Ginger Biscuits

Image and eaten by Pooja Ugrani

Of all the available biscuits, I like ginger biscuits best.

It is an acquired taste; so of course, they are the least easily available. When I can lay my hands on them, I tend to over-buy and hoard.  I have to, you see. In the boondocks where I live, resources are available only because they sell. 'Yeh item running hai'. New products do make their way on and off, but last only if they catch the imagination of the grand unwashed. Only running items are reordered.

This is not the way of the small kirana-wallah but the credo of the franchisee supermarkets as well- Big Bazaar, D-Mart, Hyper Mart will only stock items that will easily clear their shelves. The end effect is obvious- there is no diversity, no innovative products, no inclusion or freshness in the merchandise, only the staid and steady. So of late, no ginger biscuits. Also no coconut-orange juice, no basil and no Dindori.

In much the same way, our government has imagined 'smart cities'.

They have redefined ‘liveable cities’ to ‘cities that have the potential to give maximum returns’. In a great leap of associative fallacy they equate 'smart' with 'running items'- with economic viability. This ledger-book definition keeps citizens entirely out of the balance-sheet. If 100 crores are to be put into a city, it must generate 100 crores to be deemed smart.

This, in the long run, is a slippery slope. We can imagine stock patches of habitation with corporate built slickness and all round surveillance. A city where you can control your air conditioner with your mobile phone. But you cannot buy a packet of ginger biscuits, because not enough people like to eat it. Cities without diversity or inclusion, with only economic drivers, lacking socio-cultural touch points are cities heading for stagnation. We already have enough gated communities and failed malls to show us what such smart cities can become. No dogs, no bachelors, no women living alone or together, no musicians, no non-vegetarians, no Muslims. Nothing that is not conventional or conservative.

The great cities of the world have shown us one thing in the 21st century- they can run, grow, even flourish despite the government and their planners, not because of them. You live in one of them today. Look around. You have enough to complain about, but the city is not about to collapse. Diversity and everyday innovation power cities forward, social contracts that are made and remade on the streets power its spirit. And yet none of this is reflected in the Development Plans and indeed Smart City conceptions of the state.

Labels are all they are. Even definitions are difficult to come by, let alone directions.

Meanwhile, I dream of ginger biscuits.

Why building smart cities is not a smart idea

Why building smart cities is not a smart idea
Instead of trying to build 100 new cities with doubtful futures, the government should attend to the many places in India that are on the verge of becoming important urban centres.


In the 2014 Union budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley allocated Rs 7,060 crore to the development of 100 new cities in India. This was in keeping with the BJP manifesto for the Lok Sabha election this year.

“We will initiate building 100 new cities,” it promised, “enabled with the latest in technology and infrastructure – adhering to concepts like sustainability, walk to work etc, and focused on specialized domains.”

If the budget allocation is divided equally, each potential new city will get around Rs 70 crore. This amount does not build a city, but can presumably allow a feasibility study.

The refrain of “one hundred” had to be a rhetorical device. In the budget speech, this number became a mantra, with a number of projects given Rs 100 crore of funding. Then came the announcement that 100 new cities would be built.

What background data or realities of our country is this based on? There are eight metropolises in India, 26 Tier-II cities, 33 Tier-III cities and more than 5,000 Tier-IV towns. Current villages with the potential for future urbanisation number more than 638,000. All these are already in existence. These are not the new cities being referred to.

Those fresh, dynamic, extremely smart cities are greenfield developments, laid on land previously untouched. Development would, therefore, be swift, smooth and unhindered by the pesky and cantankerous citizenry that resides in every existing urban set-up.

The potential new cities are to be “based on integrated habitat development – building on concepts like twin cities and satellite towns”. Custom-built cities, emerging in the shadow of older towns, can be sterling examples of progress and best practice, undertaken, no doubt through the currently favored mode of public-private partnerships.

