Wealth issues

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 4, 2015

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Unbreakable spirit: Parveen. Photo: Kalpana Sharma

2014 ended on a grim note. The horror in Peshawar with the gunning down of 132 children by the Taliban left everyone, not just Pakistanis, shaken. So as 2015 dawns, will things change, get better, more peaceful?

On current calculations, there is little to indicate that the trend of violence, seen not just in this subcontinent, or in West Asia but around the world, is anywhere near peaking.

At times such as these, when we are filled with despair at the state of the world, and indeed even our own country, where hate-filled talk against people of other faiths and persuasions is now out in the open, I turn to individuals who face life with a courage.

So let me begin this year with the story of a woman in Mumbai. Parveen Sheikh is in her early forties. She is a member of Mahila Milan and organises women in Mumbai’s slums so that they can tackle together some of the myriad problems all of them face.

Parveen was one of eight women I met recently in an office in Dharavi. We discussed politics, problems and possibilities. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister, Devendra Phadnis, is considering setting up a special committee to deal with Mumbai’s problems to be headed by the Prime Minister. What should be the priority for a city like Mumbai, I asked.

Housing was the consensus. Affordable housing for the poor should be top priority.

Parveen’s personal experience illustrates how politics and policies deal with the daunting problem of the homeless in one of India’s wealthiest cities. While the government introduces schemes to deal with the ‘slum problem’ (as if it involved buildings, not people); for people like Parveen, the solution is often worse than the problem.

Parveen lived for decades on a pavement in Sewri, in the north-eastern part of Mumbai. The threat of eviction was constant. Yet, thousands of families like hers remained where they were, making a living by earning daily wages, using public — usually dysfunctional — toilets, and awaiting with dread for the inevitable flooding followed by disease that descended on them every monsoon.

In 2008, Parveen and her neighbours were told that they were going to be resettled. The road had to be widened. The pavement was to be broken. So they would have to move. “I was dying with happiness,” says Parveen. She had never imagined that in her lifetime, she would live in a pucca house.

With tremendous excitement, the families moved to the distant suburb of Govandi. What they found was certainly pucca; a seven-storey building identical to the hundreds scattered across Mumbai as part of the slum resettlement scheme. But you stepped inside and there was nothing. The rooms that were supposed to be their new homes were just bare walls; no lights, no fans, no windows, no doors, no toilet seats, no taps. Anything that could be stolen had been removed. But they had a roof over their heads. And for that they were supposed to be grateful!

The other side of resettlement is rehabilitation. In their new neighbourhood, far from the old, Parveen and the others could find no work. Parveen’s husband was a head loader. Earlier, he could walk to the place where he got daily work. Now he would have to spend a good part of what he earned to travel before finding work. Women who worked as domestics in a mixed neighbourhood had no work in an area inhabited entirely by people like them. So this was a strange formulate for rehabilitation.

Worse still, the area where most such urban poor have been ‘dumped’, as Parveen says, is right next to Mumbai’s garbage dumping ground. According to a recent journalistic investigation, people living in this area suffer from acute health problems, particularly respiratory, and their life expectancy is a third lower than that of people in other parts of Mumbai.

But the point of telling this story is not just to paint the grim reality of being a poor person in a very rich city, but also to recount the unbreakable spirit of women like Parveen. Instead of throwing up her hands in despair, Parveen set about dealing with the problem. With the help of her women’s group and support from the federation of slum dwellers, they have fixed their building. There are doors and windows and taps. There is water. There is even a lift, something that they did not have for the first four years.

Parveen breathes fire when she speaks of the authorities and their attitude towards poor people. But she will not let that get her down. What stands out is her determination to fight the system by organising other women like her. That surely is a recipe to deal with despair.

You too Mumbai?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 25, 2011

 

Changing times: A separate ladies coupe in the Mumbai suburban train. Photo: Shashi Ashiwal

A recent survey reveals that women don't feel safe anymore even in Mumbai, a city where women have been part of the public spaces for a much longer time.

