Articles by Shirish B Patel

Dharavi in Mumbai exemplifies what is most ugly and what is most inspiring about slum life in a city. How should it be redeveloped to remove the ugliness and yet retain its community spirit, enterprise, ambitions and hope? Current plans are focused on profit-making, by developers and government, with the welfare of the residents an incidental nuisance. This article examines the many attendant constraints in developing viable solutions. One is the promise of free pucca housing for slum-dwellers, which seems to have become a given for all slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai. Another is the fact that Dharavi already has the highest living densities in the world, and redevelopment of the kind that is proposed will triple these densities, making living there unviable. The result could be that the present residents will sell out and flee, leaving Dharavi in the hands of high-income occupants living at more comfortable densities. An alternative would be to provide the essential infrastructure of water supply and sanitation, frame rules for redevelopment, and leave it to organisations of the residents themselves to take up reconstruction as and when they wish, in consonance with an overall plan.

The government of Maharashtra recently tabled its housing policy in the state assembly. It is a document that more or less sets out current government thinking on housing issues. There are no bold new initiatives. The gloom engendered by such thinking is marginally lightened by the fact that the housing policy has been published at all, and is open to debate: perhaps the government will finally listen to what the public, in particular slum dwellers, have to say.

Advantages of Bus Rapid Transit Systems Curitiba has high-floor double-articulated buses of 270-passenger capacity, with G-shaped tubular platforms enclosed in clear plastic and buses arriving with floors level with the mouth of the G.

Mumbai is confounded with a host of problems pertaining to housing the poor and the not-so-poor. With rising real estate prices, more and more people with perfectly respectable jobs cannot find affordable housing to buy or to rent, not to mention those who are self-employed or in the lowest strata of society. More than half the population lives in slums. Residential construction for rental for the middle and lower income groups stopped half a century ago, because of the Rent Act, and shows no signs of revival. There is widespread urban blight. This article reviews the existing situation and suggests a range of housing policies that could begin to address this particular aspect of Mumbai's myriad problems.

Slum Rehabilitation in Mumbai Possible If Done Differently Shirish B Patel EVERY major public project proposed nowadays in India attracts a knee-jerk reaction of criticism, opposition, hostility. This is because government has lost credibility as a body that in formulating schemes considers its common citizens' interests as paramount. Schemes are seen as furthering the interests of one wealthy group or another. There is doubt as to whether, beyond lip-service, the public interest figures at all among the considerations that are uppermost in formulating a scheme. That said, if we try to take a dispassionate look at the slum rehabilitation scheme of the government of Maharashtra (GoM),1 we find in it a curious mixture of the admirable and the dubious. And the hastily cobbled together. The hastiness in places is such that it throws into question the seriousness of the entire scheme. Let us examine each of these aspects in turn First, the admirable. For the first lime in independent India, a government has recognised slum-dwellers as contributors to the city'sgrowth and prosperity. Inconsequence. GoM acknowledges and accepts two important slum-dwellers' rights: the right to ownership of the land on which they live, and the right to water supply and sanitation Slum-dwellers are seen as worthy citizens, and deserving of these rights. The motivation for all this may well be the garnering of votes. No harm in that, as long as the motivation persists beyond the immediately forthcoming elections Next, the dubious, redeemed by a single Hash of the admirable. GoM's scheme makes two important assumptions: first, that slum- dwellers cannot afford to finance their own buildings, and second, that they cannot manage their own construction. As we shall see, neither of these two assumptions stands up to scrutiny. But to deal with these two supposed problems, GoM's solution is a scheme whereby the city's builders and property developers will organise and carry out the slum reconstruction. Finance will be provided through a Tree-sale component' of buildable area given to builder-developers to attract them to the scheme. The free-sale floor area is roughly equivalent to the floor area set aside for slum-dwellers, which in turn is to be generously provided: 225 sq ft of carpet area per slum household, regardless of size of present accommodation, offered also to pavement-dwellers. In a final, gratuitous flourish, all existing slum improvement programmes, even though some of them have proved successful and are wanted by slum-dwellers, are to be discontinued, on the ground that the new programme is going to be so much better. Cancelling existing successful proven popular programmes, for no reason, seems a clear indicator of fraudulent intentions. Why stop something ltic beneficiaries warn?. Unless we are misreading who the real beneliciaries are.