabai Dahade, an old woman of indeterminate age from a slum in northeast Mumbai, spoke in a quivering voice at a public hearing last week. She said, "I stood with a flag in my hand to stop the bulldozers but they did not stop." She is just one of the growing number of people who are homeless thanks to earthmovers and bulldozers of Mumbai's Municipal Corporation.

In this massacre of the homes of thousands of poor people, the politicians have been complicit, politicians of all hues. They have dangled the promise of security of tenure to the poor while condoning the destruction of their shelters. While those in power claim helplessness, those out of power wait for an opportunity to exploit the justifiable anger of these poor people. Neither is really interested in finding a solution to the problem.

The middle class argue that these slum dwellers live in hovels that cannot be called "homes", that these structures are "illegal" and, therefore, deserve to be demolished and that if these people are thereby rendered homeless, they should just pack their bags and go back to their villages. They forget that even the smallest of spaces becomes a home when it is filled with memories and dreams of the people who inhabit them.

For the poor slum dweller, the 60 sq. ft hovel is a home. Those who have had their homes demolished in the recent war against slums in Mumbai, tell you how they built their huts in a swamp, how they filled up the land with construction debris and how, in the end, they had a house that was their home. Said Kaserbai Wankhade from Maharashtra Nagar in Mankhurd, "I had a very nice home. I feel like crying." She works as a domestic, has lived in Mumbai since her childhood and has nowhere to go. Yet today, she is one of those who is told that there is no place for her in this city.

The voices of these women, and others like them, have been silenced not by the Censor, as in "Amu", but by an insensitive public that has come to accept violations of poor people's rights as routine. There is no outrage. On the contrary, there is considerable support for the demolishers. Finally, the government is getting its act together, think a good number of Mumbai's upper crust. This is the only way Mumbai can become another Shanghai, another world-class city that will bring investors flocking from all over the world.

Not just about `rights'

The reality of course is that a new Mumbai cannot be built on the corpses of its poor, the very people who hold up the city. The issue is not simply the "rights" of the poor but the duties of the government. For decades now, Mumbai's urban poor have been duped into believing that something will be done for them. Successive governments have promised houses and facilities while fixing a magical "cut-off" date. Anyone who falls within this date, decided arbitrarily without any logic, is promised the moon. Those outside the circle are told to wait patiently. In time the "cut-off" date will change, and another swathe of the poor will come within the magic circle.

By doing this, successive governments have wormed out of the urgent need to devise a housing policy that will produce affordable houses for the poor. They have refused to tackle land ownership or land-use patterns. They have justified unworkable laws like the antiquated Rent Control Act that has ruined the city's rental housing stock. They have allowed private builders to flout all laws and build for the rich and the loaded.

And under the benign gaze of such governments, the poor have filled up marshland, resurfaced uneven land, all with their own labour, and built their homes. Only to find that the State is not permanently benign. Right now, it has decided that regardless of its promises, it wants at least some poor people out. There is no offer of even a basic humanitarian alternative for these thousands of people turned out of their homes.

For such "man-made tsunamis", there is no sympathy, no concerts, no appeals for funds. "We are illiterate but don't want to keep our children illiterate. Just as you have a right to live, so do we who are poor. People should get the right to shelter," said an impassioned Kadvi Wagri, another one of the growing stream of homeless in Mumbai. These voices should not be silenced.

Ambujwadi 2: Cut You Off (Dilip D'Souza)

2005-01-22T17:35:00.000+01:00

Housing: Demolition Drive (Editorial, EPW)

2005-01-22T17:34:00.001+01:00

Economic and Political Weekly
January 22, 2005
Editorial

Housing: Demolition Drive

It took Maharashtra's Democratic Front government barely a few weeks after an unexpected election victory to renege on a vital poll promise. In its campaign run-up, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance had promised to regularise slums that dated up to 2000, as against the earlier earmarked date of 1995. However, a spate of slum demolitions began from December 8 onwards as the government set itself to reclaiming nearly 306 acres of land, clearing over 70,000 shanties in the process and rendering over three lakh homeless.