In October, Mumbaikars woke up rather rudely to a reality that millions of women living in that great city have to live with every day — that of sexual harassment in the public space. The incident that caught media attention took place outside a restaurant in suburban Mumbai. A group of friends, men and women, stepped outside the restaurant. When one of the young men objected to lewd remarks being directed at a woman in their group by four men who were hanging around, it first appeared that the matter would end there. Instead, these four returned with reinforcements, set upon the men in the group, killed one, Keenan Santos, on the spot and grievously wounded another, Reuben Fernandes. The latter died in hospital.

The incident shocked the city. Was it safe no longer for women to go out even with men friends? Was it unwise for men to intervene if women are harassed? And why did none of the people who stood by and watched intervene or call the police? Could this really be happening in Mumbai, a city where women feel safer than they do in practically any other city in the country?

Shocking findings

A recent survey initiated by the women's resource group Akshara in Mumbai along with Hindustan Times and market research organisation Cfore has put some concrete numbers behind this unfortunate but emerging reality in the city, that women are not as safe as they thought they were. Of the 4,255 women interviewed for the survey, 99 per cent of them said they did not feel safe. What has changed to make so many women feel unsafe?

The public transport system in Mumbai is still better than in most Indian cities. Between the BEST buses and the local trains, over 80 per cent of the city's population travels. You would not know this if you saw the traffic jams at all times of the day. Yet, even people with cars and two-wheelers prefer Mumbai's public transport system. It is certainly a better and more pleasant option than spending long hours on the road. It is by no means as comfortable as the Delhi Metro. But the local trains especially are efficient and transport millions of people each day, way beyond their capacity.

Mumbai's local trains have separate women's compartments that do help in minimising the chances of sexual harassment on the trains. But in the buses, although there are a few seats reserved for women, there is no such separation between the space occupied by the men and women. It is here that women report the maximum amount of harassment by way of men rubbing against them, feeling them up etc. The survey revealed that 46 per cent of the women reported being sexually harassed. However, unlike Delhi, where women travelling on buses are afraid to shout or object to harassment because other passengers rarely support them, in Mumbai by and large women do get such support.

Apart from the buses, on Mumbai's streets too women report being touched, followed and subjected to lewd remarks. After dark, in areas such as the pedestrian underpasses, they feel particularly vulnerable. Girl students find that stepping outside their colleges is often hazardous as men are waiting to ply them with unwanted attention.

Changing experience

Why should any of this information come as a surprise? It does because the perception that Mumbai was safer for women was based on their lived experience. Ask any young woman who has grown up in Bangalore, or Delhi, or even Chennai about the sense of liberation she feels when she moves to Mumbai. The principal reason is the ease and safety of travel, even at late hours of the night. This gives them a sense of freedom, of choice, that they do not have in places where their movements are restricted because of the absence of safety after dark or the inadequacy of transport.

Women have used the trains and buses in Mumbai for decades. They have been in the public space, working in offices, selling wares on the streets, running small businesses, working in restaurants and in a myriad other jobs. So women have been an integral part of the public space in Mumbai for a much longer time than in more conservative cities in the North, for instance.

If despite this, the majority of women say they feel unsafe, then the reasons need to be considered and addressed. The steps taken to deal with this would be relevant not just for Mumbai's women, but for women in other cities as well.

One of the telling statistics in the survey was that 63 per cent of the women who faced harassment never told their families. Worst still, in a city where women have counted on support from men if they objected, 78 per cent of the men interviewed (776 men were part of the survey) admitted that they did not help.

What should be done? It is clear a stronger law is essential to deal with sexual harassment — at the workplace, in educational institutes and in the public space. Women should not feel that they have no option but to remain quiet. But even if there is such a law, it can only be effective if women feel it is possible to use it. Many cities, including Mumbai, are now beginning to realise the importance of not just laws but making it easier for women to approach the law enforcers. Hence in Mumbai there is one number that women can call if they are attacked or in need of help.

