For the last decade or so, Mumbai has become a city under construction. With horizontal spaces being bought by private developers, the vertical growth of the city has been phenomenal. In a skyline dotted with skyscrapers, the race for the tallest building has been an ongoing feature.
Since the focus of the Eknath Shinde-led Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena-BJP government is to accelerate the pace of development and redevelopment in Mumbai and the areas that comprise the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), a polluted skyline with construction haze has become a part of the lives of the people here. Every corner of the MMR, comprising Mumbai and its suburbs Thane, Panvel, Palghar, Bhiwandi and some eastern suburbs, seems to be under construction.
For a large population living in Mumbai, displacement due to redevelopment has become an unwelcome reality. The vast area extending from Lalbaug-Parel in central Mumbai to Girgaum in south Mumbai where textile mills were once active has seen heightened redevelopment activity for over a decade. Tall high-rises with their state-of-the-art buildings have replaced a majority of the chawls — single storeyed structures built in a cluster with common sanitation facilities. As private developers buy these iconic chawls, a feature unique to Bombay and now Mumbai, they will soon be a thing of the past. Each day, one or the other falls victims to the redevelopment bulldozer.
A study conducted by Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT Bombay) and released in 2022 indicated that the built-up area in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region grew faster and much more than the human population in this region. This study revealed that construction destroyed cultivated lands, forests, and water bodies in this region.
For independent writer Pandharinath Sawant, an 89-year-old resident of the Digvijay Mills Patra Chawl in Lalbaug in central Mumbai, his unwillingness to move out of his over 100-year-old home is seen as an “impediment” by developers who have started negotiating for the prime real estate of the chawl. Speaking to Outlook, Sawant said that given his age, moving out of his home was not a welcome option.
The real estate boom has transformed the landscape of Lalbaug, Parel, and Girgaum and the life of the chawl-dwellers. After the Haji Kasam chawl, the first to be demolished and replaced by a 23-storeyed swanky high-rise, there has been no looking back.
Redevelopment is a strange feeling for others who await it. All in all, Mumbai’s chawls have moved from being the slum dog to the millionaire with no pit stop in between.
The unbridled construction in Mumbai has experts weighing all sides and seeking for a relook at the development plans. Redevelopment has become like a magic wand, a dream shown to the poor and the middle class as a solution to lift them from their small, congested, and dingy homes in crumbling and derelict buildings across Mumbai, where the maximum displacement has taken place over the years.
According to housing activist Chandrashekhar Prabhu, a vocal voice about the self-development of structures, construction has become a constant in Mumbai. He says that with so many of the major projects being stalled, the cost has been enormous to the people displaced.
CM Shinde, who heads the Urban Development Department, has yet again given the go-ahead for the much-delayed Dharavi Redevelopment Project. It dates to February 2004 when the then-Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh had announced the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. Aimed at transferring over a million people living in Dharavi from the slums to plush skyrises “to change their lives for the better”, this ambitious project was scrapped due to the political policies of governments that followed Deshmukh’s in Maharashtra.
The state had planned to convert large parts of Dharavi into a world class business centre with high-rises housing residential colonies. Even after 19 years, Deshmukh’s announcements are yet to take off. Deshmukh, who served two terms from 1999 to 2008, passed away in 2012, but the ambitious project his government had planned has been stuck in multiple problems. To date, only 350 residents have been shifted to new houses constructed by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA).
Speaking to Outlook, a government official in the know of events said that there were multi-fold challenges in the redevelopment of Dharavi. These include: density of population, it is more like a township than a slum cluster; intermingling of residential and commercial spaces, Dharavi is fully occupied and has no space for newer structures thereby making transit accommodation a gigantic challenge.
“Though tenders had been floated earlier and extended five times to attract investors, there have been no positive responses,” said the source.
The Dharavi redevelopment project was conceived in the 1990s by Mukesh Mehta, an architect and Chairman of MM Project Consultants Private Limited. The project was scrapped by the Maharashtra government in 2011 despite its global tender in 2007 attracting 101 companies keen on taking on the project. Prior to 2004, there were small projects going on in various pockets of Dharavi. However, once Deshmukh had made the announcement for the redevelopment, all the smaller projects were stopped.
Though there are over 2,00,000 hutments in Dharavi, only 69,160 are legal and eligible for new houses. Surveys conducted by the BMC indicated that nearly 63 per cent of the residents of Dharavi were not eligible for new homes.
In 2016, a new tender was floated but the project did not attract any new bidders. In 2018, fresh tenders were issued again. In February 2019, Seclink Technology Corporation —a firm based in the United Arab Emirates— was selected. In October 2020, the project was cancelled yet again, this time on technical grounds.
In late September last year, fresh tenders were issued by Shinde and his deputy Devendra Fadnavis, who holds the Finance and Home portfolios, for the revival of this project. The incumbent Maharashtra government is seeking a management consultant and a new developer for the project to carry out the project. According to government sources, this new initiative too is yet to revive the interest of the developers.
Dharavi, considered as an informal industrial township, has numerous small scale manufacturing units which were not eligible for alternate areas under the redevelopment plan.
“The primary focus was housing and the small-scale units were not considered. The project would have been more of a displacement than redevelopment,” said a state government bureaucrat in the know of developments.
The Bhendi Bazaar cluster redevelopment project is already underway in a phased manner and has seen the handing over of houses to a number of beneficiaries. The project is funded and undertaken by the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust, established in 2009 to transform the crumbling Bhendi Bazaar area into a residential and commercial space with modern luxurious amenities. Spread over 16.50 acres, the redevelopment project will directly impact 3,200 families and 1,250 commercial establishments housing over 20,000 people. Eleven new skyrises will replace the 250 dilapidated buildings that presently stand in the area.
The Patra Chawl redevelopment project took off after being kept on the back-burner for 14 years. This project in Goregaon —a suburb of Mumbai— is spread across 47 acres of prime real estate and was cleared last February. The project —mired in many controversies— was taken up by Guru Ashish, a subsidiary of HDIL whose chairman Rakesh Wadhwan was arrested and charged with money laundering in the multi-crore Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank fraud case. Even as 672 tenants were left homeless, Guru Ashish had sold a portion of the land to three builders who had constructed high-rises with sale flats.
Patra Chawl was originally a barrack constructed by the British during World War II and the tenants lived in 265 sq ft houses. In the 14 years, the residents had faced numerous hardships as the builder had not paid them rent for years and failed to provide new houses to the existing tenants.
The Kamathipura redevelopment project is yet another ambitious plan which has been flipflopping for takeoff. The project named ‘Urban Village: Kamathipura Project’ will see the 16 lanes with 500 old buildings —some of which are dilapidated— with 3,858 rooms and 778 shops being transformed with modern high-rises with state-of-the-art amenities.
Though this project had been given the green signal by former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, who had led the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra, it will depend on the new power dispensation in the state to take up this stalled project. So far, there has been no word on the revival of this project.
In an interaction with the media during a housing conference last year, Shinde had said that through cluster development the government will try to fast-pace the redevelopment projects in the city. It will ensure better infrastructure planning and the rehabilitation of the project displaced at the same location rather than pushing them to peripheral areas, the chief minister had indicated.
