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Journalism of Courage
Or in a Mumbai slum.
That8217;s why, over three decades after a slum mitigation law was enacted, and trailed by an extended joint family of plans and schemes, the city8217;s teeming shanty towns have swollen several times over. From 1.3 million people in 1971, they now house an estimated 7 million people, a vigorous 60 per cent of Mumbaiites.
In 1995, a committee under former chief secretary Dinesh Afzalpurkar reported that just about six per cent of the city8217;s land was occupied by slums. Even if that has doubled, thanks to an opportune collusion with civic officials, it8217;s not a large footprint on Mumbai. In fact, it8217;s a fraction really, considering that 60 per cent of the megacity8217;s people live, compressed and twisted, on 12 per cent of its land.
Now perform some nifty arithmetic, suggests urban planner, architect and former member of the state8217;s housing board Chandrashekhar Prabhu: 12 per cent of the city8217;s 437 sq km area is about 50 sq km of slums. Account for an FSI of 2.5 and at a 8216;8216;very conservative8217;8217; estimate of Rs 2,000 per sq foot, and the 14 lakh tin-and-tarpaulin homes mutate into a real estate goldmine valued at Rs 26,90,97,74,000. Or Rs 2,690 crore.
LIVING ON GOLD
THEY know. That8217;s why, when Kakasaheb Shankar Tone bought a 10ft x 12ft home along a marsh in desolate Mankhurd, he ensured he got his papers in order. 8216;8216;Right side room belongs to Meghaji Tone, left side to Ramesh Kamble. Front is 12-foot galli, back 5-foot gutter/galli,8217;8217; drones the 8216;certificate8217; he displays as proof of ownership.
Tone, an autorickshaw driver, lived in a nearby slum before moving to Maharashtra Nagar, a 20-acre marshy sprawl, in 2004. In the absence of a sale deed, he picked up a letter you8217;ll find in practically every Mumbai slum household8212;a standardised affidavit filed in court, describing precisely the hut8217;s location and stating that it was passing from one resident to the next.
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There8217;s no mention of a cash transaction, although the 8216;8216;rate8217;8217; in Maharashtra Nagar is about Rs 8,000-15,000, depending on how deep in the bottomless bog you8217;re willing to be entrenched. Literally.
The earlier owner, or perhaps the one before him, paid a slumlord who nobody will identify or who, in the case of settlements that are six or seven years old, has simply transferred dealings elsewhere.
8216;8216;It is foolproof,8217;8217; says Wahaidunissa Sheikh, a gaunt mother of six, in northwestern Malvani. 8216;8216;There are8212;were8212;10,000 households here. Can you check with each houseowner who he purchased from?8217;8217; asks the native of Allahabad, nursing an inflamed foot injury she sustained when her house fell.
Ambujwadi became the biggest shanty graveyard one windy December afternoon when a record 7,000 shanties fell to monster machines.
Rumour mills contend that one of Ambujwadi8217;s fosterfathers was arrested under the Maharashtra Prevention of Disruptive Activities of dangerous persons, slumlords, bootleggers and drug offenders Act8212;the draconian law allows suspects to be detained for a year without trial8212;but the local police say it8217;s too sensitive a matter to discuss.
Ambujwadi was a pariah, even among slums. Its large Pardhi population8212;the Pardhis are a denotified 8216;criminal8217; tribe8212;plus Malvani8217;s volatile communal equation and extensive unemployment means electricity and water never came calling.
The Sheikhs were among several eager families who paid Rs 3,000 each for an electricity meter but all that was before the December ides.
Still, not a single civic official without whose complicity large squatters8217; colonies could hardly have managed to survive and even acquire electricity and water connections was penalised, or even castigated.
The only action against slumlords in the abruptly-ended demolitions8212;they began on December 7 and slowed down in early February8212;was the arrest of a handful under MPDA. These history-sheeters, police say, located vacant plots, mostly marshy coastal areas, filled in truckfuls of debris and erected spindly bamboos to form neat little rectangles for sale.
As the settlement grew, an endless supply of construction rubble would be dumped into mudflats or mangroves. Tin and tarpaulin or brick and cement structures would replace the bamboos. Value-addition, slum-style.
