A longing to belong

(This article appeared in The TOI Crest edition)

by Ashutosh Pathak and Chatura Rao July 2, 2011


Zindabad. Zinda. Abaad — a life, a house. With a clenched fist and a winning smile, Shabnam Vakil Khan bids goodbye. She manages a 10x10 sq ft life, propped up with corrugated sheets. Two kids, a makeshift kitchen, an uneven mud floor covered with a plastic sheet, a decade of memories and knickknacks , and a stubborn black chicken, are shuffled constantly in this grid, leaving little room to breathe. Shabnam’s hut is one of 3,000 crammed into 21 acres of Annabhau Sathe Nagar, a slum in Mankhurd.

Annabhau Sathe Nagar falls in M-ward , which locals call Mumbai’s dumping ground — for garbage and people. According to a Human Development Report published in 2009 by the Ministry of Housing And Urban Poverty Alleviation, the maximum number of resettlement colonies exist here. It has the highest illiteracy rate in the city, as well as a child mortality rate of 66 per 1,000 births.

Since Independence, there have been a number of schemes to redevelop slums — Indira Vikas Yojana, JNNURM, Slum Rehabilitation Act (SRA), Rajiv Gandhi Awaas Yojana. The SRA, championed by the Shiv Sena in the early ’90s, comes with the cut-off date clause, whereby, if you can prove residence before January 1, 1995, you have the right to a one-room flat in a rehabilitation building nearby. If you don’t possess a voter’s ID or an electricity bill dating back to pre-1995 , you leave with nothing.

Explains activist Simpreet Singh, “The system is so corrupt that if a person can shell out anywhere from Rs 8,000-15,000, he can purchase proof to show he’s been a resident of this city since before 1995. But this cut-off date rule erodes the dignity of thousands who have to scramble around to prepare proofs of their right to a basic necessity.” Fear for their future drives the ‘apaatra’ or ‘ineligible’ to adopt corrupt means to ensure they get a house. This gives rise to a black market within the crumbling slums that facilitates bribery, forgery and extortion. Besides, a date-based parameter can only make sense in a scenario where slums are considered unwanted parts of a city to be swept away with a broom.

Shabnam’s Annabhau Sathe Nagar and nearby Mandala are illegal settlements. They cannot be redeveloped under the Slum Rehabilitation Act (SRA), because they came up after 1995. Instead they have been demolished frequently since the ‘Mumbai-Shanghai’ clarion call of the Vilasrao Deshmukh government in 2004 when over 80,000 hutments were torn down across Mumbai in a matter of weeks. A resistance movement is gaining strength here. At the front are men and women who laugh easily but have spent hours and days battering against the closed doors of Mumbai’s slum policy that deems them ‘apaatra’ or ‘invalid’ .

“They ask for an identity to give you an identity,” Santosh Thorat, 39, grins. “I’m standing here, I tell them, flesh and blood. I have cleaned the sewers, built the roads, worked on construction sites for 20 years. What more proof do you need?”

“I have two children,” says Jamila, 26. “In 2004, they came and broke down my home. They beat us and kept us in the lock-up till three in the morning. After they released us we saw that we would have to fight for a house. But first we women had to figure out where to set up a stove, where to find a dry shelter for the children to sleep, where to shit.”

Jamila and many men and woman like her have become activists. They attended and spoke at the Jan Sansad (People’s Parliament) organised by the National Alliance of People’s Movements, held at Deonar in March. Spoke up for their right to water, toilets and a home.

Shabana Khanum, from nearby Chikalwadi, also attended the Jan Sansad. For the first time in her life, she marched with others from slums across Mumbai, calling out slogans like ‘Ladenge; jeetenge!’ (We will fight; we will win!). As Mumbai expands inland, chewing up soil, spitting out towers and mini-cities , the dirt and debris from slums demolished to make way for these is brushed under flyovers, piled on the sidewalks, tucked along the cracks of a pipeline or the swamps of a wasteland. The scenes from a documentary film by Anand Patwardhan made in 1985 are also scenes from Mumbai in 2011. If these questions have been asked before, why has little changed?

Chikalwadi, next to the Deonar dumping ground, is built on a swamp. When people moved here, there was no vacant land so they filled the swamp with what they call ‘cutting’ — remnants of rubber soles from a chappal-making factory that arrived at the landfill as trash. The ground wobbles when you walk on it, because the rubber cuttings go only a few feet deep. Sometimes the water from the swamp below rises and seeps into the houses. People here sort and sell the reusable plastic that comes from various parts of Mumbai to the Deonar landfill. A family, children included , contribute their labour to the city, and earn between Rs 80 and Rs 100 in a day. Chikalwadi and the nearby Sant Nirankari Nagar have been facing repeated demolitions in the last few weeks.

