stories from the city- corporators' meeting

today we collected stories. at a meeting in town where corporators from different parts of the city were bidding for us to ‘study’ their wards and propose development guidelines a variety of city landscapes collapsed into one another. for a change we heard the voice of the representatives of the people at the local level that sifted through individual narratives and made into patterns. these patterns formed a collage of modes of habitation and work, leisure and desire. the scale was that of a neighbourhood- and each was incredibly different from the other.

in juhu the stories were of an upper middle class neighbourhood with film star bungalows in the midst of which are old fishing villages and a few slums that run along the irla nallah. the desires there as voiced by the corporator was of film star ungalows as tourist destinations along with the old koli villages transformed into ‘home stays’ for tourists and cute pieces of the past preserved as artifacts. irla nallah was to be covered and turned into housing and in other areas was to have a garden on both sides- like in venice. an ‘art house’ theater and a bollywood museum was also on the cards.

at kherwadi 75% of the population lives in a slum whose real estate values are shooting up everyday. the area supplies unorganized labour to the city- carpenters, electricians. munier and mustaq live close here. the corporator here complained about the maintenance costs of the new high rises being built for the slum dwellers, the eviction of the entire population of subtenants and other complex tenancies from the area. low rise high density housing was suggested. the area was a classic case study of all that we claim to be faulty about the slum rehabilitation policy of the city.

at worli it was the bdd chawls- that large complex of industrial housing in the heart of the city. as the mill lands around are being transformed the corporator took serious issue with the term ‘redevelopment’ as according to him, it implied a removal of the old. and the old in this case were families that had outgrown the 160 sq feet of area allocated to them and were spilling out into the common corridor between units and sleeping on the terrace of the chawls. almost 20% of the people he claimed will not be able to pay even 15 rs per month as maintenance. do we throw them out? will they get a terrace to sleep on? and then the suspicions that emerge from political alliances, bureaucratic wrangles and caste. there are open spaces in the area that belong to the pwd department. the bmc can’t maintain them and pwd does not seem to have the mandate to. in between this red tape the spaces are being encroached upon. the crporator watches from his home in the high rise as his neighbourhood transforms- ‘tower’ he calls his new house. his father lived in one of the chawls that has been redeveloped. all his old friends have moved on.

but nowhere was the wrangling between bureaucracies more frightening than at reay road. the bit chawls are all undergoing redevelopment. towers appearing in their place. but across the road on the eastern waterfront homes for migrants stretch out over the water on stilts. disease is rampant. the municipality cant provide infrastructure as the land belongs to the bombay port trust. the bpt does not have the mandate to provide for housing. sandwiched in between at the slum dwellers living on narrow promontories named after the goods that they used to transport. reti bandar, lakda bandar.

at malad the slum stretches on both sides of the highway towards the hills of national park in the east. from madhus house, you see them like an ocean of roofs that turn blue in the rains with the tarpaulin stretched over tin sheds. an old river system has narrowed down into a drain and no infrastructure exists here. no roads, no sewage, no water supply. that’s all that exists in this ward. nothing else.

near the bhabha atomic research center, anushakti nagar with its scientists and researchers make up for most of the population. the rest of the area is a slum and some middle class housing. an agri and a koli village also exist. our corporator was a suave smart engineer from one of these villages who had made a development plan for the area already. he had enlisted the help of experts from the barc to develop local waste management systems and was claiming political infighting to be the only obstacle in the effective execution of it.