A CITY8217;S DREAMERS
8216;8216;I MUST be having a dozen,8217;8217; giggles Mohammed Hameed about his nine children. 8216;8216;Not you, snotty,8217;8217; he mocks one of the younger girls running to investigate the camera. But they8217;re all snotty, really8212;the nearest healthpost for slumdwellers in Azad Mohalla, Wadala East, is in the neighbouring slum. And the carpenter who8217;s been jobless for a week doesn8217;t have money for doctors.
But that doesn8217;t bother him. The odds haven8217;t stopped his life from panning out the way it has: Coming to Mumbai nearly 35 years ago from Uttar Pradesh, he fell in love with Saira Bano, a Muslim girl from Jalna, Maharashtra, bought a ghar 20 years ago in Azad Mohalla and worked hard to get one daughter married. She now has a son, Shah Rukh Khan.
8216;8216;Sometimes Rs 300, sometimes nothing,8217;8217; Hameed says of his daily earnings. Of late, the naakas street junctions have been getting more and more crowded every morning, with hundreds of daily-wagers waiting to be picked up by contractors.
8216;8216;The maximum work for us would be in other slums,8217;8217; says Abdul Kalam, a mason at Kandivli8217;s Ekta Nagar slum. 8216;8216;The demolitions have made the market very tight.8217;8217; Kalam8212;8216;8216;what8217;s the use of sharing a name with the President?8217;8217;8212;doesn8217;t realise how profound his insight is.
The bulk of slum-dwellers work as construction labour, hawkers, painters, domestics and unskilled labour in the unorganised sector. In the post-demolition weeks, across the city8217;s slums, men and women scraped together the last of their savings, stayed home to look after whatever they8217;d salvaged and pulled children out of municipal schools to help find food, twigs, discarded tarpaulin sheets, bamboos, water or, in Ambujwadi, grubby mango kernel dumped by a food products company into the marsh, which was useful as fuel.
To gauge how they were affected by the demolition drive, consider this: In just the eastern suburbs, 22.5 per cent of children surveyed dropped out of school entirely post-December 7. According to Amrita Goswami, project convener of social organisation YUVA8217;s housing rights and basic services programme, the dropout rate in the island city was 18 per cent.
Hameed8217;s oldest daughter Farzana 12 left school to help look after the younger siblings. Dupatta firmly on her forehead, she now rolls out fragrant rotis in the 10ft x 12ft brick-and-tin home, washes clothes in the alleyway and chases the boys dozens of times up and down the metal stairs to the mezzanine.
THE SHELTERING SKY
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Growing: Slums and Plans for THEM
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8226; After an early post-Independence optimism that slums could simply be banished from Bombay, the Maharashtra Slum Areas Improvement, Clearance and Redevelopment Act was passed in 1971. Then began the Slum Improvement Programme, or the SIP, for a slum population of 1.3 million 8226; In 1976, an enumeration of slumdwellers was carried out in the census. There were 2.8 million people in 1,680 settlements 8226; Also in 1976, the Urban Land Ceiling Regulation Act was passed. Land could now be acquired by the government from private owners and used to build subsidised housing 8226; In the mid-1980s, a World Bank-aided Slum Upgradation Scheme was launched under the Bombay Urban Development Programme. The scheme involved giving slumdwellers in cooperative societies long-term security of tenure on their plots. Meanwhile, by 1983, the number of slumdwellers had risen to 4.3 million, across 1,900 slums. That was not counting a few lakh pavement dwellers. Story continues below this ad 8226; In 1995, a committee under former chief secretary Dinesh Afzalpurkar was set up to formulate a rehabilitation policy for slumdwellers. The result? The 1971 slum law was amended to enable the formation of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority SRA. A decade after lofty promises of rehabilitating 8 lakh shanties, the SRA has given occupation certificates to about 30,000 tenements 8226; In December 2000, the Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana was introduced by the Union government. Meanwhile, 60 per cent of Mumbai8217;s population lives in slums, some 7 million people |
LIKE Hameed, Mulla Mohammed Amin Karimbaksh 68 has a file-full of papers to prove he8217;s a legitimate citizen of Mumbai. But he has no home.