Will this simultaneously breathe new life into the older city, while helping the new one reach its stated potential? As one possible answer, consider Mumbai’s favorite means of redevelopment – hire a developer, erect a shining tower, sell it at market rates. Accommodate in afterthought the original users in a runt, a lesser endowed cousin to the skyscraper built in one corner. Now imagine this at the level of a city.

Urban Renewal
Does urban renewal have to be imagined only in terms of new cities? Such an approach gives up on any possible transformation of existing cities from within as too difficult and unlikely to yield the lucrative returns envisaged in any outsourced enterprise.

The reverse does not stand: if existing cities are to be developed well, then given the number of present urban settlements in India, new cities are not needed at all. All that land that is now rolling nature can remain just that. The new city can only be at the expense of the old.

New cities are designed swathes of infrastructure, imaginary spaces awaiting occupation. What attractors do they offer as potential? In our liberalized, liquidity-based, aspiration-fuelled present, their primary potential would be as investment, not occupation.

I overheard a commuter describing his acquisitions in the upmarket node in Navi Mumbai. “We have three flats in Kharghar”, he said, “but we've never once been there”. Spaces with market rather than social potential are built for instant gentrification, displaying all the hallmarks of new Edens and Elysian Fields, but keeping out Babel. They lack for nothing except life.

Mutant Impositions
New towns are fundamentally unnatural entities. They are vast, mutant super-impositions on landscapes devoid of habitation. Historically, cities grow organically, through accumulation and accommodation, where people come first, not infrastructure. Over time, through largely iterative processes, common law practices coalesce into traditions of urban behavior, remaining inclusive, and then through osmosis with other cities turning cosmopolitan. First settlement, then design. Every great metropolis is testament to this, located next to bodies of water, along caravan trails, next to natural resources. They grow by attracting migrants who see the value in those who have come before them, and learn from it.

Even new cities need a reason for their existence. Jamshedpur and Bokaro Steel had heavy industry to attract workers in the socialist 1950s. Chandigarh, Gandhinagar and Bhubaneshwar were new capitals. Navi Mumbai, on the other hand, envisioned as a twin city to the grand metropolis, took more than three decades to become viable. Lavasa and Amby Valley, exclusive by their very mandate, and despite their large publicity budgets, hardly appear to be urban transformers.

Smart City, Sim City
Planned cities take as much time to come into their own as unplanned towns. In the same manner of towns that grow organically, the individual potential of a planned urban settlement will be reliant on regional transformations, socio-economic and political processes and sheer blind luck.

You might remember Sim City, a vastly popular video game in the 1990s, where you played the mayor of a city. A large part of your time was spent laying out the city – its roads, networks and infrastructure, its public buildings and amenities. You then allowed users to move in, who came like ants chasing honey. Soon you would receive either praise and accolades from your citizens, or – if they did not like your layout – you would face strikes, rioting and arson. Good intentions are never enough.

Why not focus on the urban centers that already are? If only the government could overcome the fear of resistance and inertia from existing populations, overcome the desperation to show instant results, be patient, work for the long-haul well beyond their terms in office, then existing towns, from Tier IV to Tier I can be transformed – first through public participation, then through inclusive policies and the provision of social infrastructure, and finally through “enabling technology and infrastructure, and specialized domains”.

No one can deny that our big cities are overburdened. But for every one of those, there are already a dozen more on the cusp of becoming future cities with potential. If attention is lavished on these instead of the chimeras of a hundred new cities with doubtful futures, new India, with its changing demographics, may still benefit.

As Rahul Mehrotra, architect, academic and urban conservationist recently remarked in a discussion on urban change: “We do not need 100 new cities. What we need are 100 great cities.”

