In media reports on a wall collapse in Mumbai, evidence that the lives of the poor don’t matter

 

If a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Published in Scroll.in on August 22, 2025

Link: https://scroll.in/article/1085767/in-media-reports-on-a-wall-collapse-in-mumbai-evidence-that-the-lives-of-the-poor-dont-matter

Every monsoon, India’s richest city has its tales of horror: of submerged railway tracks, of flooded roads, of open manholes into which people fall, of trees that collapse, often on passersby, and of hillsides that give way.

This year has been no different. People living in Mumbai are more than familiar with the images we see in newspapers and on television.

But the story that mostly escapes attention is the impact this has on the poor, those who must work rain or shine, with no means to protect themselves or their temporary dwellings from being submerged or even washed away.

And when some of them die, when a wall collapses or they fall into an open drain, they appear the next day as a statistic in the media: 9 dead, two from tree fall; 6 dead including one in an open drain, etc.

Sometimes the dead have names. But just that. Names. We do not know anything more about them. Were they migrants? Did they have families in Mumbai? And who will be held responsible for what are routinely registered by the police as “accidental deaths”.

Worse still, even in death, there is no dignity of those mentioning their names bothering either to get the names right or their ages right.

A loud sound

Take for instance Satish Tirkey. This 35-year-old from Chhattisgarh worked as a watchman in Godrej Baug on Malabar Hill, one of Mumbai’s wealthiest localities. He lived with his wife in Simla Nagar, a large settlement next door that is home to drivers and domestic staff who work in the homes of the well-heeled residents of the locality.

Also living in Simla Nagar are taxi drivers, delivery workers, construction workers and others with jobs across Mumbai.

Tirkey’s job included stepping out of the complex to find taxis for its residents. On August 18, despite the heavy rain, he set out to do that. As he walked down the road, sheltering under a large umbrella, the wall on the side of that road collapsed right on top of him.

Residents of the building facing the wall heard the loud sound and rushed out to their balconies to see what had happened. But they did not realise at first that someone had been crushed by the debris. They watched in horror as stones, mud and water cascaded down as if a dam had broken, filled the road, and flooded their building.

Even before the fire brigade arrived, they saw a man dressed in a yellow raincoat being carried out by three young men. These were the first responders. They were residents of Simla Nagar who saw the wall crumbling, rushed to pull Tirkey out and take him to the nearest hospital. They said he was still breathing when they carried him out despite the barbed wire from the wall having penetrated his body. But by the time they got to the hospital, Tirkey had died.

A cascade of water

Meantime, the cascade of water that had shattered the wall continued unabated. It took the fire brigade and the municipality hours to clean up the road, remove the rocks, clear the stormwater drain and cut a tree that was precariously poised on the broken wall. All this in pouring rain.

The next day, some newspapers reported Tirkey’s death. In some, he was mentioned as a watchman. A few articles gave his name. In practically all his age was wrong – it ranged from 55 to 75.

Most reports repeated what the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation must have told the journalists, that the man died due to a tree fall. A couple mentioned that he was crushed by the wall. What no one wondered was who had built that wall and who was responsible for the flood of water that led to the wall collapsing.

If the person injured or dead in such circumstances had been one of the residents of the buildings of Malabar Hill, how would the media have reacted? Would they not have made sure to get at least the basic details such as name and age and cause of death accurately? Would they not have gone further to investigate why the wall collapsed? Was it just the rain or something more? Who built the wall?

The fact they did not is because Tirkey was a poor man, a migrant worker, one of the millions of such workers who literally hold up a city like Mumbai. These are the men and women who cook, clean, deliver, build and repair. They are mostly invisible. Even when they die, they are noticed in passing, but just as a statistic – a victim who succumbed in an “accidental death”.

In this case, I know that this was an accident waiting to happen because I live in the building that was flooded after the wall collapsed.

Raised wall

The wall in question skirts a garden meant exclusively for senior government officers who live in Hyderabad Estate, which once belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad. The gates to this large park are kept locked in a city that is starved of open space.

At some point, the height of the wall was increased. The residents of the area and those who regularly use the road would probably not have noticed this.

The original wall was thick, low and made of stone. The extension made it several feet higher, not as thick but with a heavy iron frame and barbed wire on top. Why this was needed to protect the garden is unknown.

