Two laws to spruce up Mumbai devastated it

That’s ironic, because nowhere on earth are the challenges of urban planning more challenging, nowhere are more people jammed into a square kilometre as in Mumbai: over 40,000. Contrast that with Seoul’s 16,391 and Hong Kong’s 6,254.

Much of the damage caused by the great flood of July 26, said experts, was a direct result of a cementing over of its land, a rash of building resulting in high-rises with chronic water, traffic, parking, sewage and drainage problems.

It will get much, much worse: Since last year, about 1,000 high-rises have been cleared by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

The anarchy has actually received legal sanction: by the deliberate and blatant undermining of the very two laws meant to decongest the city and upgrade its shabby looks.

However, Deshmukh warded off questions about the ill-planned development that worsened Mumbai’s floods. ‘‘These are long-term issues that we will certainly look into,’’ he told The Indian Express.

But don’t point a finger at Deshmukh alone.

The city’s richest MLA is the BJP’s Mangal Prabhat Lodha, a real-estate tycoon worth, according to his affidavit, Rs 8 crore. Lodha—who last October promised a crowd of voters angered by high-rise construction projects in strained South-Central Mumbai that he would ensure a citizen’s committee would clear all buildings—is now constructing buildings in tony Malabar Hill and Worli.

The week before the great flood, Sena leaders Manohar Joshi and Raj Thackeray bid Rs 421 crore for a five-acre plot to join the ranks of developers who’ve won record bids to purchase central Mumbai’s defunct textile-mill plots.

Where did the money come from? Thackeray’s cryptic answer: ‘‘Bank loans. Those who are in this industry know how these things operate.’’

Indeed they do. With flats in Mumbai’s downtown heart selling at between Rs 17,000 and Rs 26,000 per sq ft, money from land and construction has financed every party.

The ongoing constructions that today evoke such outrage among residents of South-Central Mumbai were cleared by BMC engineers under the controversial ‘‘builder-incentive’’ programmes to fund housing plans which the state claims it has no money to implement. So, at the heart of the mess are the two legal concessions to private developers: they get additional TDR (Transferable Development Rights) and higher FSI (Floor Area Ratio, introduced in the city’s 1964 Development Plan) in exchange for rehabilitating slums and tenants of Mumbai’s dilapidated buildings.

But as numerous official inquiries—and a spate of public interest litigation (PIL)—reveal, these laws have been systematically undermined by successive governments, none more guilty than Congress-led ones. Last October, the Bombay High Court stayed the spate of illegal construction under the guise of reconstructing dilapidated buildings. Developers were abusing the programme and securing additional FSI either by knocking down sound buildings or showing fake tenants.

In previous years, the court had noted how a Malabar Hill bungalow was demolished under this rule to build a 38-storey tower by showing fake tenants that included prolific architect Hafeez Contractor and his mother. But Contractor believes Mumbai’s rampant illegal development should not be read in simplistic black-and-white terms but instead is the market’s beleaguered response to Mumbai’s land supply bottleneck. ‘‘The population is clearly going to keep increasing,’’ he said. ‘‘So the only solution is to increase Mumbai’s FSI to 10 (currently from 1 to 1.33) like Seoul and Shanghai.’’

Contractor argued the additional FSI can fund upgradation of infrastructure, whose current dilapidated state is used to argue against more constructions while also solving Mumbai’s other great irony: ‘‘Poor quality housing with a sky-high price tag.’’

That irks civic groups arguing that the swift pace of private construction is hardly matched by investment in surrounding infrastructure, made clear by the floods.

Of course, much of Mumbai’s land wrangles have to do with the city’s unique peninsular location, allowing no room for expansion except northward, coupled with a population of at least 15 million—and growing. These have coalesced to create a problem that would challenge the most sensitive of urban planners.

But in a city where ‘land’ is as likely to be associated with ‘scam’ as with ‘scarcity’, Mumbai’s administrators have consistently avoided solutions to the city’s complex land debate.