Originally published in Mandarin in Initium Media on 23 May 2019. This is the original English text.
On the afternoon of December 26 in 2017, on Hans Bhugra Road in India’s metropolis of Mumbai, four women were arrested as they tried to prevent their homes from being demolished by the city’s municipal body. One of them was Chhaya Thakur. Her elder daughter was in the office at that time. Her younger daughter was at home with her, when a posse of policewomen accompanied officials from Mumbai’s municipal body. Earthmovers crashed into tin roofs, and wails of protesting women and children — who begged that they should at least be allowed to rescue their belongings — were ignored.
In the ensuing chaos, Thakur’s younger daughter did not know that her mother had been taken away to the police station. She also did not know that her mother had hidden ₹ 70,000 ($ 1,000) in cash in a plastic bag. It was a part of the sum Thakur had received from selling another house she owned down the street, merely 10 days before the incident. So, along with most of their household items, the money was lost. “We managed to save only the TV and the fridge,” Thakur said.
Thakur was allowed to leave the police station by sundown, and when she reached the neighborhood, there was nothing standing. All of the 250 houses, lined across a stretch of one kilometer along the busy road and adjacent to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, had been reduced to rubble. Rescued household belongings lay scattered in the open and the people huddled together, mourning the loss of their homes.
Thakur and her two daughters, and a grandson, stayed amid the rubble, and slept under the open sky, for five nights. They managed to find a house to rent, about 2kms away, tucked amid winding and narrow alleys where the sun doesn’t reach the ground.
Six months later, stout, tall pillars arising from the middle of Hans Bhugra Road reached up the sky, to buttress a metro line. The space of the houses and the thriving community? Flattened with concrete, and a lane for speeding vehicles.
Thakur’s is the story of the marginalized across India. People like her provide for the cheap labor that cities thrive on — many of the women living on Hans Bhugra Road work as domestic workers, while the men have odd jobs. But their concerns are pushed away from the mainstream narrative and political discourse. The result? Urban infrastructure, especially in a densely populated city like Mumbai where commercial interests overpower every fundamental right, becomes the castle in the air built by political parties before elections.
Between April and May this year, 900 million Indians has voted to choose a new government — across seven phases, in 1 million booths, with 8,048 candidates vying for 543 seats of the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of Indian Parliament. As the country awaited the results on May 23, dwindling fundamental rights were the contested ground on which political parties had pitched their battles against one another. In 2014, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) had come to power based on Narendra Modi’s election campaign that promised a better economy and better living conditions for all. He was also challenging the incumbent Indian National Congress, which had been in power for two terms, but was mired with various corruption scandals. On the other hand, Modi had offered the template of a transformed Gujarat for the rest of the country, based on his term as the western Indian state’s official head. All of these factors — including pushing the rhetoric for a fundamentalist Hindu state, as opposed to a secular one — was what brought the BJP to power with a landslide majority in 2014, making him the country’s Prime Minister.
But five years into power, the country’s disillusionment has grown, slowly and steadily. The secular fabric of the country has been torn to shreds, with the Hindu fundamentalist ideologues gaining an upper-hand in exercising anti-Muslim rhetoric. Several Muslims and Dalits (the erstwhile ‘untouchables’ within India’s hierarchical caste system) have been lynched by mobs based on suspicions that they had beef at home. The country watched in disbelief as Modi, who was accused of initiating and condoning the Godhra pogrom that killed nearly 1,000 people in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, went on to become the country’s leader. Following close to that sense of unfairness and injustice was Pragya Singh Thakur: on trial for terrorism charges, she was fielded by the BJP as one of its candidates, days before the election this year.
The economy has been suffering equally. The knee-jerk step of demonetization of currency notes — towards “eradicating corruption” — hurt the economy as well as the public morale. Employment is at the lowest since the 1970s; the country faces an agrarian crisis as a result of failed farm economics, mismanaged water resources and erratic climate; other human development indicators show an equally worrisome picture. It is in this context that the unfulfilled promises of 2014 are being questioned, towards a single question: would the BJP come to power for another five years?
The emphasis on smarter urbanization, based on the acknowledgement of unprecedented rural to urban distress migration, was one of the premises of the BJP’s campaign in 2014. This is significant, given that India’s urban population is expected to reach 600 million by 2031 — a jump of 40 per cent, from the figure of 377 million in 2011. This growing urban population calls for the need for jobs with a minimum wage, better infrastructure in the public sphere, and affordable housing.