What was also not noticed by residents of this neighbourhood is that alongside the wall, a water body with concrete sides had been built. What purpose it served is also not known.

What residents discovered, through their own effort to trace the source of the unending flow of water from the broken wall, was that this pool was overflowing and did not appear to have a drainage system to deal with excess water.

Furthermore, the builders of the wall had left holes in it from where the excess water could drain –onto a road used by thousands of people every day. An old cobbler who conducted his business next to the wall had complained about the outflow of water from these holes. But who listens to what old cobblers say?

A routine event

Two days before the disaster, residents of my building noticed that water was gushing out of several holes in the wall, flooding the road and subsequently our compound. This ought to have been a warning signal. But as this happened on the first day of the deluge that drowned the city, it passed as something that happens when it rains.

Except that this time, after the collapse and the subsequent flood, the water did not stop flowing, even when rain stopped. The municipal corporation would not answer the queries of residents. No one representing Hyderabad Estate was visible during or after the catastrophe.

I narrate all this to emphasise several points.

One, as I mentioned earlier, if a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Second, because it is a poor person who has been killed, there is practically nothing by way of follow-up to fix culpability. The authorities – in this case the municipal corporation and the Central Public Works Department, which is responsible for the garden and the wall – simply throw up their hands or pass the buck. When the rain stops, everything is back to normal.

Two families, and the ‘chor gadi’

 

October 12, 2022. A day like any other day in post-monsoon Mumbai. Muggy, cloudy, a brilliant evening sky.

 

But also, a day when hearts, hearths and homes were cruelly broken.

 

Let me backtrack.  I live in a mixed neighbourhood in Mumbai.  It has buildings with government officials, private buildings with a mix of rich and middle-income families, a large enclave exclusively for Parsis, and an even larger, in terms of population, urban poor settlement where a mini-India jostles for a limited space.

 

There are some private gardens, such as those exclusively for the government officials, and a short distance away public gardens for the rest of us.

 

There are also shops, a police chowki, a Hindu temple, a mosque and a Buddhist shrine. The road leading up to our neighbourhood is narrow, but on one side, it has something resembling a pavement.

 

For at least two decades, I have observed a family that consisted only of women and children living on the side of this road opposite the pavement.  They are waste pickers, originally from Tamil Nadu.  I sometimes saw a man, but mostly the women – an older woman and her daughter.  In the course of time, the daughter gave birth to a little girl, and thereafter to two boys.

 

The girl, Uma, grew up before my eyes.  She was toddler, then a little girl with neat plaits who would wind her way up the road to a municipal school. I bumped into her on most mornings when I went for a walk.  She would beam up at me, her eyes luminous. Over time I saw her grow into a statuesque young woman, clearly conscious of her beauty.

 

Then the entire family moved across the road, to a spot in front of the closed gate of the government officers’ colony.  They spread themselves out.  The older woman told me they had the contract to collect the dry waste from the government colony.  They seemed confident that they would not be asked to move.

 

I noticed at one point that the younger woman, Uma’s mother, looked ill.  She seemed to be literally wasting away.  They said that she might have TB but were not sure.  One day, I saw that she was not there anymore.  She had died. Of what, I asked Uma’s grandmother. Not sure, I was told. 

 

So now there was the grandmother, her grand-daughter, and a couple of boys.

 

Then another family arrived on the same spot.  The man had been around.  I had seen him as he collected the dry waste from our building.  But the woman and her daughter were new. They were also from Tamil Nadu.  The daughter’s name was Pooja.

 

The two families were uneasy allies – united in their homelessness and yet competing for contracts from the buildings and colonies in the neighbourhood.  The man managed to hustle Uma’s grandmother out of the contract with the government colony.  She found something else.

 

They fought often, but also shared a basic level of camaraderie.  Pooja was friends with Uma who was considerably older than her.  When her mother was out collecting waste, Pooja hung out with Uma and her brothers.

 

Then one day, I saw Uma with a tiny infant in her arms.  Whose? I asked. Mine, she said, her eyes gleaming.  And then by way of an explanation, the father did not want to marry me.  Uma was 16 years old then (although later she insisted that she was 18).  