Larger context

But even a stronger law, better policing, a more responsive criminal justice system will not suffice. What is happening to women in our cities is the result of a growing culture of impunity — where you know you can get away with breaking a law regardless of whether it is a minor misdemeanour, like driving through a red light, or more serious crimes like defrauding public funds or even murder. In such an atmosphere, not just women but anyone who is vulnerable will feel unsafe.

At a time when people's protests seem to be making some impact on public policy, perhaps women too have to launch protests that demand an equal right to safety in public spaces. “Freedom from sexual harassment” is a campaign that everyone would support. Akshara has launched a Blow the Whistle campaign, urging women to shout out if they are harassed. College students in the Mumbai are conducting a Zero Tolerance Campaign, the Chappal Marungi and Freeze the Tease campaigns. These are positive steps. Women cannot afford to sit back and be silent victims.

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New Delhi: Apartheid city

There are chilling parallels between the building of the ‘new’ Delhi by Edward Lutyens exactly 100 years ago and the construction of the global city today. Then as now, the men and women who actually built this increasingly segregated and fissured city have no place in it

In another hundred years, will Mumbai resemble even closely the urban chaos it represents today or will it become an orderly megacity where everything functions?  Will Delhi ultimately fulfil its aspiration of becoming a global city?  And in the process what will these cities lose and what will they gain?

Documenting Indian cities today is a tricky affair.  For they are changing at such a pace that even as you produce a document on a city, it gets outdated. In Mumbai, for instance, what were once the landmark textile mills that gave the city its nickname  ‘Manchester of the East’ have been erased and replaced in less than a decade by glass and chrome structures that display not a hint of the city’s industrial past.  Everyday there are reports of plans to replace the old with the new and destroy arrangements that have served a diverse population.

The changes in India’s national capital are in some ways even more emphatic.  2011 will mark 100 years since the British notified Delhi as the capital of India through a proclamation by King George V.  It is a fascinating century to study for it witnessed not just the dramatic political changes accompanying India’s move from colonial rule to independence but the physical transformation of an old walled city to one that aspires to become a ‘global’ city.  What is striking is the disturbing continuity in attitudes and policies of the colonial rulers and those of an independent India.

Finding Delhi, Loss and Renewal in the Megacity (Viking Penguin 2010), an edited volume by Bharati Chaturvedi, attempts to address the changes in the national capital from the perspective of those who are a low priority for the planners.  Perhaps more than any other city in India, Delhi exemplifies the pitfalls of huge investments that produce a city that fails to satisfy the basic needs of the majority of its residents.  Of course things could change and the city could yet become a more democratic and less segregated space.  But from the lived experience of millions of Delhi’s residents, especially those who have been rendered virtually invisible by the visioning exercises of a ‘global city’, ‘new’ Delhi seems less democratic, more fissured, than the old and historic Delhi.

Chaturvedi’s edited volume is an important addition to urban literature in the face of the direction of transformation in Indian cities.  Unfortunately, although she acknowledges that there are gaps in it – such as chapters that look at the disappearing trees and green spaces – the real gaps are articles that look hard at the economics and politics of land use and the absence of an affordable housing policy.  For in the final analysis, no Indian city will ever be deemed liveable if the desperate need for decent shelter by a growing number of city dwellers is not addressed with a sense of urgency. Yet neither local governments, nor state government, or even the Centre, address affordable housing on a priority basis as part of urban policy.  

Despite such gaps in the volume, at least a couple of the essays are important both for the perspective they provide and for the direction for the future that they indicate.

Lalit Batra’a essay, ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Slumdwellers in “World-Class” Delhi’, suggests that Delhi today is an ‘apartheid city’ that is the outcome of an exclusionary planning process.  He points out that while the colonial government made no pretence of being inclusive, the post-Independence governments of a ‘free’ India seem to have abandoned all attempts at being inclusive.

