The Visible High Rises And The Invisible Slums

Mahesh Vijapurkar

If there’s a city with the widest rich-poor gap, and very visible too, it is Mumbai. It has the country’s richest, Mukesh Ambani in his 27-storey residence. Then the textile-tycoon Gautam Singhania has his spread across 36 floors. Cyrus Poonawala reportedly bought a palace of a Gujarat prince which earlier housed the US Consulate.

Anil Ambani has his 19-floor home. Chhagan Bhujbal, former deputy chief minister, had a nine-storey home built for his family. It has come to public knowledge that Shatrugan Sinha, MP and movie actor has a family home of seven floors. Others of that socio-economic tier have magnificent homes, but not high-rises.

Can’t grudge their wealth or its flaunting, but it does help draw comparisons. Nandan Nilekani, in his Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century mentions how Dharavi slums, touted as Asia’s largest with its scrap, leather, and recycling industry, generates US$1.7 bn a year. Ambani’s new home was variously estimated to cost about that.

While these high rises are visible, the invisible slums are a larger part of Mumbai than one likes to accept. For, it is seen as detracting from its image of a huge city with a thriving economy. That economy, in fact, is kept going, by a lot of activity, captured or not by economists, from the slums or the slum residents. Without them, the city would certainly come to a halt.

The Slum Rehabilitation Authority has put the population of the slums in Mumbai city 62 lakh in 12.5 lakh tenements. Earlier, they were entitled to free replacement housing if in place before 1995, then the cut-off date changed to 2000. Those after that came up between 2000-2011 need to pay for new housing using the PMAY’s interest subvention.

The point here is not about the existence of the slums and the rehab plans which are at best going at a pace that could put a snail to shame, the attitude towards slums and slum dwellers. Recently, exterior walls of slums of Asalfa were painted, to ‘beautify’ them and add some colour to lives in the drab dwellings. It indirectly underscores the aspect of them being ‘eyesores’.

Those who do not live slums would like to believe, ostrich-like, that they don’t exist and do not want to acknowledge their role in keeping the city humming. The informal sector to a very large extent is powered by them. There are waiters in 5-star hotels from the slums, as are your drivers and housemaids. And in most cases, their dwellings do not extend beyond 100-140 sqft for a family.

In the replacement housing, they were entitled to 225 sqft, which meant almost doubling the living space. But even that has been hard to come by because builders and developers had acquired the rights on slums to develop housing for them and build in permitted excess to sell to non-slum dwellers. The latter is to fund the former. But not enough of that has happened in two decades to imply any change in housing typology.

In the two decades, only 1.7 lakh replacement free tenements have come up while the as many as 1,441 projects were approved. That, if they had been executed, would have impacted the city’s housing typology and given a better life to the poor, though such structures are wanting in quality, impacting their durability. But that is one aspect.

Now the city slum dwellers, government has begun to think, should get 322 sqft units because the additional space meant “the families can stay comfortably”. The slums units are of about 100-140 sqft, entitled to 225 sqftin replacement housing, later hiked to 269 sq ft. The government’s attitude is not self-generated, butbecause the PMAY mandates that large size of 322 sq ft.

Thus, size of a house is dependent on the availability of land – all slums occupy about 10 per cent of all of Mumbai housing half its population – affordability to the user, and the need. That explains why some have super-huge houses, and some just barely enough to live in. Even the non-slum dwellers in ‘flats’ live in houses the size the PMAY wants to be built.