 

Another child of the street, Uma’s little girl, is now almost four years old.  They call her Karooramma.  She is cheerful, waves out to the people she knows, keeps herself busy playing with whatever is lying around.  She imitates her mother and great-grandmother by pretending to wash clothes or the dishes.  She sometimes goes off on her own to the tea stall at the top of the road where she’s given a cup of tea, more like a thimbleful, and a biscuit.   

 

Over the years, both families followed a pattern.  During the rains, they would stretch out a tarpaulin over their belongings and sleep under it.  And once the rains were gone, so was the temporary cover and they continued to sleep in the open.

 

On October 10 this year, the municipal corporation descended on this little settlement of two families and demolished their shelter.  It was still raining.

 

For two days, they somehow continued to occupy the spot, which had now been ‘beautified’ with large potted plants.  They kept their belonging behind these pots and slept on carboard spread out on the pavement. The little girl slept under an umbrella.

 

I asked them what they would do now, as living this way was clearly untenable.  Could they not find a room in one of the many urban poor settlements scattered in the area, including the one nearest to us?

 

How is that possible, asked Pooja’s mother.  The rents start at Rs 7000 and more for a small room.  And then there is a deposit.  Of at least Rs 50,000.  Where will we get that?

 

And then on October 12, the municipal van came again – the ‘chor gadi’ as it is called.  And took away most of their belongings – pots, pans, mattresses, almost everything.  To get them back, they would have to go to the ward office and pay a fine, I was told.

 

When the clean-up operation was being conducted by the maintenance department of the municipality, I asked the man in-charge why they had to confiscate their belongings when they had already destroyed their temporary structures? We have had complaints, he told me. In any case, it was evident he was not going to stop.  He had his orders. And he was following them.

 

I want to record this moment because it illustrates the heartlessness of a big city like Mumbai where there is no place for the poor.  These families are poor, but they earn their living by providing an essential service.  Yet, the city can make no place for them.

 

For the people living in the area, the majority would only see them as the dirty poor ‘spoiling’ their neighbourhood. I can bet that even the woman who complained about them has never spoken to them and has no idea what they do for a living.

 

This moment also tells me how the entire system is stacked against the poor. Little Karooramma, for instance, cannot get an Aadhar card because she has no birth certificate.  She was born, literally, on the street.  Hence, even the municipal school will not admit her.  For the State, she is invisible, as is her mother, and her great grandmother. They are not even a statistic. 

 

I sleep tonight with a heavy heart as I think of Karooramma, who smiled at me when I passed her on the pavement, even as the BMC men were confiscating their belongings.  “BMC aya”, she told me solemnly.  “Sab le gaya”.  And then she waved and said her usual “bye”.

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A longer version of this post was published in Scroll.in.  Here's the link:

https://scroll.in/article/1034969/what-the-story-of-two-families-says-about-the-unchanging-reality-of-living-on-the-streets-of-mumbai

 

 

 

 

 

Lawbreakers, not quite citizens: ‘Bulldozer’ reportage shows how little India cares for urban poor

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 28, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/04/28/lawbreakers-not-quite-citizens-bulldozer-reportage-shows-how-little-india-cares-for-urban-poor

Predictably, Jahangirpuri has slipped off the radar. The high drama of April 20, as excavators – or bulldozers, in popular parlance – razed homes, shops, walls, gates, food carts, awnings, and temporary and permanent structures has ended, at least for the moment, as we await the verdict of the Supreme Court of India.

But in the court of popular opinion, as determined by the tone and substance of the media coverage of Jahangirpuri, the verdict has already been delivered. And it reads: “The state has the right to use force to deal with ‘illegals’ and ‘encroachers’, and to punish those suspected of rioting, even if there is no proof.”

The other message, barely hidden, is that this is what awaits Muslims who so much as dare to raise their heads, even if a few Hindus also suffer as collateral damage.

Television news in this country has already fallen so low that it is hard to imagine it could go lower. But it has and it did, on April 20. There are no words to describe the craven, callous and gross coverage of the brutal actions by the municipal authorities in Delhi that not only rendered people homeless and crushed their sources of livelihood, but also sent out a frightening message to lakhs of others like them.

Instead of showing an iota of sensitivity, a section of TV journalists shouted, climbed onto bulldozers, and remained in perpetual exclamation mode as they recorded the mayhem. To get a glimpse of this, take time to watch this edition of TV Newsance by Newslaundry. It will illustrate better than any words what television news has been reduced to in this country. To term it farcical would be a gross understatement.