First published in scroll.in, Jul 19, 2014 • 07:00 am

Time Out Mumbai- Slow City

This piece was published in an edited version in the latest issue of Time Out Mumbai


Slow City

We must concoct a new name for the extreme sport of sitting in the path of whooshing traffic on Mohammed Ali Road with your back to it. Limb and possibly life is risked for a plate of saffron-hued firni outside Suleman Mithaiwala, but one spoonful is all that is needed to make the risk worthwhile. Above and beyond your head, long haul cars speed past nonchalantly on the snaking flyover with many names, the one that connects the Sir JJ School to the Sir JJ Hospital. At the Al-Madinah, plastic chairs and makeshift tables are always full at this time of year, occupied, quite comfortably by growling bellies in need of satiation.

Once upon a time, when Ramadhan was pronounced Ramzan, the all-denominational greeting ‘Khuda Haafiz’ had not yet been essentialized to ‘Allah Haafiz’, indeed when the concrete reptile flyover under whose grimy underbelly we now cheat death in order to gain the Kingdom of Culinary Heaven was not even imagined, eateries on the cross lane to Minara Masjid and beyond would lay their spread out nearly across the busy Mohammaed Ali Road,. For a month, at dawn and at dusk, vehicular lanes would be re-imagined as food plazas. Bombay’s hordes would descend on Saarvi, Shalimar and Noor Mohammadi, full of piety and perfume in time for Sehri and Iftaar. The moments before sunrise would pass swiftly, suffused with prayer and humility but the nights were long, filled with loud conversation and conviviality.

Life did take a downturn after the unimaginable events of the early nineties, but then life does find a way. Today, Allah be praised, even in its relatively constricted circumstances haleem, nalli nihaari, and a variety of char grilled kebabs occupy the mind as much as firni and maalpua, assorted barfis and the awe-inspiring aflatoon (the word by which the Arabs knew Plato). Elsewhere in the city, politicians hold Iftaar parties to stem the erosion of their flock, while the food corner between the Suleman and Zam Zam confectionaries requires no agenda to flourish.

Ramzan in Mumbai is a month of charity and fasting, but also thirty days of collegiality and general bonhomie. The fasting hours these days are quieter, given a summer that has stretched longer than usual, but evenings, despite the delayed monsoon go on and on, full of good cheer and loud humour. Does fasting make our city a warmer place? We should all try it then. Our city’s streets are used particularly well, transforming into spaces for eating, shopping and prayer. If the rains do not play spoilsport, each lane outside overflowing mosques accommodate the faithful. Azaad Maidaan on the day of Eid becomes a vast makeshift Idgaah.

Unlike other parts of the Muslim world that have taken the more rational path, using calendars to determine the times of fasting, India is still fixated on mandatory sightings of the sliver of moon for beginning the cycle of rozas and, especially for ending them. As children, this was a time for one-upmanship, running up to the terrace and trying to spot the Chaand. This year, the chaand was attested to by several reliable witnesses on Facebook, a public service act that was, in turn duly liked and shared. Whatever works.

In the days before television, Muslim neighbourhoods of Bombay would be woken by a volunteer walking from street to street like a town crier calling the faithful to rise for Fajr prayers. Today, times for commencement and breaking of fasts are easily regulated by downloadable Android and IoS Apps, loaded with alarms that indicate various times of prayer. But the crier’s sonorous voice, often using popular tunes of the day resonates in my memory decades after this tradition gave way to loudspeakers and recorded calls.

We live in a world of punctuated chaos, a term coined by Bill Gates. He alludes to our current times as one of constant upheaval marked by brief respites, unsettling to those who experiencing them. There was a time (that Gates calls punctuated equilibrium) when we believed the world would never change, at least not much, when the full enjoyment of a month that brought the city together was enjoyed at a slower, more deliberate pace.

For me, this pace is represented by tongawallahs and Victoria drivers, those urban transporters who played a crucial role in short-distance commuting in Bombay right until the late seventies. Plying a beat that extended from Colaba to Jacob Circle, these horse carriages could carry four or five persons along Bombay’s North-South roads. After stuffing myself silly at Minara Masjid, staring up at starlit skies unencumbered by flyovers, sky walks or luxury housing, I could slide into satisfied somnolence to the offbeat clipclopping of the horse’s hooves, nodding my head to a rhythm that would take me home. It this slow city that I miss the most.

