Why Mumbai Has Slums

I started off my career as a business development executive after I completed my BA CID in mind that and you know juggling you know in the corporate world I also come to admire and be from a material city where I can afford Oprah's arts Pizza is about the way I can afford a meal once in a month and IPC but I really cannot have a peaceful sleep because it's really a big problem it's big problem for all of us because at the end of the day what matters is how Shakti Verma a resident of a self aslam in Mumbai Scott Cooper left the job that paid him one lakh rupees a month to start his own business according to him he would have never been able to afford a proper house in Mumbai on a fixed salary if you look at a map of Mumbai you will find these clusters of informal settlements officially called slums across the city along with varma 52.5% of mumbai his population lives in them all of them crammed into just 9% of the city's total geographical area the government defines slums as residential areas when dwellings are unfit for human habitation so why does every second resident of the financial capital of the country live in them the reason is simple because there are no formal affordable housing options in the city so the question is why does the city not produce formal affordable housing very simply one reason one important reason is that as long as land the cost of land is going to factor in the cost of housing you are going to have a problem of an affordability and land being scarce and Mumbai is expensive but others feel it is due to the government's indifference upon independence India had pledged to be a Socialist Republic which means the government had taken upon itself the exclusive responsibility of promoting social welfare projects including affordable housing or social housing now come 1991 the year of liberalisation the government dumps that responsibility and role and talks about facilitating the private sector it began to depend on privatization as a means for development undertaking development projects now that to my mind has been the major disaster leading to a state that we are now in where housing crisis has hit the roof where Slama fication our cities has begun to threaten our quality of life das is referring to the slum rehabilitation scheme by which private builders are roped in to construct flats for slum residents on a small portion of the slum plot while the larger portion of the area is used to build high-end apartments land is at a premium in Mumbai since the city is located on a peninsula over the decades the city has grown northward and so have the land prices the average cost per square foot for a house in Mumbai is 21 thousand rupees where is the average per capita income is 2.5 lakh rupees at this rate a 500 square foot house would cost more than a cruel a some out of reach for the average citizen according to a report by the National Institute of Urban Affairs around 95 percent of households in Mumbai cannot afford to buy a house in the formal sector slum housing was one response to this problem but living in slums can place a huge burden on families socially and financially the residents are routinely called encroachers and illegal settlers while others label them dirty yeah chica khana Khazana and Yoshi rich Patel DNA no urban planner an article made on Ebola Turkey yeah it's tricky see Heke it but if he shivered Vasari over cousin Joe ship crucify girls cannot Kelantan and example came to sky captain got accompany a camper oh I'm up who conquered am bidding I'm up to come capacity building it but Hannity Sumida homily honey detector up the react and some other Quindaro calsilica a poppy Lazaro a bob shark mostly cake honey banister budget oh - subic or time parag parag or any other to go sorry look like making a Vasari look up sivak compare summa cunningly they are bomb-making Hanabusa turkey taking a paramdham below both a minute karate mookie services later but job opening turkey diamond cutters on command coach Eska and coachman got their homes may be less expensive but they end up paying a lot more for water and basic amenities sanitation is virtually non-existent which can result in a wide variety of illnesses take Sanjay Nagar on the eastern edge of Mumbai a broken wall separating it from the dem nah garbage dumping ground families live here 7 members to a room the open drains were covered only 3 years back but they keep overflowing into the residents homes in the Raja - a security just karate teacher Layla get you mom doesn't play DVDs of cheese cutter cutter colada you can take him home look like a few yoga Olivia [Music] one would be tempted to think that the proliferation of slums is due to a shortage in housing but in fact Mumbai has the highest number of vacant houses in the country according to the 2000 17 and 18 economic survey around 5 lakh houses are vacant in mobile what explains this paradox in more recent years I think one of the facets that we have to look for is that Mumbai is no longer only a housing market it is an investment market and which is why the even though there has been very little buying in within the housing market for the last three years you still see that there is hardly any dip in the prices in 2015 NRA's invested thirty four thousand two hundred crore rupees in real estate in India houses bought for investment purposes mostly remain unoccupied but there's another reason why lakhs of houses in Mumbai are kept empty on purpose the Bombay Rent Control Act of 1947 which became the Maharashtra Rent Control Act of 1999 the Act covers 23 lakh buildings in Mumbai where the rents have been frozen and the pre-1965 levels this gives landlords little incentive to rent out flats in the old buildings experts believe however that even with the scarcity of land there is enough real estate in Mumbai to build sufficient formal housing units instead of commercial projects instead of high-cost housing projects on slum land which is cleared after rehousing them on 20% we if there was a restriction to those areas let's say we build only three hundred square feet to eight hundred square feet houses on them then we've done a report which shows that after rehabilitating the existing slum dwellers we are able to produce or construct 400,000 surplus affordable housing just through the slums redevelopment schemes on the other hand we physical planning of over 2,000 hectares of model land in Mumbai City and we find after rehabilitating the existing tenements who are residing on model and we are able to produce 500,000 surplus affordable housing so if you put these two figures of 500,000 through Mahara Landry development and slum land redevelopment then we produce 900,000 houses which is the shortfall that government has identified for Mumbai city there is reason however to be skeptical of the government's ability in undertaking the work Mumbai had an annual demand for housing of up to 50,000 units every year since 1947 however all of the formal housing put together whether it is public housing or privately built housing the output was not beyond 20,000 units a year so if both the government and the private players have been unable to provide adequate housing for the poor is there any other way what the housing is not a panacea it's not going to produce housing for for all privately developed housing is not going to produce housing for all they if you look at the amount of housing units that have been constructed by private developers over the past 10 15 20 years and if you project that for the future you'll find that they are not going to be able to produce enough affordable housing over the next hundred hundred and twenty years right which means that the only real viable mode of housing and effective and tried and tested method of producing affordable housing in the city is self building so really the focus the policy focus should be on upgrading and improving informal settlements and providing service land to people to build their own homes and what stops the government from doing that then doing that because if you regular I slums private developers will not be able to build flats on them and sell them in the market it's as simple as that on the other hand what about fuels that regularizing slums might encourage an influx of people into the cities just so we can get three houses the idea that if you have a good housing policy it will encourage people to migrate is completely you know muddle-headed because people don't come into a city because there is housing available you can come into the city because there is a possibility of a better life possibility of employment there are opportunities that the city offers that that's the reason why people migrate into the city by the turn of the twentieth century Bombay had become one of the largest cities in the world but the city lacked a proper drainage system which led to an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1896 the Bombay Improvement Trust set up in 1898 to create sanitary housing for the urban core demolished more houses than it could build and so the poor went back to living around the edges of the cheol's built by the trust in what would now be called slums in the 1920s the Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes visited the BI teachers and remarked Bombay is not housing its workers it is warehousing them a hundred years later not much has changed with the slum rehabilitation scheme threatening to do the same in the next episode we delve into how the scheme became a goldmine for builders and politicians while creating more pockets of informal housing in Mumbai [Music]

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Id: jPZp_ICmfhE

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Sat May 12 2018