Discriminatory Planning and Environmental Deregulation in Mumbai
It argues that the shift in Mumbai’s planning from its earlier ‘restrictive redistributive’ paradigm to its current ‘incentive-extractive’ one has led to the evolution of the city’s unique discriminatory and differentiated (de)regulatory regime. This shift has facilitated the construction of rehabilitation blocks and townships that evoke some of the most deleterious conditions produced during the laissez-faire period of late nineteenth-century Bombay.
The article will historicize the city’s planning discourse and practice, and explain this paradox as a convergence of three recent trends: a reconceptualization of the ‘slum,’ from its earlier focus on physical conditions towards legal status and aesthetic criteria; the characterization of public intervention and regulation in housing as a constraint on market activity; and a recalibration of planning as essentially the design of monetizable ‘incentives’ and regulatory ‘relaxations’ to enable the private sector to deliver development goals.
In 2006, a Mumbai-based NGO committed to ‘good governance’ filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Bombay High Court against ‘slum encroachments’ along 70 km of the Tansa Pipeline, Mumbai’s water mains. The issue assumed urgency following the 26/11 attacks of 2008, with the Court expressing concern over the ‘security environment’ in the city, and the safety of the pipes that carry water for the “citizens of Mumbai.” The court also worried about public hygiene “because, throughout the route of these pipes, there are hutments built unauthorisedly by people” (PIL No. 140,2009).
A four-member Committee of high-level bureaucrats was set up to prepare an action plan for the “removal of hutments on and around the water trunk mains in Mumbai” (GoM, 2009). The Committee recommended rehabilitating 8,790 hutments built before January 2000 in Project Affected Person (PAP) housing, and evicting without rehabilitation the remaining 6,193 “ineligible encroachers.”
Areas cleared on both sides of the pipeline were to be “protected using compound walls / fencing so that no new encroachments take place in the future.” It also recommended amending the city’s Development Control Rules (DCRs) to increase the Floor Space Index (FSI) for rehabilitation schemes up to 4.05, so that additional tenements in other locations for ‘eligible encroachers’ can be constructed.
In late 2016 the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) began to demolish homes along the Tansa Pipeline, acting on the orders of the High Court. Between 7,000 – 10,000 homes were pulled down in various locations (Sarkar, 2017; Subramanian, 2017). The plan was to build a 39km fenced jogging and cycling track, called “Green Wheels Along Blue Lines,” to replace the homes along the pipeline – and hopefully to “improve the health of the citizens” (Singh, 2018).
A few hundred evicted households found eligible for rehabilitation were forced to move 11km away in a township built for displaced slum dwellers in Mahul on the Eastern periphery of the city, almost an hour away from their place of residence. Ironically, families being moved have appealed to the High Court citing safety, health and environmental concerns – similar grounds that led to their eviction in the first place. Evictees pointed out that the township’s proximity to a state-owned petroleum refinery poses safety and health hazards, and that its remote location, poor transit connectivity, and poor infrastructure make conditions unlivable.