Time Out Mumbai - Unforgiving City

This piece was published in an edited version in 

Time Out Mumbai, June 20- July 3, 2014, Volume 10, Issue 22

Unforgiving City

Just how far can you go on forgiving the foibles of our city?

In these pages and elsewhere I have defended Mumbai’s dirt, its density, its congestion, its dearth of open spaces, its overcrowding as natural to the processes of the city. I have extolled the virtues of living together messily in those everyday acts that contribute to its vibrancy and richness. But sometimes you come across a sight that makes you feel that your own leniency makes you an accomplice to something inexcusable.

In the back of a fast moving cab, moving from Metro to Flora Fountain, trundling in the left lane of Mahatma Gandhi Road that is filled with competing four wheelers, I see a decrepit old man laboriously pushing a wheelchair with a frail and visibly ill woman. Life does not seem to have been kind to either of them, and, they are very obviously trying to make their way to Bombay Hospital. The man is negotiating the wheelchair with care, right in the line of oncoming traffic that is not accommodating of his presence in a vehicular lane. He and his charge have no business being there.

I wonder too. But, as I pass them and move ahead it is woefully obvious that the footpath where M G Road turns to meet Mahapalika Marg is simply unfit for anyone to safely push a wheelchair. Walking, even able bodied, is something of a steeplechase. There is encroachment and debris, with little space for pedestrians; trees, hawkers and porta-cabins all grow out of jagged and dangerously irregular paver blocks. There is no length of pavement that is level and true. What else could the old gent do, but to throw caution to the winds, risking not one life but two in the maelstrom of rush hour?

This is too much, even for me. What kind of a city is so unaccommodating that even the infirm and the unwell cannot make their way across it? It is an unfeeling and hostile environment that we have become benumbed to inhabit. I’d like to think that the good city is one we can take for granted. My assumption hardly holds when the pedestrian ways of our city are out of bounds for pedestrians. My gripe is not only about the specially-abled, but for anyone, unfettered by any means of transportation, completely vanilla, on their feet being pushed to the very periphery of presence. 

It is all right, I can argue, that Mumbai really has no open spaces in the European mould, no street-side cafes, no buskers, no flower stalls and souvenir stores, no bespoke urban furniture, no streetlights that geo-position you just by their unique design, no useful signage- our piazzas are our streets. Always have been. We live out our lives measured in walking distances, and latching on to the most meagre of landmarks- shop signs, building corners, even compound walls. As Sahir Ludhiyanvi once wrote: ‘Jitni bhi bildingein thi, sethon ne baant li hai/ Footpath Bambai ke, hai aashiyaan hamaara’. The footpaths belong to us. 

When even this is denied, everyone, panhandler, commuter or flaneur are all exiled from the legitimate city, and are compensated with skywalks built to stop jaywalking, at such heights that trucks carrying idols during the festival season can conveniently drive under. Jaywalking, like jugaad is illegal, but fills the vacuum created by the oversight of the state. The old man and the lady were reduced to doing exactly that by the uncaring nonchalance of those holding municipal responsibility. It occurs to me that, if a mishap should, heaven forbid, happen and either of these two get injured or worse, it is they themselves who would be held accountable and at fault for trying to occupy the vehicular road. 

We are losing those streets that traditionally had very little or slow moving traffic that were once populated by the walking public, doing this and that, other than merely making their way from A to B. Streets, where the pace of life was slower, where one could meet, chat, eat, buy, haggle, curse and move along. Nakhoda Mohalla at one end of Mohammed Ali Road once was a street full of fabric sellers where chiffons and chikan were sold with equal felicity. That was completely ruined with the flyover that swept past one edge. Now Mutton Street, the road that transmogrifies weekly into Chor Bazaar is now on its last legs.