The behaviour of some TV reporters and anchors on April 20 has also underlined how far the media, and many journalists, have travelled from the concepts that undergird the role of the media in a democracy. Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

Apart from the basic message that the demolitions at Jahangirpuri, as well as in Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone and in Gujarat, seek to send out, there is a backstory that also needs to be understood and addressed by the media.

Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

This is the egregious ways in which governments, and city authorities, constantly use and misuse laws against the urban poor.

I live in the city of Mumbai where an estimated 50 percent of the population lives in semi-permanent housing. In the eyes of the authorities, some of these settlements are “encroachments” on land marked for other purposes, even if that purpose has remained unfulfilled for decades.

As a result, the sword of demolition hangs over the heads of lakhs of poor people who continue to find work and survive in this so-called Maximum City.

The reality, of course, is that in Mumbai, even the very minimum by way of basic services is not provided to close to half the population.

A recent study prepared under the Mumbai Climate Action Plan noted that 41.7 percent of the city's population uses community toilets. A toilet in every home is still a distant dream. Many of these so-called community toilets are in such poor condition as to be unusable. Children often squat on the open land in front or behind the toilets. Old people are compelled to use the open drains running past their homes, as even in many of the settled, or "regularised" slums, there is no sewerage system. And increasingly, people are building toilets inside their tiny houses and the waste is being flushed out into open drains that run through these settlements.

This is the state of affairs in India's richest city.

If you are a reporter based in any Indian city, the urban poor are a reality who cannot be wished away. They are driven to cities because they have no means of livelihood in their villages. And many have lived decades in impermanent housing, even on pavements, or alongside railway lines, because even if they found work, they could not find a place to live.

These settlements of the urban poor have a history, linked to migration but also to demolition. Jahangirpuri, for instance, was designated to resettle people pushed out from the heart of Delhi in efforts by the Indira Gandhi government to “beautify” the national capital. That term has increasingly come to mean that you either hide the poor, or send them far away so that urban poverty is invisiblised.

The people who were settled in Jahangirpuri in the 1970s were given small plots on which they were expected to construct their shelters. These people had originally come to Delhi from UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal. Over time, as with most other similar settlements, tin and tarpaulin were replaced with brick and mortar, and pucca houses coexisted with temporary structures – all under the benign eye of the authorities.

Yet, this history of the place, and understanding of what it was and how and why it is what it is today, was largely missing from the reporting on Jahangirpuri. We read about events on the day of the demolition, the loss to so many families, and the desperation with which people tried to save their belongings. But for people living outside Delhi, it was hard to understand where this place is, how it was established, and who were the people who lived there.

For the majority of viewers of television, however, the story was complete on that day itself. The municipal authorities had acted, they had removed encroachments and illegality, and they had sent a powerful message to those who think they can get away with violating the law. Laughable as that is in this country, where respect for the law is the lowest amongst the powerful and the well-heeled, it is this distorted narrative that is being pushed by much of the media.

We have seen this happen in the past in many cities. In Mumbai, for instance, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories. Such reporting perpetuated the belief that anyone living in a slum was an “illegal” and that the municipality was right in demolishing such slums.

In Mumbai, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories.

In 1981, at the height of the Mumbai monsoon, the then chief minister of Maharashtra, AR Antulay, conducted a demolition drive against pavement dwellers and slum dwellers that is memorable for its callousness. In response, journalist Olga Tellis and others filed a case in the Supreme Court arguing that even the poor were guaranteed the right to life and livelihood like any other citizen of India and that their shelters could not be demolished without notice and without giving them an alternative. The judgement in the case, delivered in 1985 by a constitution bench, has much in it that is relevant even today.

The court held that pavement dwellers should not be treated as trespassers. “The encroachments committed by these persons are involuntary acts in the sense that those acts are compelled by inevitable circumstances and are not guided by choice.”

Today, this kind of understanding of the reality of the lives of the urban poor is missing, not only amongst the class that does not have to fear loss of shelter, but also in much of the media. As a result, you get reports depicting the poor not only as lawbreakers but also their settlements as eyesores that need to be cleared out to “beautify” our cities.

In the three decades and more since the Olga Tellis ruling, attitudes towards the urban poor have hardly changed. You realise this if you revisit the 1984 documentary Bombay, Our City by Anand Patwardhan. It could have been made in the India of today.