The turning point in Delhi’s history was 1857, following the anti-colonial uprising.  Delhi then was seen as a dirty congested place that needed to be ‘improved’.  A municipal committee was set up in 1863 and tasked to improve and ‘sanitise’ it with the help of public nuisance laws that could be used to discourage activities considered unsuitable in a modern city.  Thus tanneries, keeping draught animals and milch cattle, roadside hawking, slaughter houses etc were banned. (There is an eerie similarity to the current attitude towards some of these activities, particularly roadside hawking, something that gives millions of migrants their first opportunity of earning something when they arrive in a city.)

In 1911, Edward Lutyens was given the task of building a new city, away from the old walled city of Delhi, “as the perfect embodiment of limitless imperial power”.  Lutyens’ Delhi continues to be the embodiment of power even as other parts of the city struggle to survive. 

Batra’s essay brings out the chilling parallels between the building of the new capital a hundred years ago and the construction of the global city today.  Then as now, the men and women who actually built it had no place in it. A hundred years ago, construction workers crowded into an already congested old Delhi or went to live on the outskirts.  Today, they find places in slums that have survived demolition or move to the relocated slums outside the city. 

The pressure for affordable housing has been a constant in Delhi, greatly exacerbated first by the wave of refugees post-Partition, an estimated 4.5 lakhs, and thereafter the steady stream of migrants from the states surrounding Delhi and further afield.  As early as the First Five-Year Plan, the presence of slums in urban areas was noted and they were seen as a “national problem” and a “disgrace to the country”.  The Second Five-Year Plan acknowledged that any policy dealing with slums should ensure minimum dislocation of slum residents.  The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the Delhi Master Plan were supposed to address the need for affordable housing.  Indeed one of the features of the plan was “getting rid of slums by providing standard ‘decent’ housing for everyone.”  Yet between 1959-75, the slum population grew rapidly as provisions in the master plan were routinely violated. By the late-1990s, despite these efforts at planned development, Delhi had 3 million people living in 1,000 slum clusters.

By the time the age of liberalisation dawned, even this attempt to deal with the problem was abandoned, argues Batra, and was replaced by the concepts of “legal and aesthetic”.  Slums that were illegal and certainly not beautiful could have no place in such a vision.  And so began the policy of slum removal and relocation outside the city.  Batra estimates that between 1998 and 2010, an estimated 10 lakh poor people have been displaced in Delhi.  That is an astoundingly large figure.

The result of such a policy towards the urban poor is the creation of a city that has the superficial markers of a modern city but is based on making invisible the people who actually make the city work. 

A vivid description of exactly who these people are comes through in Vinay Gidwani’s fascinating essay on Delhi’s recycling industry.  It mirrors such industries in other cities, where thousands of silent workers pick, sort and remove the growing mountains of waste that modern urban living produces.  Yet, even as the service they render is being recognised at a time of growing environmental consciousness, there is little or no attention paid to their wages or their health. 

A memorable section of the essay describes women removing the PVC outsoles from discarded sneakers.  “As the soles heat up, along with the adhesive that binds them to the body of the footwear, plumes of noxious grey smoke waft into the air.  The smoke catches the back of the throat, so acrid that it is difficult to suppress a staccato of coughing.  ‘Dioxins’, my colleague mutters.  The women, who have no safety gear at hand, merely cover their noses with their chunni or pallu.”  What will be the lifespan of these women workers who inhale poisons on a daily basis?

Gidwani rightly argues that the recyclers of waste illustrate well the interdependence in the urban economy of the formal and the informal.  Yet while the formal is valued, the informal is not.  “How different might Delhi look if its ruling classes learnt to recognise the sprawling universe of people, places, activities and things that they currently scorn as marginal, peripheral, illicit or annoying as the enablers of their own lives in this city.”    Yes, indeed, all our cities would look different if the ruling classes had such an epiphany.

The volume also contains an essay on the Yamuna River by Manoj Misra.  Delhi is described as a city located on the banks of this 1,400-km-long perennial river.  Yet the part that flows past Delhi is pure poison and the city’s residents know little and care even less about this.  Manoj Misra of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan illustrates in his essay the callous and ignorant attitude of city planners toward the river and the flood plains that in the past absorbed the excess water in the river during the monsoon.  Today, the threat of flooding has become greater because the Delhi authorities have chosen to exploit what they deem are ‘vacant’ lands.  Despite expert advice to the contrary, they have gone ahead and built a Metro Rail Depot and station, an IT park, the Akshardham Temple, the Commonwealth Games Village, an electric sub-station and a mall on these flood plains.  Needless to say, the poor communities that lived around this area have been pushed out.