Mumbai is probably the only aspiring world city that does not have a single officially designated pedestrian street. What does this say about its inhabitants and those elected to run it? They seem to have, like Pilate washed their hands and sealed the fate of pedestrians, those pesky critters that move in the manner of the pack donkey. Cars, fortunately for them, are not linearly challenged and predictable in their movements. Just the thought of the pedestrian being considered collateral in the larger fortunes of the city, is distressing, to say the least. 

And as for soft spoken me, I feel just like Howard Beale in Network, who pulls his hair out in great tufts and screams : 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' 

Time Out Mumbai- Re:claim

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, December 2013

Re: claim

Dear Mumbai,
re: your claim that the only solution to your congested, imploding self is to reclaim more land from the sea, here are our considered opinions-

We see from our records that your past actions re: reclamations on your good-self are chequered with inconsistencies- whereas your laying the many causeways in the mid 19th century interconnecting the erstwhile islands that constituted your good-self had some intrinsic merit in making you whole, this resulted in a low-lying centre prone to flooding annually and mosquitoes, a space you further exacerbated by raising several textile mills, creating a situation you have not satisfactorily resolved even after a century and a half.

Your next request for plastic surgery admittedly met with some success in 1940 with your self-named appendage- the Queen's Necklace. But you botched this up laying a road along the water edge rather than perpendicular to it, isolating a thin sliver of land only useful for walking dogs and/or resisting expressions of young love. All your subsequent actions, we note with concern, catered to the whims and fancies of automobiles rather than your own citizens, a trait so deeply embedded that you seem to think is normal. It is not.

We can only shake our head at your half-hearted, ultimately abandoned attempts to create a business district out of the sea in the late 1960s, which you ironically named after the same person who opposed you in the first place. We call your attention to the toothless gum that is the Cuffe Parade fishing village. Your desire to iconicize the Mantralaya only resulted in scuppering the very objective of your new city across the harbour. This reluctance to shift your administrative heart to Belapur put back both settlement and progress of New Bombay by three decades, making it a dormitory suburb. We must therefore infer, Mumbai, that you are, in your own words, 'aarambh shoor'; you know how to start things but not finish them.

It is with some relief that we note your fancy late '90s ideas proposed by your starchitect to reclaim a width of one kilometre on your western edge for 'public amenities' stayed on the drafting board. God alone knows how you would have monetized all that land in the millennium. On bended knee, we offer thanks to our city deity daily that your other scheme of enclosing your natural eastern harbour (linking Colaba to Uran, like bringing together a thumb and forefinger) in order to create, a 'giant freshwater lake' remained just an idea. Having seen your track record with sewage,re: the Mithi, we only shudder at what you could have done to the water you sought to sweeten.

Now, in your latest application, you have sought to expand on the aborted Nariman Point reclamation by another hundred hectares. We observe that you have enclosed testimonials from foreign experts to back your claim. Needless to say, you seem unconcerned that in the last decade your business centres have all shifted to BKC and the mill lands. Enterprise and commerce have moved north. Has this not helped change the mono-directional circulation of commuters and laid the base for a polycentric city? Who do you think will benefit from raising land to create high-end residential properties on the southern tip? You already have, at the last count, around 1,40,000 unsold ‘crore-plus’ flats all over the city. We suggest you sell them first.

Also, your current policy allowing the densification of those parts of your good-self that are already some of the densest in the world displays an ambivalence about your own urban future. While you ignore debris-dumping on mangroves and salt-pans without permission, you keep a twenty kilometre stretch of eastern docklands undeveloped, hidden behind tall screens. This, after shifting the bulk of your maritime commerce to JNPT. We suggest, earnestly, you look up the word ‘oxymoron’.

Your new proposal also seeks to create another ‘freshwater lake’, this time at Mahim, which you intend to fill with water from the Mithi. You never learn, do you?