In its efforts to initiate Mumbai's metamorphosis into a new Shanghai, not only have several acres of land been cleared, proposals to implement extensive infrastructure projects and upgrade the city's severely stretched transport network are being speedily pushed through. While the World Bank has expressed its willingness to finance Mumbai-specific projects through a $1 billion loan assistance, the state is expected to raise over Rs 6,000 crore from the market to finance its development projects. Strangely, the business plan will be overseen by a group of five bank officials, business leaders and bureaucrats from Maharashtra. There is no representation from the people, who, constituting almost 62 per cent of the city's population, will form vast sections of the displaced once this makeover plan gets underway.

As with the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance that preceded it, the DF government's attitude towards the builder lobby has been marked by a similar laxity. Recent months have seen substantial revisions made to the mill development plans, as land allotted for recreational purposes and affordable public housing have been progressively reduced. Civic groups such as Bombay First have also proposed a scrapping of the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCRA) to free land for slum redevelopment needs. As precedents go, it is the builders who will reap full advantage of such relaxation of rules. Slums take up just 12.85 per cent of Mumbai's land, but this fraction of the city's land is real estate said to be worth Rs 80,000 crore.

Any solution that links beautification and redevelopment with the bulldozing away of slums appears simplistic. Migrants have been responsible for much of the city's dynamism; most migrant slum dwellers also provide much of the cheap informal labour that sustains the city. The government admits that it does not really have plans of rehabilitating the evicted. The Indian Tribunal on Human Right and Environment has suggested that slum dwellers, to ease to some extent the disruption in their lives, be allowed to remain until alternate sites are provided, and the constitution of a broadly representative (that is, no builders) committee, to ascertain the 'true' reasons behind the demolitions. It appears that the move to also target illegal construction of high-rises in the more expensive locations of the city is an attempt to appease the NCP. The NCP, with an eye on 2007's civic elections, has been wooing the slum votebank to wrest control of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation from the Shiv Sena. Civic groups have also warned that ad hoc demolitions could threaten the social fabric of the city, as political heat can be stirred up, always and easily, by vested interests. Proposals that do exist on constructing affordable housing for the urban poor, complete with adequate recreational space, have gathered dust over the years. On the other hand, groups such as the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) have succeeded in involving women's groups in slum areas to bring about a qualitative improvement in civic amenities.

As with Delhi a few years back when slum dwellers were evicted to beautify the city, the state government appears to have forgotten its responsibilities towards most of its citizens. The Supreme Court in its Shantistar Builders (1990) and Chameli Singh (1996) judgments had ruled that housing constituted a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution ? the right to life. The court had held that the right to housing includes adequate living spaces, decent structures and clean surroundings. In a later judgment in 1997, the apex court specified that it was the state's duty to construct houses at reasonable rates and make them easily accessible to the poor. 'The state has the constitutional duty to provide shelter to make the right to life meaningful'. But governments all over have neglected to provide for this right, at least not to the poor.

Mumbai's demolition marathon (Kalpana Sharma)

2005-01-22T17:34:00.000+01:00

The Hindu
January 22, 2005

Mumbai's demolition marathon

By Kalpana Sharma

While the Government can have a tough policy on structures built illegally on public lands, it cannot have the same attitude towards the people living in those structures.

EVEN AS one half of Mumbai celebrates a special festival and the media applauds the successful Mumbai marathon, a tragedy has been unfolding that affects the other half of the city, the poorer half. In the course of eight weeks, over 60,000 slum houses have been razed to the ground rendering an estimated two lakh to three lakh people homeless. This is a part of the joint strategy by Mumbai's municipal corporation and the State Government to send out a message that "illegal" encroachers will not be tolerated any more. In reality, the only people not being tolerated are the very poor.

The demolitions are not just a gross violation of basic human rights, they illustrate the absence of a workable housing policy for the urban poor. Indeed, demolitions have become a substitute for a housing policy.