Perhaps the volume should have been called ‘Losing Delhi’.  For it is clear from the essays in the book and other writing on Delhi that what marked it out as a city with a history, a beautiful environment and a diverse population is quickly being replaced by an unsustainable and unequal megacity.

FINDING DELHI, Loss and Renewal in the Megacity, edited by Bharati Chaturvedi, published by Viking Penguin 2010, pp 171, Rs 350

Infochange News & Features, December 2010

(To read the original, click on the link above)

Fighting urban fires

Cityscapes column on InfoChange India News & Features

By Kalpana Sharma The urban poor do not worry about earthquakes or floods as much as they do about fires that frequently destroy their inflammable, densely-packed dwellings. In Mumbai, where half the population lives and works from slums, there is no disaster management plan, and only 1,503 fire hydrants out of 10,371 work. This year the monsoon seems to be taking its time to recede. Just when reports began appearing in the media about the monsoon ending, vast swathes of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra were flooded as unusually heavy rains led to widespread devastation. While seasonal floods are a hazard faced in many parts of India (and they usually get more coverage in the media if they also affect the bigger cities), the frequent disasters that visit particularly poor people in urban areas throughout the year are often overlooked. Even during the rains, the poor suffer far more than those living in permanent housing. Each year, the monsoon rains in Mumbai bring with them landslides that bury scores of hutments occupied by the city’s burgeoning population of urban poor. Despite repeated notices from the municipal corporation, these people continue to perch on hill slopes and remain optimistic that they will survive the monsoon, because they simply do not have an alternative. Perhaps in recognition of this, the Slum Improvement Board, under the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), builds retaining walls on vulnerable hillsides. But every year, most of these retaining walls give way under the weight of accumulated silt and water seepage, which weaken the walls. When the wall breaks, it is like a dam that has burst. The force of the water, boulders and mud is much greater than in a normal landslide. In its path, flimsy homes and the belongings of scores of poor people are swept away. On September 4, 2009, a huge landslide killed 11 people in Mumbai’s Saki Naka area. Not far from the site of this disaster is another site that was affected during the July 26, 2005, rains and where 73 people died. Earlier, in the year 2000, 78 people were killed in a landslide in Azad Nagar, Ghatkopar. Of the 107 landslide-prone areas identified by the BMC, most are in the Saki Naka area. Many of the retaining walls are, in any case, notional. In 2009, for instance, according to newspapers, the Maharashtra government sanctioned Rs 17.4 crore for 183 retaining walls to be repaired, constructed or built. But work sanctioned in 2007 was still pending -- of the 199 works sanctioned that year, only 111 were completed, 58 were still being worked on, and 30 had not yet started. Such disasters cannot be called ‘natural’. Nature might help speed them up, but they are waiting to happen at any time. And the solution for these disasters is not just emergency measures and disaster plans but a long-term vision of how to deal with the housing crisis for the poor in cities like Mumbai. Even landslides get their due in the media when they happen. But there is one category of urban disaster that is not taken seriously; nor are the root causes of these accidents or disasters acknowledged. This is the disaster caused by fires that break out with uncanny regularity in the slums of most big cities. Fires in well-known locations -- in high-rises where the better-off live and work -- draw considerable attention from the government and the media. Usually, after a fire in an office building in a metro city, the media runs articles on fire hazards in high-rises, raises questions about whether the fire department is adequately equipped to deal with such fires, whether buildings are following the fire safety norms, whether the space around the buildings is adequate for fire engines and for firemen to operate during such disasters, etc. But increasingly, a major section of India’s urban population does not work and live in such buildings. In Mumbai, for instance, more than half the population lives and works out of informal structures, many built of extremely inflammable material. Fires in slums are so common that they pass unnoticed except when they spread and threaten nearby formal structures, or when there is notable loss of life. Mike Davis, in his book Planet of Slums, points out: “The urban poor do not lose much sleep at night worrying about earthquakes or even floods. Their chief anxiety is a more frequent and omnipresent threat: fire. Slums, not Mediterranean brush or Australian eucalypti as claimed in some textbooks, are the world’s premier fire ecology. The mixture of inflammable dwellings, extraordinary density, and dependence on open fires for heat and cooking is a superlative recipe for spontaneous combustion. A simple accident with cooking gas or kerosene can quickly become a mega-fire that destroys hundreds or even thousands of dwellings. Fire spreads through shanties at extraordinary velocity and fire-fighting vehicles, if they respond, are often unable to negotiate narrow slum lanes.” (To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