To conclude, your past history does not give us the confidence to endorse your proposal to resume reclaiming land. By allowing redevelopment on almost every plot of land (built or unbuilt), to provide ‘long denied’ benefits to the owners, your developers are reclaiming the entire city anyway, bit by bit. You should be satisfied. And satiated.

Nevertheless, given our long association, we specially commissioned our back office to develop a proposal to reclaim land from Bandra West to Sur-on-sea (Oman East). We are told this is feasible, as the crow flies. The only reason we resist giving it the go ahead is our concern about illegal migrants, and the possible dilution of your city’s culture.




The image at the top of this post is Neibhur's 1764 mapping of Bombay's islands.
This image was one of many made free for use online by the British Library.

The Fifth Estate

Here is a long essay on the conundrum that is Mumbai's housing that was published in The Indian Quarterly; 

Volume I | Issue 4 | July-September 2013

The Fifth Estate

Mumbai’s developers are increasingly holding the city to ransom as its people desperately grapple with the dearth of affordable housing

I pass an hour in the local train listening to a man on his cell phone confess that he has no ready money for investment. What he does have is “property” that he will sell only when he gets the right price. On a second cell phone he is already making deals for the next property to buy. “Give and take” is his oft-invoked mantra. This is bijness. There was a time when one came to Mumbai to do business. Today, Mumbai nagariya is the bijness.

Mumbai has always attracted real estate deals. What is so different today? The change is in the mind-set. In a city where green-field land is virtually gone, all land is now perceived as available for (re)development, even if already built upon. Once you accept this premise, the whole city is a very large pot of gold, which like Kuber’s ghada can constantly be replenished.

The built city, the one we always held as a social contract to be permanent, a city we could take for granted, is now temporal, almost tentative, a commodity. The home is now the new unit of exchange. Once, it was accepted wisdom that occupation of space, whether through outright ownership, long-term rental or even common-law territoriality was the stable base upon which Mumbaikars built a life. Their home was the costliest thing they possessed, but this was the one thing they could never afford to sell. To sell was a downgrade, a displacement to the northern boondocks, away from the downtown soul of south Mumbai. Now there is another option: an upgrade, with the promise of more square footage and some rokda. Now the very house you live in can be monetized, even as you live in it. This has brought a venal sense of entitlement for a homeowner to lust for every last rupee that can be squeezed out of a deal.

Consider Vallabhbag, Ghatkopar, a suburban neighbourhood largely inhabited by Gujaratis. Built in the late 70s, this is not a gated community but built along lanes ending in cul-de-sacs. Very urbane, with pocket parks, very upper middle class. Each building is uniformly four storeys high, in reasonably good condition. Today, individual building societies are sourcing out developers to hand over their buildings to take them down and re-erect new apartments, with added areas granted through the municipal munificence of Floor Space Index (FSI) and Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). Homeowners negotiate for sops (space and cash) as quid pro quo for excess square footage that the developer can sell for profit. Aspirations are created where once none existed. Charles Correa in a recent interview said: “Sometimes aspirations of people can be quite ugly”. Aspirations here, having reached a tipping point become the norm. All change is justified. 

More housing in Mumbai sounds like a good idea, but in some localities like Altamont Road, Walkeshwar or Malabar Hill the price of real estate has risen exponentially. The most expensive real estate deal in the city, in June 2012, was for a 28th floor flat in Tahnee Heights on NapeanSea Road, which exchanged hands at the rate of Rs. 830/- per square inch! According to a recent survey by Liases Foras Real Estate Rating and Research, more than 60% of new housing units cost over a crore of rupees each. Housing affordable to the middle class now amounts to only 2% of the available stock. What this means is that at today’s rates even areas as far-flung as Jogeshwari West (13,987/sq ft), Powai (17,717/sq ft) or Palm Beach Road in Navi Mumbai (14341/sq ft) can provide, at most, a modest 500 square foot, super built-up apartment for a crore (figures from magicbricks.com, Jan-Mar 2013). No wonder then, no developer wants to construct anything in a size other than for the luxury segment. The rising cost of upper-end estate is unsustainable.  More than 35,000 housing units in the city are left unsold. Despite this, there is no fall in retail prices—proof if any that while the city can no longer provide homes to live in, it is still a haven for speculation.