The BJP’s 2014 manifesto perceived cities as “high growth centers”, catering to the growing “neo-middle class” — people who had risen from poverty, and were working their way up, with their aspirations and purchasing power.
After the BJP came to power, six nation-wide urban housing schemes were announced, at a cost of $5.6 billion. Modi announced houses for every citizen by 2022; he launched the Smart City Mission positing urbanization as an opportunity to mitigate poverty. The urban renewal program was aimed at improving the quality of life for urban residents by using technology and data-driven solutions — electronic delivery of services, intelligent handling of municipal solid and waste water, smart parking and energy-efficient buildings — to promote investment and growth. The definition of “smart” is based on redeveloping at least 50 acres, or retrofit 500 acres, or build a green-field project over 250 acres.
According to critics, the urban renewal program, has offered only piecemeal solutions instead of viewing cities as a larger complex ecosystem wherein services have to be integrated with each other.
Critics have further said that the actual results — slum rehabilitation or improving the transport system — would take up to a decade to show results. As a result, cities have been planned to develop only as “smart enclaves”, consuming 80 per cent of the funds, which could be used as a poster for the BJP government. Never mind the fact that scores of urban infrastructure projects have been stuck for decades because of a variety of factors.
Strikingly, until April 2018, only 1.8 per cent of the allocated funds for Smart City Mission —$ 28 million of the $ 1.5 billion — had been utilized. Other affordable housing schemes have been stagnant. The government missed the March 2019 deadline of building 10 million houses in rural areas, with 40 per cent of the target still pending. Only 18 per cent of the 6.8 million sanctioned homes, of the 10.2 million proposed for the urban poor, have been actually built. Some states have individually fared worse than these figures.
A report by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) revealed a key piece of data: the Smart City Mission aims to benefit 99.5 million, but this is only 8 per cent of India’s total population or 22 percent of the urban population.
Mumbai opted out of the race to be a smart city owing to the possibility that the CEO appointed by the Central government, with absolute executive powers to implement the plans, would undermine the existing plans undertaken by the city’s municipal body and thus dilute its power.
“Any shred of democratic process in improving urban lives will be lost because of the Smart Cities Mission, because of the top-down approach. The plans announced seem more like a market for digital lives, which would exclude the poor,” said Bilal Khan, an activist in Mumbai who advocates for housing rights among Mumbai’s slumdwellers.
But Mumbai — the city where everything is possible, the city of dreams, the city of contradictions — has its own bag of complexities in addressing issues of infrastructure. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), India’s richest municipal body — whose budget exceeds that of some of India’s smaller states — continues to face the ire of citizens for haphazard budget allocation. A large chunk of the budget every year is set for solid waste management and clearing storm water drains, to prevent water logging in the monsoon. And yet, in the past decade, a small downpour during the monsoon has brought the city to a standstill. Two years ago, a renowned gastroenterologist, Dr Deepak Amrapurkar, died when he fell into an open manhole which was not visible in the knee deep water. His partly decomposed body was found several days later, under the drain, a significant distance from where he may have fallen.
“Mumbai is a pathetic marker of a smart city of our modern times,” said Vinita Deshmukh, a political analyst, who was a journalist for two decades. “There are skyscrapers and the coastal land is now being reclaimed for a fancy road, but there is nothing for the common man. The city once had the best public transport but that is also crumbling. People lead pigeonhole lives because of a dirty nexus between the builders’ lobby, politicians, bureaucrats and contractors. Nothing significant changes, no matter which party comes to power.”
In the midst of the hubris of the city is the political party Shiv Sena. It found its footing propagating the “sons of the soil” agenda in the 1960s and thus attacked Mumbai’s cosmopolitan fabric. The city had been, after all, built by communities who had migrated from across India, over centuries. Deshmukh attributes their rise to their grassroots organizational skills. However, Shiv Sena began to lose relevance — even though identity politics were stoked, such that taxi drivers, mostly hailing from north India faced violence at the hands of angry, unemployed Maharashtrian men radicalized by the Shiv Sena — the city’s commercial focus won the day.
