Jawed Khurshid

 

Mumbai enjoys the odd reputation of housing almost fifty per cent of its population in slums.

 

Out of around 1.8 croreMumbaikars, over five million live in tattered canvas and tin hutments apart from near about 7-lakh pavement-dwellers who sleeps under the starry sky.

 

Ever since the island city’s inception, slums have been an indivisible part of Mumbai's landscape. However, the first official enumeration of the population living in slums was performed only in 1976. It found 2.8 million people in 1,680 settlements all over the island city. The total population was then 5.9 million.

 

A second count in 1983 found 1,930 settlements. They contained 4.3 million people in 924,572 households. The number of people living on pavements was estimated to be 700,000. These two populations accounted for about half of Mumbai’s citizens.

 

Recent estimates claim that about 40 per cent of the city's population lives in 3.5 per cent of its area. The population density in these enclaves comes out to be a whopping 400,000 persons per square kilometer.

 

These numbers do not capture the human cost of slums; they give only an idea of the magnitude of the problems of low-cost housing in urban India.

 

In the past slums mushroomed around mills and other places of employment. Now they erect their tent in any empty space they figure out fit for settlement. Although older slums in Byculla, Dharavi and Khar were earlier separate villages, with their own traditional industries, most people who live in slums now work outside them.

 

The financial capital has failed to provide a pukka roof to almost half of its population. Every election witnesses stone laying rituals that promises steel and concrete roofs over every heads. Unfortunately till the next election arrives the ground either entangled in some legal web or sees little development. This speaks of the lukewarm approach of city administration and MHADA.

 

MHADA has earmarked two major chunks of land – one at Byculla (Richardson and Crudas) and the other at Mulund for developing houses for low income groups. The builders are drooling over these gold mines and have already sent their feelers to various nodal agencies. This may dampen the government’s drive to remove what many call an embarrassing eyesore.