The developer has become the fifth estate of the city. The grab bag of goodies is growing. This has been made possible by changes in the Development Control Rules of Greater Mumbai (Clauses 33(7) and 33(9), for the most part) that allow for reconstruction of buildings irrespective of their condition. Kamu Iyer, one of Mumbai’s most respected senior architects, always lived in Gold Finch near Five Gardens, designed by his teacher G.B. Mhatre in the late 1930s. Buildings like these in Parel, Matunga, and Wadala defined the domestic fabric of Art Deco Mumbai. Iyer’s own celebrated monograph on Mhatre helped generate awareness for these residential buildings worthy of heritage preservation. Gold Finch is one of the best examples of Mhatre’s mature work. Now, it is up for redevelopment, in amalgamation with an adjacent plot. The new building will loom 16 storeys above the four-storey harmony of the once salubrious R.P. Masani Road, calling attention to its nouveau riche occupants.

“Gated spaces are not new to Bombay,” says Iyer. “Kalbadevi, for example, had many community-based wadis, providing homes for all economic levels. Redevelopment today will lead to both gentrification and stratification of former mixed neighbourhoods, reducing considerably the public realm.” With single plots granted permission to rebuild, planning norms and urban sustainability are impatiently brushed aside for the “greater common good”. It is not unusual to see single buildings springing out of otherwise harmonious localities like mutant incisors. These extrusions affect the relation between building and street, and constrict light and ventilation, especially on the lower floors. New housing, exclusively for the affluent, directly affects available infrastructure like water supply and parking.

In Mumbai today, the builder lobby is all-influential. Since the mid-80s, they have negotiated operational space within the development rules, and these “understandings” have become more and more concretised. No wonder then, a former Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief was viewed with so much resentment for tightening the screws on new building projects and reducing concessional FSI on such mythic devices as flower beds. His recent departure was the reason that, according to newspaper reports, most of the afflicted members of the lobby allegedly took off to Dubai to celebrate his leaving.

A survey of Housing Typologies by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in 2007,2007 identified 21 distinct types, reflecting Mumbai’s diversity. These included chawls, slums, slum resettlements, site and service schemes, slum rehabilitation projects, housing at the urban edges, townships in the suburbs and redeveloped dilapidated structures. Many of these are self-help housing, consolidating older inner city areas and developing newer localities, mostly without state support. One such housing site laid out grid-wise on a garbage dump has become Shivaji Nagar, Deonar. Each grid has narrow alleys with five or six hundred units on a plot of around 120 square feet. Unlike organic slums, Shivaji Nagar was created by re-housing families uprooted from other parts of the city. Today it is a thriving locality, with several communities making their niche in Mumbai’s emerging middle class. Its alleys are paved, and repaved before every election. Electricity is legal, bought from Reliance; water comes to every house through overgroundover ground pipes that run for hundreds of feet. There is no squalor.

Every family in Shivaji Nagar is on the path to a pucca house. This is possible because land costs are not factored in and these are houses built outside the credit economy, in rokda, as it were, as and when the householder accumulates enough to upgrade. The prescient homeowner in Shivaji Nagar looks to the future: in (re)building, he creates an upper floor for giving out on rent. For every home rebuilt, at least two families get housed. Nowhere in the upper city does this 100% model of increasing housing stock exist. The poor renting from the poor seems like a win-win situation. Despite this, as Rakhi Mehra of micro Homes Solution has written, institutions like the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) have policies that block out those who need affordable housing the most by making a 15-year residency proof for families and a monthly household income above `5,000 as qualifying guidelines.