Shiv Sena changed its focus to the ultra-right-wing fundamentalist Hindu ideology of Hindutva, and aligned with the BJP. Since nearly four decades, both parties have been in a political alliance and have come to power, except for a brief period of Congress rule in the state. Even though the MCGM has been the dominant ground for the Shiv Sena, it suffered a setback and a reckoning in 2017: during the local elections, when the city voted to elect a Corporator for each ward, the Shiv Sena won only by a slim margin. Close on the heels was BJP.
“BJP entered into the fray, in the MCGM elections, from 2014. Modi was the figure that was looked up, rather than the Shiv Sena, which was perceived as having only local aspirations for the people. People were also fed up that the party was responsible for taking the law into its own hands on several occasions. For the modern Mumbaikar, the BJP is seen as relatively more palatable, with a broader view on the country,” Deshmukh explained, noting that following the debacle in the 2017 MCGM elections, the Shiv Sena broke away from its alliance with the BJP in the state government, but got back together just before the 2019 elections. “Both parties need each other.”
With an almost-rogue party at the helm of MCGM, infrastructure in the city continues to be in shambles. And among those that continue to bear the brunt of this are slumdwellers. Lacking a concrete roof, drinking water, toilet and closed drains, slums are a compact settlement of at least 20 such households. About 3.15 million — or 5 percent of households in India — are slums. Majority of these are come up on government land, and their crammed environments provide the host for several diseases.
This is what Thakur’s home used to be: it took them years to get water supply. Drains were mostly lying open, which seemed a better option that overflowing. But it could have been worse — like in Dharavi.
Dharavi in Mumbai is home to the world’s third largest slum by population, yet, in recent years, slums are growing rapidly and as expansively in other parts of the cities too. Mumbai is notorious for the high value of real estate: The Knight Frank Wealth Report of 2019 found that $ 1 million can buy approximately 100 square meters, translating to $ 930 per square feet.
Hence, affordable housing projects under any scheme becomes restricted satellite towns far from the city. Thakur considers herself lucky enough to have found a new place not too far from her previous home of nearly three decades, but her neighbors have had to move as far as 10kms away to match their budget to rent an apartment or a room in another slum, thus disrupting access to schools where the children might have been already enrolled, and to access other amenities.
Even though a Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) already builds houses for Mumbai’s slum-dwellers, based on a metric on the time of the settlement in a particular slum location, it still is a far cry from providing housing to all.
The demolished houses on Hans Bhugra Road can be categorized as a slum, even though many of the households had made concrete structures to their homes over the years. Cities have looked at slums as an eye sore, and so slum demolitions are common.
Nearly 75 per cent of single room houses in Mumbai are inhabited by more than one family. “The 2011 census says that 42 per cent of households in the city are slums, and approximately it is the same percentage of population also living in slums. However, there seems to be an under-counting: the 2001 Census showed that slum population at 52 per cent, and it very unlikely that there has been a decline in slum dwellers,” detailed Hussain Indorewala, a teacher of urban planning theory.
Would that then mean that slumdwellers, like Thakur who was displaced, would have significant influence on the outcome of elections, and thereby the infrastructure of the city?
“The voting calculations are different in different elections. During local election, there tends to be more influence of community, towards getting access to services. In the national election, the calculation is about larger concerns. So voters tend to think differently and vote accordingly,” he explained.
Prior to India’s Independence, the need for workers’ housing in Mumbai created several identical structures across the city. But the need for cheap labor has meant that the State denies the existence of people living in the margins, noted Amita Bhide, Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Planning, Policy and Governance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).
But Mumbai’s multi-tiered system of governance does not always allow for participatory action, viz-a-viz urban development projects. The smart city model, with a CEO at helm, or the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, are para-state entities, which Indorewala says, cannot be voted in or voted out. MCGM is left with the task of coordinating between these various agencies, over which it has minimal influence. “Besides, the commissioner of the MCGM is an un-elected bureaucrat, and this is why electoral democracy does not translate into urban governance. This also explains why there is little or no difference among political parties when it comes to various infrastructure projects,” he said.
But what happens to those forcibly displaced?
Nearly 5,500 people in Mumbai, whose slum dwellings were demolished, have been living in the suburb of Mahul. The 72 seven-story buildings are meant to “rehabilitate” thousands of the city’s poor previously living in slums, to make way for various infrastructure projects. In 2017, nearly 20,000 homes were cleared from various parts of the city.