Mumbai is facing a genuine crisis. A city of commerce and enterprise, it has always been a magnet for those looking for work not only in Maharashtra but also from other parts of India. But while in the pre-Independence years this much needed labour to service the city could be absorbed and even housed, since Independence there has been no clear policy to deal with housing for the working class and the poor. Over time, vacant land has been encroached, marshland has been reclaimed and the homeless have occupied pavements, empty strips along railway lines and water pipes. Today, close to 60 per cent of the city's population of 12 million lives in these slums. By any measure, this situation cannot be allowed to continue.

Instead of getting to the bottom of the problem, which is that of finding ways to increase the affordable housing stock in the city, successive governments have resorted to piecemeal solutions. The most popular has been to set a "cut-off" date — that is a date after which no encroachment on public or private land will be tolerated. Except that the Government has been selectively tolerant even as this "cut-off" date has edged forward and now stands at January 1, 1995. The parties that form the present State Government in Maharashtra, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, promised that this date would be further extended up to 2000. But having won the election and formed the Government, they have hastily backtracked.

The "cut-off" date essentially means that the Government will not be responsible for people who have encroached on land after that date. Those who can establish that they set up house before that date are entitled to either alternative accommodation, free of charge, if that land is needed for any other public purpose or can bring in a developer to construct formal housing on that land. This was part of the Slum Redevelopment Scheme (SRS) brought in by the Maharashtra Government in 1998. It was premised on the recognition that slum dwellers had invested in developing the land and the structures. So the "free" house was notional as it was essentially to compensate for their labour in making the land on which the slum stands habitable. In any case, once the slum dwellers moved into their "free" house, they had to pay charges to the housing society. So the security of tenure came at a price.

On paper, the Government's stand on a cut-off date might sound reasonable if you argue that it is not the job of governments to provide houses for everyone. But in reality it translates into denying people basic rights just because they are poor. For while the Government can have a tough policy on structures built illegally on public lands, it cannot have the same attitude towards the people living in those structures. These are citizens of this country. They cannot be pushed out on the street, or forced to "return" to their so-called native place just because there is work available but nowhere to live in the city.

What is worse is the manner in which the demolitions occur. In the past, the demolition squad would come with sticks and axes and manually break down the structure. This gave the "encroacher" the time to save his or her belongings. Today, there is no such luxury. Bulldozers and earthmovers appear overnight aided by the police. Within a few hours, structures that have been built by the poor incrementally over years are flattened. There is little time to save anything. Sometimes even the papers that would establish that the hutment existed before the cut-off date are flattened with the structure.

The plots where the demolitions took place are being policed and slum dwellers say that even temporary structures, built with bamboo poles and plastic sheets, are being pulled down. Thousands of children have not been able to attend school because of the demolitions, parents are afraid to go to work and leave what little they have salvaged of their belongings in the open, and old people are suffering the cold nights without a roof over their heads.

Demolitions, of course, are not new to the urban poor. Go to any slum in the city and you will hear stories of how many times houses have been demolished and how many times people have been forced to rebuild on the same spot. The difference is that each time this happens, they have to pay more to the local officials.

The reason this spate of demolitions is particularly unacceptable is because of the complete absence of a plan about what to do. State Home Minister R. R. Patil was quoted in a newspaper saying, "When we launched the (demolition) drive, we never thought of their rehabilitation. Legally speaking, that is not the responsibility of the government."

The statement underlines the cavalier attitude of the State Government towards the urban poor, the very people whose votes are sought before an election and who are promised security of tenure. While "legally" the Government can claim it is not responsible to resettle those it has displaced, can it really turn its back on them. And what about the hundreds of acres of land ostensibly freed by the demolitions? At last count, over 300 acres have apparently fallen vacant, as slum settlements have been demolished in the northern and north-eastern suburbs of the city. The Government, however, has not announced what it plans to do with these lands. The reason they were encroached upon in the first place was precisely because the Government failed to develop them.

The only policy that can be considered a housing policy of sorts is the Slum Redevelopment Scheme. It has worked indifferently and has nowhere near achieved its target of rehousing 40 lakh slum dwellers. But at the very least it represents an approach towards housing the homeless.

