For poorer or richer

By Kalpana Sharma

AS YOU drive into Mumbai, you are struck with the contrast between hoardings advertising dotcom companies and the slums below them. Indeed, in this age of connectivity, the distance between virtual reality and reality is nowhere more apparent than in Mumbai. While one half of the population of the city dreams of being ``connected'', the other half continues to remain disconnected. Regardless of the worlds framed on our computer screens, even the wealthiest of Mumbai's denizens cannot ignore the fact that over half the city lives in sub-standard housing or in slums.

Other cities too face similar problems. In New Delhi, four former Prime Ministers have drawn attention to the plight of slums that are located along railway lines. In Mumbai, these slums are subject of a court case where a citizens' group has filed a Public Interest Litigation demanding that the Railways clear its land of slums. This was in response to incidents of stone- throwing where some people travelling on Mumbai's packed suburban trains were grievously injured. It was assumed that the people living along the tracks threw the stones although there was no proof. And in Chennai the issue of relocating slum-dwellers on the banks of the Cooum has been in the news.

Regardless of whether it is a person of the eminence of a former Prime Minister such as Mr. V. P. Singh who draws attention to the existence of millions of people living in sub-human conditions, or middle-class activists who move courts because they are concerned about their rights, the issue is one that needs to be addressed sensibly - by Government, citizens' groups and the media.

In the history of urban planning, low-cost housing has always been the lowest priority. It was assumed that if people came into the city looking for a livelihood they would somehow survive. They did - by squatting on every piece of vacant land available, whether it was an open plot, a pavement or land along a railway line. A strategy of incrementally recognising this reality, and then dealing with it in fits and starts has now created the monster that is the urban slum. And as it stares everyone in the face, the reality should sink in: that cities must plan to house their poor.

The few examples of success that exist are those where the affected communities have taken their own initiative to save for their housing, learnt how to design and build houses, and where the state has respected their initiative and given them the land to build. Where housing efforts have failed are either where the state has decided where and how poor people should live and constructed row upon row of sub-standard inappropriate housing, or schemes where it has relied too greatly on market forces being able to generate the finances to underwrite housing for the poor. The issues around housing have not changed since the 1980s - questions of availability of vacant land, of housing finance, of appropriate cheap housing - only the proportions have grown. What has changed, however, is the attitude of the middle class living in cities. In the 1980s, for instance, when pavement dwellers were herded out of their skimpy shelters at the height of the monsoon and left outside the city of Mumbai to make their way to their ``native place'', there was considerable outrage. A PIL was filed, the famous Pavement Dwellers' case, and even the usually unsympathetic middle class acknowledged that this was not the way to deal with the problem.

In the year 2000, a similar process of demolition was carried out by the Railways on shelters that had stood undisturbed - some for over two decades - and there was not a whisper of sympathy from Mumbai's middle class. What has changed in these last two decades when the objective conditions of prosperity for some and poverty for the many have remained the same?

Mumbai is one of those cities where few can ignore the presence of poverty. Even the poshest localities have a neighbourhood slum. The people who live in those slums service these middle class neighbourhoods. Yet, while swearing by the convenience of having domestic help within shouting range, the rich swear at the people working for them for living in slums and ``spoiling'' their neighbourhood. And like much of industry in Mumbai, most of which has now been moved out of the island city, neither set of employers is willing to shoulder the responsibility of housing those who work for them.

An increasingly consumerist culture, and a media that caters to this, has insulated the better-off population of Mumbai mentally from the poor even if physically they cannot avoid contact. Civic issues centre around cleaning up neighbourhoods and preserving old monuments. However laudable such efforts are, they skirt around the central problem of inadequate planning for the housing needs of the poorer half of the city's population.

Unfortunately, this same mental distance - as reflected also in some media coverage of city issues - tends to render poor people non- people. Thus, people living in slums are constantly referred to as ``encroachers''. These are law-breakers, people who should not be where they are. The fact that these are men and women who are employed in white collar and blue collar jobs, families, children who go to schools, old people is forgotten when you constantly refer to people as ``encroachers''. You also do not ask why they are there in the first place and why was nothing done earlier to give them an alternative space.

As a result, you have an array of battles being fought at different levels in the city. One group of middle class people want railway land to be cleared of ``encroachers'' because they hold that such ``illegality'' should not be permitted and that it endangers the life of people. The fact that these ``encroachers'' have also risked life and limb for decades living three feet from the railway line because no one would listen to their pleas for relocation is ignored. There is also, of course, no discussion of the ``illegality'' of the moneyed classes in the city who merrily encroach, break building rules, illegally reclaim mangroves, construct buildings without getting clearances etc. Besides the battle over railway slums, there is an unresolved dispute about the future of ``encroachers'' in the Borivali National Park. Also, civic conscious citizens in some localities want to clear garbage and slums from their areas. The net result is that the city now faces the prospect of rehousing thousands of families urgently, ideally before the monsoon breaks over the city in mid- June. Although some housing is available, it is nowhere near sufficient to meet these urgent needs.

The housing crisis facing Mumbai is unlikely to be resolved in the next two months. But the very fact that so many poor families have to be resettled urgently should force dialogue between the contending parties - a dialogue that places the interests of the poor at the centre. Demolitions are not a solution; they merely postpone the problem while causing untold hardship on productive human beings.

The water crisis that has afflicted large parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan should teach those of us who live in cities some lessons. Where people have taken the initiative, and worked out their own systems of water conservation, the crisis has been averted. Where people have waited for the Government to deliver, or taken the law into their own hands and dug deep into the ground to draw water, the earth all around has cracked as everyone cries out for water.In cities too, people of all classes have to come together to figure out how to deal with the question of housing for the poor. If this is not done in time, then the crisis will engulf the entire city - the city of the rich and the city of the poor.

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