The first residents came to stay in Mahul in 2013. Since then, people across age groups have fallen ill and 25 people have died.
The apartment block in Mahul were built far from the city, providing meagre access to public transport and other facilities, like schools and hospitals. The nearest railway station from the housing complex is 7kms away. Buses to the railway station are erratic, and the commute can take up to an hour during peak hours. It lies in close proximity to two refineries, flouting buffer zones. Also in the vicinity is a chemical and fertilizer plant. From a major highway, the apartment blocks can be seen as a stretch of matchboxes, and the view is often obliterated by thick white smoke from several chimneys nearby.
A report by the state Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) found high concentrations of nickel and benzopyrene, exceeding permissible levels, as well as the presence of volatile organics.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) — which expedites disposal of cases pertaining to the environment — heard a case brought by residents against the industries. It declared that the symptoms among the ailing people were all similar. Following this NGT declaration, 211 tenants are petitioners to a case in the Bombay High Court, who want to have Mahul declared as inhospitable.
Recently, the Court ordered Mumbai’s municipal body to give every tenant a flat amount as rent, until it finds them alternative housing. “But the municipal body, dominated by political parties, visit people only when they want to seek votes.”
“The irony is that, the residents of Mahul have been stripped even of their democratic right to vote. There were 1,600 people whose names were missing from electoral rolls in locations where they had previously resided as well as in Mahul,” said Khan, who has been actively involved with the case put before the Bombay High Court.
The story of different agencies with no synergy applies to Mumbai’s transportation woes. The city currently thrives on its suburban rail and bus network: nearly 2,400 trains carry 7.5 million commuters daily (operated by the central government), along with a fleet of nearly 3,400 BEST buses (operated by the MCGM). In recent years, the city’s roads have been turned upside down due to construction of underground metro rail system, which is a public-private partnership project.
“The state government is party to the construction of the metro but it views the bus system as competition for ridership. This has meant that there is a proposal to have the BEST buses operated by contractors, and have feeder buses that won’t compete with the metro routes. It is further complicated because the public transport system is seen as a competition to private modes of transport. This has meant that public transport is viewed as undesirable and only for the poor. So there is a tiered transport system now: exclusive projects for car users, metro for the middle class, and BEST buses and suburban trains for the poor. It is a systematic strategy and not merely born out of chaos,” he explained.
The “exclusive project for car users” refers to the 5.6 km Bandra-Worli sealink, which prohibits the passage of the iconic red BEST buses, motorbikes, bicycles, three-wheeled autorickshaws and pedestrians. It has one third of expected ridership and costs four times more, than what it did when it first opened in 2010. The number of cars has increased on Mumbai’s streets, but the sealink has not eased traffic woes. “Our assumption presumes that these projects are meant for addressing transport–which they are not. Similarly, the proposed coastal road is a real estate project, as it will increase the land value because of the car-only connectivity,” Indorewala explained, like he often does, among the various citizen groups that he is part of. Modi’s ambitions for India’s infrastructure is nearly identical: benefiting the private sector while left the public service behind.
Khan asserted that when people are viewed as commodities for their labor, and when housing is no more seen as a right, programs like smart city mission and others are only smart “gimmicky politics”.
One could argue that political leaders take advantage of people’s naivete, especially the poor: they are fed with lies and free meals before the elections, and people live on hope. “They are kept on a tight leash, and are promised a mirage of better lives only in minuscule visible patches,” said Deshmukh.
But Indorewala feels more optimism in the sense of democracy that’s grounds-up, even for a city like Mumbai which is so focused on commercial gains. “Political parties tend to respond to the demands of the people, based on how people articulate it and organize around it. True development doesn’t come from political parties, but it is people’s mobilization that pushes parties to adapt them in their manifestos, and work towards them. If there is a mass movement towards upgradation of slums in the city, where slumdwellers across the city demand it strongly, then there will definitely have an impact. What happens on the ground affects how parties pin their agendas,” Indorewala said.
On May 23, the election results were declared: the BJP won as astounding 303 seats, 21 more than what it had won in 2014.
Thakur was among the millions who had voted for the BJP, and in effect, for Modi. Why? “I voted for the hand [symbol of the Congress party] all these years, but what happened? My house of 28 years, where I had been living since the time I got married at age 15, was still demolished. Nobody came to stand by us.”