In Shivaji Nagar, every family partners with local contractors, who are as busy with work today as developers like the Lodhas or IndiaBulls in the other Mumbai. Pankaj Gupta is one such contractor who has learnt his craft through a decade of experience and apprenticeship. He has the process of house construction down to such a degree of efficiency that project management consultants could take notes from him. He can build a two-storey Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) house from demolition to handing over keys in five weeks flat. Gupta is well respected, for as he says, in Shivaji Nagar trust is the only currency. His work guarantees follow-up repairs and general maintenance even after the family has moved in. He has to; he lives in the neighbourhood too.

Gupta is only one of hundreds of contractors who build solid, lasting homes outside the pale of the mother city. This upgradation is happening in many other wards as well. Mumbai’s slums have a history at least half as long as the city itself. Few slums are new, and their inhabitants, through years of toil, have lifted themselves up in the world. The contractors’ creations are quite unique, for they work in deep collaboration with homeowners, constructing the most blatant displays of aspiration. New homes proudly show off shiny ceramic tile facades, idiosyncratic aesthetics, designed interiors, well-appointed kitchens and toilets. Some homes even have false ceilings with decorative mouldings and small chandeliers, just like in the movies. All this, on plots the size of postage stamps.

And yet, Shivaji Nagar and other similar localities like  Dharavi, Wadala and Bhandup live in the valley of the shadow of demolition. The BMC can be both benign and arbitrary. In Shivaji Nagar, no construction is permitted higher than fourteen feet. Any violation and sledgehammers may swing. Even though many houses routinely flout this restriction, demolition is not a norm. There is a policy to live and let live, which is why an inhabitant can pledge his life-savings for a pucca home. Contactors and officials understand each other. Pankaj Gupta had just completed building his own home and office in March 2012 when the BMC demolished its upper floor. “Bees saal mein pehli baar hua (It’s happened for the first time in 20 years),” he says stoically. It has hurt him, but the reason is politics, not personal.

Mumbai now is vertically cleaved into a binary of high-end luxury housing and hands-on, user-generated housing. Outside of the slums, there is no culture of building for oneself, discounting single-family anomalies such as Antilla. The model for cooperative middle-class housing—the mainstay of the 1970s that allowed families with modest incomes to build apartments—has almost gone. The state that once patronised cooperatives by providing subsidized land has now become a trader and auctioneer of land. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), the state organisation responsible for generating housing stock, finds it easier to outsource to developers, at terms that benefit them. This sedentary mindset has permeated the rising middle classes: no one wants to do for oneself what they can get done for a price.

While the middle class is inexorably being squeezed out of the reckoning, slums remain the sites of true affordability and self-help. Badmouthed as eyesores and bastions of filth, civic bodies have mandated to make the city slum-free by 2015. The way to these Elysian fields is, naturally, to be forged by builders regulated by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), who are to re-house the so-called unauthorised but “eligible” slum dwellers in free units of 300 or so square feet each on 20-storey skyscrapers clumped together, while freeing a large portion of the occupied site for sale at market rates. Dharavi can now happily be renamed Bandra–Kurla South.

With policies allowing unilateral interventions by lobbies intent only on making capital, the collegial soul of Mumbai is being inexorably ripped out. Mumbaikars are now wilful accomplices to their agenda, bought over by ephemeral but colour-saturated carrots. When the pupils of your eyes can reflect only rupee symbols, you are reduced to a caricature of a citizen. Individual rights become everything, while urban responsibility is NIMBY—someone else’s concern. Mumbai seems headed down a one-way road to transformation for its own sake.

This city has had a history of reclamations—some that defined its urbanity, like those in the 1930s and 40s, and some contentious like those in the 1970s—but Mumbai has never been more a site for reclamation than it is today. Even as you read this, the land that is sought to be reclaimed is the ground beneath your feet.



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