The other so-called plan on the horizon is one devised by the private consulting firm McKinsey for Bombay First, an organisation representing the city's corporate sector. The report "Vision Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a world-class city," suggests constructing Special Housing Zones on the salt-pan lands in the north of Mumbai with 300,000 housing units for slum dwellers. They would have to pay between Rs.750 and Rs.1000 a month in addition to regular taxes. There is no plan to ensure that these lands will be made accessible to the livelihood sources of these poor people. Nor have ecological considerations been taken into account. Against the background of the tsunami tragedy, the importance of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules cannot be over-emphasised for in many areas the violation of these rules exacerbated the impact of the killer waves.

What we are seeing in Mumbai today is the culmination of decades of mismatch between precept and practice. Instead what we need is a step-by-step approach that places housing at the centre of all urban development policies. Changes are needed in antiquated laws that have stifled the growth of affordable rental housing. Vast lands in the heart of Mumbai's former textile mill area are waiting to be developed in an equitable and just manner. They would be ideal for low-cost rental housing. Instead, they are becoming home to shopping malls and high-end housing.

In the mid-1980s, the idea of sites and services to house the poor had been tried. This involved marking out plots in land that is provided with basic infrastructure by the state. The actual type of construction is left to the family. If in addition financial services are designed to help the urban poor build and develop such housing, we might arrive at a more sustainable model for housing the poor.

A "world-class" city cannot emerge if half the citizens of Mumbai are denied their rights. The problems are serious and complex. But surely the solutions do not lie in such a callous approach towards the very people who service the city.
o o o o

Gulf News Published: 5/1/2005, 06:46 (UAE)

Demolitions leave thousands homeless

Reuters
Mumbai : Recent slum demolitions in Mumbai have left tens of thousands of people without a home as the government tries to free up valuable space for development in India's crowded financial capital.

Local officials said that more than 45,000 shanties had been demolished in just over three weeks as police and state workers used earthmovers and bulldozers to clear 200 acres of illegally occupied government land.

The demolition comes as the state is rolling out an ambitious 260-billion-rupee (Dh21.6 billion) infrastructure plan to "turn Mumbai into Shanghai", with better roads and public transport and more green spaces.

Among the more than 200,000 people displaced, many are angry with the government for reneging on an election promise and excluding them from its grand plan for the city.

"This is an inhuman way to deal with the poorest of the poor," said Jockin Arputham, president of the National Slum Dwellers' Federation. "The government had falsely assured them and has not provided an alternative. Where will these people go?"

Distraught families have put up tents near where their flimsy tin and tarpaulin dwellings have been smashed, while others have started building again on the same spot with material salvaged from the wreckage. Others have simply moved to another slum.

More than half the city's 17 million people live in slums or on pavements below gleaming high-rises. Apartments are largely unaffordable for the many poor rural migrants seeking work in the wealthy commercial centre of Mumbai.

The Maharashtra state government said last month all slums built since 1995 would have to go. Of the estimated half a million shanties in the city, nearly 80 per cent are on municipal and government-owned land and pose a challenge to development plans.

"They have to leave Mumbai as they are staying on government land illegally," said Prakash Patil, the assistant municipal commissioner, admitting that demolition is expensive and not always effective, as shanties often reappear just as fast.

"We need to upgrade our slums, not demolish them, and develop the rest of the state, so we can stem the flow of migrants," said Sharit Bhowmik, a sociology professor at University of Mumbai, who helped draft a national policy on urban development.

"We don't need a Shanghai, just a liveable city for all."

'93 riot victims' homes demolished

2005-01-19T17:38:00.000+01:00

Two lakh deserted to turn Mumbai into Shanghai

2005-01-04T17:32:00.000+01:00

Reuters : Tuesday, January 04

Two lakh deserted to turn Mumbai into Shanghai
URL: http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=40309

City organisations unite to protest slum demolitions

2004-12-31T17:30:00.000+01:00

Indian Express, India - Dec 31, 2004
City organisations unite to protest slum demolitions