Compare what has occurred in Mumbai with evictions and homelessness in Kenya or Mexico City or New Delhi. Certainly, in terms of both the sheer numbers of poor people affected and the brutality of the demolitions, this qualifies as amongst the worst cases of forced evictions anywhere in the world—90,000 shanties torn down. Forget resettlement, even rules now accepted globally on the process of evictions have been thrown overboard—there’s no notice, no consultation with the affected, evictions take place on Sundays, on religious days, on festival days, people’s belongings are set on fire after the evictions, women are assaulted, bulldozers have demolished homes when people were still inside. This manner of behaviour from any elected government, or any government, violates a range of human rights, including the right to adequate housing. The McKinsey report that is the intellectual basis for the Vision Mumbai plans of the Chief Minister is itself fundamentally flawed, based as it is on the tragically simplistic notion that indices such as ‘growth’ in monetary terms determine the health and future of a city—no matter what the social cost. This is the brutalised neo-liberal logic that is spreading like wildfire (razing millions of poor people’s dwellings along the way) across the world. The current drive to demolish the homes of the vast majority of Mumbai’s slum-dwellers makes the city a particularly devastating example of this logic at play. The demolitions are creating a true apartheid city with a clear demarcation of where the rich and the poor live. For a city with the type of communal history that Mumbai has lived through, any development plans involving such large-scale dislocations need to be that much more carefully thought out. But where there are already lines of division between ethnic classes in some zones, what’s now being added is another division along the lines of income—only those can stay in the ‘expensive’ parts of the city that can afford to buy, to save, to have collateral, to speculate in crores. Everyone else will be forced to live far away. The demolitions appear to be a very clear plan involving politicians, the real-estate lobby and the land mafia, to create playgrounds for the rich. Because, in the cold logic of the market, the land on which the poor now live is worth crores. The poor are standing in the way of enormous profits to be made through land speculation—among the highest in the world in Mumbai—and if that helps build a so-called world-class city, well who cares for the poor? Nobody seems to be looking at the social and psychological impacts of such a clear case of dispossession. Is anyone looking at the impact on specific groups—on women, on children, on Dalits? In fact, the brazen confidence the CM displays is astonishing, including openly declaring that he has the support of the PM for this so-called Shanghai plan. I wonder if the PM knows what he has signed up for. Because the process of development in Shanghai was brutal, built on the backs of thousands of poor people’s homes. Those who objected to the evictions were arrested, some sent to labour camps. Today you don’t see Shanghai’s poor. Just like in Cleveland or Chicago—some of the other models being offered by the Vision Mumbai people. The Afro-American population here lives in the poorest areas, defining a clear racial divide, while public housing is systematically demolished, housing subsidies for the poor are gradually withdrawn and homelessness, segregation and ghettoisation increase. Maybe Shanghai looks good from the narrow economic perspective. But that’s exactly what is wrong. It’s a shortsighted outlook, good only from the economic perspective. So you may get foreign investors, but the moment you have social conflict, breakdown in infrastructure, these investors will fly away—they have dozens of other options. The ruthless logic of economic globalisation has created a competition amongst cities that has been at the detriment of the poor. Is this the trap that Mumbai wants to fall into? Is it too late to redeem Mumbai, where people of all income groups have the right to what their city has to offer? The main problem with Mumbai’s development plans is the absence of a judicious mix of public housing with lower rent costs, cooperative housing, micro-finance, an option where the poor can contribute partly even where there is a subsidy and a socially sensitive use of legislations that are available, such as the Land Ceiling Act. But for all that to happen at a scale that benefits the majority of slum-dwellers, Mumbai’s land mafia has to be broken. At the same time, the problem of lack of housing and land rights for the poor in urban and rural India has to be solved at both ends. There should be a consultation between the Union and state governments for holistic rural development and planning. This is perhaps a good chance for the new governments to attempt to reverse decades of ‘urban bias’ that has dictated our developmental priorities. It is a good opportunity to start a corrective process to reverse the failure of governance since Independence, which has created the enormous problem of slums in India in the first place. The demand by the deputy CM for all evicted slum-dwellers to go back to their villages is a completely unreasonable demand and violates people’s constitutional right to reside and settle anywhere in the country. Even if you were able to send some of Mumbai’s slum-dwellers back home, the problem of lack of adequate housing would still be immense. And a solution is necessary. This solution has to be based on a human rights approach that meets the needs of the vulnerable first, that respects the views of all women, men and youth in the city and includes their participation in the planning process. The writer is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. He visited the debris of many Mumbai slums in January as member of an independent tribunal on human rights. He lives and works in New Delhi