The reporting on Jahangirpuri reminds us yet again how the media “discovers” poor and marginalised people only when something dramatic happens, such as a demolition. They forget that for the urban poor, the very process of survival, as Patwardhan's film so graphically portrays, is a daily drama. These are the stories we ought to be recording and reporting, rather than waiting for their lives to be literally crushed under a bulldozer.

India’s 'everywoman'

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 21, 2015

The Hindu Archives

An old woman lies in a hospital in Mumbai.  No one knows her precise age — perhaps 80, perhaps 90. She was born in a village near Ratnagiri.  Her date of birth was never noted.  So we don’t know.

What we do know is that she was widowed young, has a daughter who survived but who is also a widow.  The two women look after each other.  Their lives have followed an eerily similar pattern. 

 And both have spent their entire lives caring for others.

Years of standing at the kitchen stove, going down on their haunches as they swept and swabbed, picking up heavy buckets of water and doing all the other chores that domestic helps do has meant that both women have developed acute arthritis.  Their joints are stiff and swollen.  Yet they have no choice but to continue to stress these unyielding joints, forcing them to bend a little as they go about their daily tasks.

Although she does not work as a domestic help anymore, the older woman has suffered unbearable joint pains for years.  With age her condition has worsened. She lives in a 15x10ft house in a Mumbai slum.  There is no running water.  It has to be collected when water is released each evening and stored in a drum.  And there is no toilet.  The nearest public toilet is a 15-minute treacherous walk up and down narrow slippery lanes.  For an elderly woman with unmoving limbs that is a mountain she simply cannot climb. The only option is the indignity of open defecation in the drain outside her house.

Sadly, even as she lies inert in her hospital bed, hooked on to an oxygen tank, she is probably better off than she has been for many years.  The women’s ward has six beds; only three are occupied.  It is substantially larger than the room in which she sits, sleeps and eats in her own home. In the hospital, someone washes her, changes her clothes, puts clean sheets on her bed and brings her nutritious food to eat every day. In her own home, her daughter, already frail and still working as a domestic in two households, has to seek the help of neighbours and family members every time she has to help her mother sit up or move a few feet. It is humiliating and frustrating for both.  

Yet, a hospital bed is obviously not a permanent solution.  It is a temporary respite until a diagnosis is presented. And even when that happens, there will be no easy choices about what to do next.  Can a bed-ridden elderly woman, without access to running water and to a toilet, be nursed back to health in a claustrophobic slum dwelling?

I tell this story not only because the woman is someone I know, love and respect; a woman who has cared for me and my family; who has laughed with us, cried with us, scolded us and fought with us.  And who has never said ‘no’ to anything we asked for; who cared for us in a way we can never repay.

This woman is also ‘everywoman’, or rather every poor and elderly woman living in a poor urban settlement anywhere in India. Her condition illustrates the challenge that poverty, illness and age presents to those living in impermanent housing.

An estimated 26 per cent of people living in urban India live below the poverty line.  Yet, this poverty is not just about numbers, about rupees and paise.  It is the poverty of absence — the absence of basic necessities.  It is the poverty that forces families to make the heart-breaking choice of not treating the elderly, of taking them to their villages to die because they cannot afford to treat their ailments in the city.  It is the poverty that exacerbates the indignities that most elderly people suffer, regardless of their economic situation.  It is the poverty of hopelessness that you see reflected in the eyes of this ‘everywoman’.

I realise that these conditions will not change overnight, that many more like this woman will, and indeed do, suffer a fate worse than hers.  But it does strike me as ironical, and vulgar, that we should obsess about building “smart” cities and “global” cities while forgetting that for the largest number of people the solutions are simple and local.  

Affordable housing, so that people like this woman have an option to be cared for at home, should be the topmost priority if we want to build really smart cities.  With such homes will come water and sanitation.  This is not rocket science.  And is surely not beyond the capability of our “smart” urban planners.

Instead, we are deluged with plans to make our cities Internet compliant, with advertisements about dream housing where every desire is fulfilled (at a cost that only a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford) and of health care that means being permanently in debt as the medical industrial machine churns out profits.

A compassionate society is one that cares for the indigent and the elderly.  We are nowhere near the mark.

Link to the original article: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/indias-everywoman/article7337652.ece