A Reprieve for Dharavi

A reprieve for Dharavi
Cityscapes
(Column posted on InfoChange India News&Features)





Urban planners have proposed alternative approaches to Dharavi’s redevelopment, which would view Dharavi as a thriving and functioning urban settlement and not as a slum that needs to be flattened and rebuilt. The October assembly elections may just have given Dharavi the breathing space required to discuss these alternatives, writes Kalpana Sharma


For months it appeared as if nothing could stop progress on the massive Rs 15,000 crore Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP). Everything was finalised. Only the final bids had to be confirmed. Suddenly, with the announcement of state assembly elections in Maharashtra scheduled for October 13, the project has come to a grinding halt. With the electoral code of conduct in place, the state government cannot initiate any projects. For many people in Dharavi, this comes as a huge relief.

The history of the project, mired in controversy from the start, is a story of how such redevelopment should not be done. It all began when a developer, who already had a couple of projects in Dharavi through the existing Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) of the Maharashtra government, noticed the potential of developing the entire area. Its location next to the Bandra Kurla complex, where land prices were going through the roof, made it even more attractive. Mukesh Mehta of MM Consultants outlined a plan to develop all of Dharavi in 2003. He divided the area into 10 sectors and proposed that each sector should be handed over to a developer through open bidding.

Mehta successfully sold the idea to the then National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the centre led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The Maharashtra government responded by following up on Mehta’s proposal, appointed him initially as an adviser and eventually as the consultant for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project.

In the course of time, the original 10 sectors got collapsed into five, a separate authority was created to oversee the project and the government set about finding ways to give special incentives to attract private developers to take on the project. One of these was to increase the FSI (Floor Space Index) from the current 1.33 to 4 and allowing developers to use all the additional FSI in Dharavi itself rather than converting it into TDR (Transfer of Development Rights) to be used in other projects elsewhere in the city.

In the initial years, the project was estimated to cost Rs 9,300 crore. Today it is valued at Rs 15,000 crore. The delay has helped increase profit margins as land prices have steadily gone upwards, by 30 to 40%, although there was a slight dip in the last year. But between the date the project was initiated and the present day, there has been a notable increase in land prices. All of this benefits developers who are aiming to win bids to develop one of the five sectors.

Also in the interim, to pacify Dharavi residents who have argued that their existing spaces are considerably larger than the 225 sq ft apartments promised free to them under the DRP, the government agreed as a special case to increase the size of each apartment to nearly 300 sq ft. For this the relevant Development Control Rule (DCR) needed to be amended.

The project has inched forward, with the government inviting bids, shortlisting 14 possible developers and promising that by July 30 the final bids would be announced. Inexplicably, on that day, the entire process ground to a halt. The government claimed it had not yet amended the DCR to accommodate the bigger apartments for Dharavi’s residents. Hence the bidding process could not go through. In fact, this was a mere technicality. The thought of the impending elections, and having to face the ire of disgruntled residents in Dharavi, was probably a much bigger reason for postponing the final phase of getting the project underway. Now, with the election code of conduct, this government cannot take any more steps and the project will have to be revisited, or revived, by the new government that takes office at the end of October.

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