Housing Mumbai's millions

By Kalpana Sharma

THE DEFENCE Minister, Mr. George Fernandes, presented another side of his persona in Mumbai recently. On a nostalgia trip into the past, Mr. Fernandes recalled his first days in Mumbai, how he was forced to vacate a spot on the pavement where he chose to sleep and how the slum where he finally found a roof was demolished to make way for housing for the atomic energy complex. Thousands of families who suffered the same fate as Mr. Fernandes still live in slums.

Today, on the Government's own admission, more than half of the 12 million residents of Mumbai live in slums - on once vacant lands, along railway tracks, on pavements and along the sea shore. They occupy four to six per cent of the total land area of the city, a statistic that is hotly disputed by environmentalists and others. The crisis that the absence of adequate housing has created in Mumbai is a serious one. It needs to be tackled at different levels through multiple approaches that are humane and decisive. In the past, one has seen either so-called decisiveness consisting of demolitions without any planning for alternatives, or an apparently humane approach of benign neglect. Neither has helped; it has only exacerbated the problem.

The current Maharashtra Government has been forced to confront the slum issue chiefly because the implementation of the World Bank-funded Mumbai Urban Transport Project II (MUTP II) involves clearing slums along railway tracks to facilitate faster movement of suburban trains and extending the corridors along which these trains run. The Bank's insistence that the slumdwellers be resettled and a case in court demanding that the tracks be cleared has accelerated the process of resettlement. As a result, thousands of slumdwellers, who have lived for decades within one metre of the tracks, have been shifted to permanent housing or transit camps. About 19,000 families who live within what is called the 10-metre safety zone will be resettled, more than fifty per cent by March this year.

The very fact that this has been achieved suggests that solutions are possible if the Government is pushed to act. The problem the Government faces is having to decide which of its constituents it should try and please. If it tries to please the rich and the middle classes, as well as foreign investors whom it hopes to continue attracting, it will have to try and present the image of an efficient, clean and functioning city. Slums along every major arterial road leading into Mumbai do not enhance such an image. So the only solution would be to remove slums. But for votes and political survival the slums are essential to every political party. For the current Democratic Front Government, it would be political harakiri to set forth on a course which would alienate this vast vote bank particularly when the former Shiv Sena-BJP Government projected itself as pro-poor with its slum resettlement policy.

So what does this Government do? First, it issues a resolution stating that there would be no protection for any slums located on land marked for any other purpose under the development plan. This, in effect, would have rendered half the current slum population as ``illegal''. But when it realises that such a policy will be politically suicidal, it quickly backtracks, says it does not know how that GR was issued and announces that all slumdwellers, regardless of the status of the land on which they are living at present, will be given protection if they can prove residence in the slum before January 1, 1995. It even protects commercial establishments, including restaurants and beer bars, built in slums before 1995. Also, despite earlier noises about abandoning the Sena regime's scheme of providing free houses to all pre-1995 slumdwellers, this Government has now announced that it will continue with the same policy.

While none of this is unexpected, what is regrettable is that this Government has not even attempted to learn from the mistakes made by the last one, particularly in the way the slum redevelopment policy was implemented. There were major problems with the previous policy, both in concept and in implementation. The least a new Government should have done was assess the old policy, discard what did not work and revise it so that these mistakes would not be repeated. Instead, it has simply gone ahead with the same formula.

The previous slum redevelopment policy failed for a number of reasons, primarily because of an unrealistic time-frame. Given the size of the problem, how could any Government have promised that it would rehouse 40 lakhs slumdwellers in five years? It is precisely because of this haste to yield results that the policy did not work. It assumed, for instance, that the property market would continue to rise, that builders would rush to take over slum land, redevelop it, give the stipulated ``free'' houses to the slumdwellers and build free sale houses with which they would make a neat profit. The property market did not rise, it fell. The builders lost interest. And the slum redevelopment policy remained largely on paper. A longer term view would have accommodated such inevitable fluctuations in the property market.

Even the Government's attempt to compensate for the lack of private builder interest by setting up its own funding mechanism failed to work because it was used to reward political supporters rather than actually implement the policy. Only in a few instances, where the state-run housing agency used the funds, were there some visible results. Indeed, it is these houses built by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) under the slum redevelopment scheme which are now available to rehouse the railway slumdwellers.

The other unfortunate fallacy that the former Government's slum redevelopment policy perpetuated was that of giving slumdwellers ``free'' houses. In the policy document, the Government acknowledges that slumdwellers would not be charged for these houses because the Government accepts that over a lifetime people invest several lakhs in their dwellings. Thus the house was a compensation for this investment and not technically free. Yet, as in all the literature and statements, the term ``free house'' is constantly used, the misconception about the scheme continues. As a result, today you have middle class citizens groups insisting that ``encroachers'' and people who have broken the law by squatting on land they did not own should not be ``rewarded'' with a free house.

The previous policy also did not allow for flexibility. It laid down rigid norms in terms of density, for instance, that restricted the ability of groups of slumdwellers to devise their own housing according to their needs. And finally, even where schemes were worked out, there were unresolved conflicts on land use that needed to be sorted out. The principal ones revolved around land that technically fell within the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) and land that had been marked as no- development zones. These are tricky issues that need resolution but so far a way out has not been found. For instance, in the new policy the Government has promised land to resettle pavement dwellers. But how it will release land that falls under various restricted categories has not been clarified.

The Maharashtra Government needs to accept the reality that rapid urbanisation is a virtually irreversible trend in the foreseeable future. Unless this is recognised, the best of plans will be rendered useless because they will be based on achieving short- term results rather than setting up a long-term policy framework for urban housing and land use. Unfortunately, the present Government has demonstrated neither the rigour to inspect and correct previous policies nor the foresight to plan adequately for the future.

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