8216;8216;I came in 1981,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;But nothing worked for me.8217;8217; Nearly blind after a bout of measles as a three-year-old, Karimbaksh followed an older brother to Wadala from his native Bijnour. But years of tobacco, gutka and beedis left him a tuberculosis legacy8212;a rasping cough and a frailty that render him unhireable.
Still, here in Azad Mohalla8212;a slum that escaped the bulldozers because of its 8216;protected8217; status8212;there are neighbours who vote to give him the money from the post-Muharram auctions of goat hides. He8217;s called Mullaji here and neighbours helped him string up curtains in a 5ft x 6ft dead-end to fashion some privacy. 8216;8216;Back home, there8217;s nobody to help out, no hope,8217;8217; Karimbaksh says.
Like other slum colonies in the central suburbs, Azad Mohalla and its neighbouring Korba Mithagar, Sangam Nagar and Shanti Nagar are also home to tenanted residents, guests paying for mezzanine accommodation, groups of migrant labourers using dingy shanties as dormitories and home industries. If beaded jewellery and packaged foods are common, there are also potters8217; colonies, families raising poultry at home or goats in the alley8230;
8216;8216;We suffer the most when there8217;s no water,8217;8217; says Razia Bano of Shanti Nagar. In Azad Mohalla, as in other slums8212;8216;tolerated8217; or 8216;notified8217;, depending on their status vis-a-vis cut-off date 19958212;water is supplied either through a fickle standpost where the women line up steel pots and plastic cans to mark their position in a queue or through alley taps shared by 10-15 households.
In Ambujwadi, water was heaved out from the earth8217;s belly, from open groundwater wells that at least one child is believed to have fallen into on a post-demolition night8212;fatally.
A HOME ON LOAN
8216;8216;Toilet?8217;8217; asks a ragpicker now living under a plastic tent at Rafique Nagar, Govandi. 8216;8216;We go in the open.8217;8217; Ambujwadi, of course, never had toilets. Most protected slums have public toilets built by BMC or MHADA.
A survey commissioned by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in 2001 for the World Bank-partnered Slum Sanitation Project announced that 62 per cent of slumdwellers used public toilets. 8216;8216;The percentage of people to seats was shocking,8217;8217; says Sheela Patel, director of Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres SPARC, which is partnering the BMC in ramping up slum sanitation.
Three hundred and thirty-eight blocks were built in Phase 1 of the project, in three years. That8217;s 5,000 toilet seats. 8216;8216;It8217;s hugely successful8212;we8217;re handing over operation and maintenance to slumdwellers8217; organisations and they8217;re innovating with television sets inside, newspapers, ambulances outside,8217;8217; beams Kunte.
But another official adds the rider: Phase 2 is stuck because the Centre won8217;t forward the proposal, with scaled-up targets, to the World Bank.
Local politicking works systematically8212;the grassroots workers, the karyakartas with hopes of making it big in the party, promise everything from electricity to sanitation, some actually working hard for local corporators8217; victory at the next poll.
At Maharashtra Nagar, for example, every tenth house has a Congress worker. At the Vidhan Sabha election, senior Congress leaders like Gurudas Kamath and MLA Yusuf Abrahani promised regularisation of homes till 2000. But when the bulldozers came, a corporator8217;s 8216;8216;temporary election office8217;8217; fell too.
8216;8216;All politicians are welcome,8217;8217; says Rukmabai Chavan, a Pardhi living in the open expanse of Ambujwadi. They8217;re Republican Party of India supporters, loyally protecting the blue flag from bulldozers.
But there are pockets of support for all parties8212;8216;8216;because we all vote, especially when they promise to protect our homes,8217;8217; says Chavan.
The local politicians keep promising water and sanitation to the disillusioned Congressmen dotting Maharashtra Nagar, Ramdas Athavale8217;s Dalit supporters in Ambujwadi and Samajwadi loyalists in Rafique Nagar.
8216;8216;Doesn8217;t matter,8217;8217; says Rukmabai Chavan, at Ambujwadi. 8216;8216;Right now, we just want a home. That8217;s what we voted for.8217;8217;
