Summing up your words, Mr CM, ‘slum it’

Notice the obfuscation? The absence of detail or deadline? If there is someone who reads English living in a slum in Mumbai I urge you towards public interest litigation to demand those ‘‘houses with all comforts and cares’’.

The other solution to Mumbai’s problems is for the CM to move from Malabar Hill to Dharavi to understand what life is like for that half of this city’s population he claims to care so much about. What right does he have to live, at taxpayers’ expense, in a fancy bungalow on Malabar Hill if he cannot provide ordinary citizens with affordable housing? What right do his ministers have to live in bungalows in the best part of the city, when housing is so scarce that billionaires can barely afford apartments?

Besides, what better way to discover how the ‘common man’ lives. ‘Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath’ was the winning slogan in the last general election, and it’s time the party put its money where its big mouth is.

Nowhere is life more grim than in the slums of Mumbai. Living conditions are abysmal in our villages but at least there are green fields and clean air. If you grow up in a Mumbai slum you grow up with poisonous air and water so filthy that even the poor buy it in plastic bottles. You grow up with the stench of open sewers and blocked drains and if you are lucky enough to find yourself a home it is likely to be a windowless hovel with a dirt floor and neither electricity nor running water. I know a family that has lived on a pavement near Marine Drive for 40 years and when I asked why they did not find themselves a roof over their heads in a slum they said they could not afford to pay the Rs 3 lakh pagdi.

After spending a morning in a Chembur slum I stopped urging them anyway because I realised that life on a Mumbai pavement was better quality than life in a Chembur hovel.

The one I spent the morning in was built on the edge of a sewer and sewage water had seeped into its floor. It was on this floor the family slept and cooked and children played. Perhaps, it is to a slum such as this that the CM should move because for sure then municipal officials will appear in droves to clean out the toilets and unblock the drains. He could then move on to the next slum so that it can be cleaned up as well and by the next election we could well have a slum-less Mumbai.

Meanwhile, here is a little something for Maharashtra’s CM to chew on. In his excellent new book, Maximum City, Suketu Mehta writes, ‘‘Some parts of central Bombay have a population density of one million people per square mile. This is the highest number of individuals massed together at any spot in the world. They are not equally dispersed across the island. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are crowded into just 5 per cent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolise the 95 per cent.’’

write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com