Exterminating Communities

Urban Planning  |  1 July 2011  | print

The refusal to reognize that slums are communities is the biggest failure of our “slum rehabilitation” laws

Mumbai slums, from the Nehru Centre, Worli

What kind of government, what kind of system allows suffering like this? Very early in Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram comes this reaction to a first view of Mumbai slums. It is a reaction fuelled by shame, guilt and rage, and it is the view of an outsider. We who live here have passed beyond such feelings. We simply do not even notice them any more. Perhaps this has to do with our ‘culture’ of the philosophical shrug and the always-reliable excuse of karma. But karma and justice are uneasy bedfellows.

Depending on your politics, the numbers vary. For a xenophobic political pretender, tens of thousands migrate into the city and make their homes in slums; other studies put the number much lower — Delhi has a higher daily influx than Mumbai, Bangalore and Ahmedabad combined, they say. The reasons for this migration are well known, of course, and as Charles Correa says, nobody comes to the city looking for housing. They come looking for work.

In that situation, for a government to have absolutely no policy on affordable housing borders on criminality. Successive governments plead helplessness and, when the problem is brought to courts, file affidavits¹ saying that the government is unable to prevent encroachments on government lands. This is patently untrue, of course: there are no slums on the lawns of the High Court or the Chief Minister’s or Mayor’s or Municipal Commissioner’s splendid bungalows, and all these are government lands. And the coda to these excuses is to say that there is no solution.

As everybody knows but nobody in government or in court will openly acknowledge is that there is simply no will to consider any meaningful solution. The result is a distortion of perspective and a corruption of language: rather than ‘rehousing’ we say ‘rehabilitation’ as if living in a slum is a birth anomaly and not a situated forced on humans; we automatically associate slums with poverty and crime; and we turn our slums into icons (Dharavi) and permit ‘slum tourism’. There is conceivably nothing more degrading than allowing busloads of camera-festooned tourists to take photographs of degradation, and never mind that overseas tourists find the experience “uplifting”. That much of this ‘tourism’ is organised by or for people from the slums themselves only makes it worse; it is then a kind of social pornography.

The solutions our governments offer are travesties. One is to simply evict city workers and throw them off-site and out-of-sight without any form of support systems. Another is our wonderful Slum Rehabilitation statute, a law that trespasses on insanity. This is a law that has bred corruption of inconceivable proportions from the top down. It proceeds on a deliberate refusal to understand that living in a slum is not just a matter of makeshift partitions and tin sheet roofing. Driving past Dharavi one summer, my fellow passenger asks me where we are. She has never been here before. When I tell her, she is astonished. “But this doesn’t look like a slum,” she says. “These are homes.” Indeed they are, and some have been homes for a very long time. They have been permitted and silently encouraged: ration cards, electricity connections, bus routes, municipal schools and places of worship, factories and workshops all exist in slums. Unlike the semi-detached lives of the rich, these are also communities, and the refusal to acknowledge this is the signal failure of our slum rehabilitation laws. Slums grow and develop organically, not by the handiwork of some government satrap temporarily assuming expertise in urban planning. Slums are also self-regulating and there is a coherence to deciding who lives or works where and next to whom. The refusal to acknowledge this community ethos is deliberate and eminently convenient to governments, which can then pick and choose by thoroughly arbitrary standards who, if anyone, in that community should be plucked out and selected for rehabilitation. The date-lines fixed by our State Government (originally 1 January 1995) are completely random and, therefore, constantly shifting. There is, too, no discernible logic to saying that anyone who lives above the second floor, for example, is automatically ineligible for any kind of assistance, never mind that he and his family have been there for the last 20 years. Redeveloping these slums by rotating them through 90 degrees, and piling and squashing people into tower blocks fractures these communities. It tears the social fabric of the city and creates increasingly stark dichotomies: rehab buildings with scarce water, no lifts, little by way of amenities must face the ‘free sale’ developer-incentive luxury structures.

Both aspects are central to the powerful documentary narrative in Ruzbeh Bharucha’s book and documentary film “Yamuna Gently Weeps”.² Yamuna Pushta was one of the oldest slums in Delhi — actually a network of some 20-odd smaller slums — and one of the country’s largest. It was home to over 150,000 individuals in more than 40,000 dwelling units. It had schools, dispensaries, businesses, temples, even restaurants. Various NGOs worked within this community, attempting to better its conditions.

It took only a few weeks to efface it, following a court order.

Only 20% of the inhabitants were ‘rehabilitated’ — in Bawana, some 40 kms away, on barren land with no facilities, not even the bare minimum they had before: no sanitation, no power, no healthcare, no jobs nearby, no transportation to their workplace.

The demolition was carried out at the height of Delhi’s brutal summer. The resettlement site at Bawana had almost no water.

What of the other 80%? They were driven onto the city’s streets and, in the sheer desperation of survival, very likely into another slum.

What our slum laws also do not recognize, perhaps deliberately, is that these schemes are doomed to failure because they fail in a second aspect: they do not provide the intangible benefits of property rights. Instead, by merely allotting spaces in rebuilt towers, these laws have become a lottery. People rehoused in towers soon sell them at hugely inflated rates and move to another slum. The going rate for slum rehab flats in South Mumbai is over Rs.35 lakhs; and at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, those shifted out have sold their flats and moved back into slums in the Park.³ The reasons for this are many. The rehab buildings are atrocious, little more than vertical slums. Water and power supply is seldom stable if it exists at all. To complain that the occupants ‘do not know how to use lifts’ is an indictment of the design, not the occupant. But the primary reason is what these constructions represents: the wholesale extermination of entire communities, a failure to accord basic rights and the refusal to pursue social justice in any meaningful sense.

Does this mean that nothing can or should be done? Far from it. First, we must stop looking to courts for solutions. These are matters of policy and courts are hamstrung by having to operate within the confines of a statute which, on a cold reading, is not unconstitutional. A policy that protects government lands and also provides property rights, forces payment for these rights, limits transferability and enforces penalties against illegal transfers and provides transportation systems can work.

Charkop Sector 8

An attempt was actually made MHADA in a World Bank assisted project at Charkop, east of Manori Creek. The entire area, once marsh and mangrove, was reclaimed by MHADA for affordable housing. Communities were involved in design and layout decisions. Property rights were built in, as was a lock-in on sales. For at least one early project, the result was a community proud of itself, banding together to improve and maintain its space. Now that the freeze-period on sales and transfers is over this community has been reduced to a small enclave. All around it, on lands meant for similar public affordable housing projects are tower developments and further absurdities like an F-1 Race track. Much of this is on illegally reclaimed land. Much like CIDCO in Navi Mumbai, MHADA has become a state-sponsored real estate developer using its land for purposes and in ways it was never meant to do.

The problem of slums and housing is not intractable. But it demands strength of political will, clarity of vision and recognition that slums are not building blocks for developers but real communities in need of assistance.