In early 2000, people who couldn’t find a place in the city came to these distant suburbs. Local ganglords or small-time politicians gave them ‘permission’ to stay on the land in exchange for money. “I sold my wedding jewellery to buy this bit of land,” smiles Shabnam of Annabhau Sathe Nagar. “I have two small children. We had to have a place to raise them.” People bought mud for Rs 1,000 per truck to fill up the swamps and marshes, and gradually set up a community. These transactions gave them the assurance of being legitimate within a system that otherwise ignored them.

“The politics of the poor is street-level politics,” explains Amita Bhide of the School of Habitat Studies, TISS. “When the poor ‘buy’ slum land from the local land mafia (which is affiliated to various political parties — note which flag is flying over the slum), is the land the local mafia’s to ‘sell’ ? If you look at the struggles of the poor to gain a foothold in the city, all of it is illegal. It is a parallel system at work. But if you look at it in the context that there is no legal solution to the problem of housing for the poor, then this is the only way for them to stake a claim to a house, which is a prerequisite to working in the city.”

Slums in Mumbai, as per the city’s development records, began in the 1940s with the need for additional housing. Today, this need grows at a rate of 90-95 ,000 houses per year. Two per cent of these are for migrants, but the rest of the demand is attributed to natural growth. The city’s families expand, the children grow up and start their own families. The demand for 60 per cent of these 95,000 new homes come from the low income group. Since 1985, the state has almost stopped constructing homes. The middle and higher income groups depend on the market for housing. But who addresses the needs of the poor?

“My aunt came from Jalna district over 40 years ago when there was a drought there and they were starving. She and her people provided the labour that built the airport,” says Shobha Uttam Mule, 46. Her home in Ambedkar Nagar flanks Mumbai’s domestic airport. It’s a torturous climb from ground floor to the first, the ladder so narrow and steep. “Santa Cruz was a swamp,” she says. “No one asked us to leave when we cleared it. We have jobs. Our children and grandchildren go to school here. We don’t want to be rehabilitated in Vidya Vihar far away.”

The BMC plans to move the evicted to the treeless rubble of Mankhurd. The question is: What is to become of the livelihood of these people? Slum-dwellers work in road and building construction, as plumbers, carpenters, peons, rickshawpullers and taxi drivers, in delivery services, with the police, as domestic and industrial workers. They run small, profitable businesses . They work as lightmen, storyboard artists and assistants in Mumbai’s film industry. Six out of 10 people in Mumbai are slum-dwellers , and they do the innumerable jobs that keep this city dynamic.

People from some of the post-1995 slums across Mumbai, under the guidance of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, have been lobbying for an alternative to the SRA. The NGO re-educates the landless about their legal rights and the correct way to go about asking for them — this prevents them from being exploited quite as much and begins to empower them. It also fulfils the critical role of keeping the peace in potentially violent situations.

These people have been working systematically towards a redevelopment scheme which will include them in development. So now in Mandala, the BSUP (Basic Services for the Urban Poor), having been approved by the Centre, is a few formalities away from being passed by the state government. This scheme grants a flat in exchange for a standing house, no proof required. It also makes the slum-dweller pay a percentage of the cost of building it.

On March 23, over 20 slum residents rallied outside Mantralaya to ask for the Rajiv Awaas Yojana (RAY) to be applied to the redevelopment of their slum. The RAY has no eligibility cut-off date. It also allows the granting of land rights to the slumdwellers . “The community can play an active role in the development of their slum,” says Simpreet Singh. “It won’t be just builder-led …besides if residents get land rights, it will halt the bulldozers, putting an end to the agony and economic losses of demolition drives.”

In 2010, official projections showed that about 90 lakh or 9 million Mumbai residents live in slums. Mumbai provides them with a livelihood, and they in turn provide the services that fuel the city. But when they ask for a home they get the bulldozer and the lathi. ‘Humanism’ and ‘activism’ , in polite circles, have become taboo words — the responsibility of the other. Unless they become ours once again, the need to stop violent evictions and the problem of economy housing will not be urgently addressed.

While children from slums that range from bamboo-and-plastic Chikalwadi to concrete Golibar are growing up with the daily threat of dispossession, their parents — even the illiterate ones — are educating themselves with the ideals of a crucial piece of text: the Constitution of India. They are trying to re-trace the law to its origin. They find hope in the pixillated print of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s face staring back at them and a simple sentence in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution: “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to the procedure established by law.”

And in the spirit of the law, the Right to Life includes the right to a life of dignity.

(Inputs by Faiza Ahmad Khan)