Place to work, no place to live!

Poor pay the price for Mumbai's `Shanghaisation' (The Hindu Business Line,Feb 04, 2005)

State adopts `double-standards' in re-sheltering slum-dwellers

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Only after about 84,000 huts were flattened by civic officials under police protection have strident voices are being raised with support from Ms Medha Patkar of Narmada Bachao Andolan.

WHAT'S sauce for the goose is obviously not sauce for the gander. That's certainly so with slum dwellers in Mumbai where the Maharashtra Government is applying two different yardsticks to decide who should get re-housed at State expense and who should be left out in the cold.

Those who have been evicted from the route of the new, broad roads and extra railway tracks being laid to make movement easier alone are being given alternate apartments of 225 sq ft each. But those who have been bulldozed to make Mumbai shine like Shanghai — were they alone eyesores? — are being asked to fend for themselves.

Because the World Bank so stipulated, the Bank-funded infrastructure endeavour, Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) has already spent most part of the Rs 450-plus-crore on building apartments on Government land. Or else, the squatters would have had no defenders. But the others whose huts were bulldozed since mid-November 2004 have no protectors.

The number affected by the MUTP and those made homeless to make Mumbai shine like Shanghai may ultimately be alike, at about 3.5 lakh.

Only after about 84,000 huts were flattened by civic officials under police protection have strident voices are being raised with support from Ms Medha Patkar of Narmada Bachao Andolan. Even before she told the victims of the massive — and for the first time, such relentless drive to rid the city of slums — that they should return to rebuild their homes at the same spots, some 25,000 had done just that. A vexed civic corporation says it is not theirs' but the Government's job to protect cleared lands.

The backgrounds of all the migrants who colonised all vacant land, both private and public, with official and political connivance do not differ: They came to find livelihoods but not houses to live in. Of them, only those who luckily picked spots that later became the route for new, wider roads and extra railway tracks for the suburban trains are entitled to replacement housing costing over Rs 450 crore. The other squatters are the unwanted.

If the massive demolition drive targeted shanties put up after January 1,1995, those who are benefiting from the MUTP-driven housing including those who built them after that cut-off date and thus would normally be categorised "illegal."

Those built prior to 1995 alone are entitled to protection till resettlement. In the MUTP's resettlement all huts, regardless of their `legal' or `illegal' status have been treated alike. In the first 1996 base line survey, most of the potential beneficiaries were living, obviously, in pre-1995 huts but by the time they were supposed to shift , the number of those who put up their huts on those sites grew.

An official confirmed that, depending on the site, such dwellings "could be between a fifth and a third of the total. We have been flexible and people have benefited."

`Tsunami demolition': The drive which a former High Court judge, Mr Hosbet Suresh, calls "a tsunami demolition" and so far has flattened 73,500 shanties built post-1995 has no rehabilitation component at all. People left homeless are expected to move out of the city. Most continue hoping for help and remain in the open.

Some who linger on the devastated landscape, may soon be driven away in a second wave of action. The demolition drive's victims also stand to lose their right to vote because they are no longer residents of "given addresses" in the voters' lists; unless they find new ones, cannot vote.

This, however, has not triggered many protests because the priority is to find a home, not retain their voting right. And they had voted for this Government because they were promised their post-1995, but pre-2000 shanties would be protected. So what price the vote?