Slumming it in Mumbai

You only need to drive into Mumbai from the international airport to realise that the Maharashtra government8217;s current campaign to clea...

You only need to drive into Mumbai from the international airport to realise that the Maharashtra government8217;s current campaign to clean up the city is decades overdue. If you arrive at some ungodly, pre-dawn hour, as most international flights do, there is the blessing of not having to crawl in at bullock-cart pace in what feels like an unending traffic jam but there are other delights like the uncollected garbage. Bleary-eyed and travel weary you drive through your first Indian bazaar and notice that not only are the municipal bins overflowing with garbage but it appears to flow through the narrow streets like a rivulet and if you open the window for your first whiff of 8216;8216;incredible India8217;8217; you are assailed by a stench so overpowering it travels with you. Then, you hit the highway and notice people living in hovels along the sides of it. They appear oblivious to the open drains and the rats that scuttle between the hovels and the garbage but by this time you know that if this is India8217;s commercial capital it cannot possibly be an economic superpower. And, this is only the beginning.

A few minutes later begins your slum tour. On your left, slums spread all the way to the runway on which you landed and when you get off the highway to turn into the city you drive past Dharavi, famous for being the largest slum in Asia, jewel in the crown of a city that has been accurately described as the most expensive slum in the world. So, anyone who does not support the Maharashtra government8217;s drive to clean up the city would have to be nuts. My problem is that I do not see it going much further than earlier campaigns of this kind because it appears to be happening without method or planning.

In an exercise of this kind there have to be demolition men, builders and planners not just demolition men. So far it looks as if the Chief Minister only has the demolishers so he could end up being defeated just as Jagmohan was by Delhi and Khairnar was by Mumbai when it was still Bombay. The reason why I fear that Vilasrao Deshmukh will end up defeated by the city he seeks to improve is because he appears not to have noticed that you cannot work without a masterplan that takes cognizance of the needs of a modern city. Most masterplans for Indian cities were devised decades ago by people who had no idea of these needs and absolutely no idea of the number of people who were going to flock in from the villages everyday in search of a living.

If Maharashtra8217;s chief minister has a plan he has kept it a secret. What does he intend to do to house the people whose slum homes he is in the process of demolishing? Are they going to be ordered to leave Mumbai or is the Maharashtra government going to invest in massive amounts of low-cost housing? Is he aware that the reason why more than half the citizens of Mumbai live in slums is because there is no low-cost housing? Is he aware that it is because of stupid rent control and urban land ceiling laws that a real estate market never developed and that mafiosi stepped in where there should have been respectable businessmen?

The reason why we need to get it right in Mumbai is because there are already more than thirty Indian cities that have a population of more than a million and, sadly, nearly all of them look like slums. For those of us who can remember Indian cities that were once beautiful, it has been even sadder to have watched them being destroyed by government-sponsored city planners of such abysmal quality they should not have been allowed to build a public toilet. Speaking of which you only need to see the placement of these toilets to know that they should not even have been allowed to build these. In Mumbai they have been positioned on promenades along the sea that should have beautiful cafes and parks and in villages I have seen them placed in the middle of the village square where in more idyllic times men with hookahs gossiped over tea and newspapers.

Our political leaders have a long and impressive record of not seeing a disaster till it hits them in the face and so they have not noticed that urbanisation is a disaster that is already happening. If Mumbai looks bad you only need to drive through the featureless ugliness of small town India to see that it is a beautiful city compared to the small towns that have come up in more recent times.

These are towns without a centre, without public buildings of any beauty, without parks, without sanitation, without drainage, without anything that would qualify them to be described as anything but slums. In earlier times, when central planning ordained that only PWD engineers were qualified to design towns and cities, this might have been excusable but today, when we have some of the finest architects in the world, there can be no excuse. Except, perhaps, that eternal Indian reality: the absence of governance. Cities and towns need to govern themselves. Citizens need to have more say in what happens to their city. Will this ever happen? No, not in the foreseeable decades so let us wish the Maharashtra chief minister well because if he succeeds in Mumbai we might begin the process of reversing the disaster that currently stares us in the face.

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