As Mumbai looks to redevelop its eastern docklands, the more than one lakh slum dwellers living on the land are being left out in the cold. The city has no space for them. Its 2014-2034 draft Development Plan omits the communities entirely – as if they never existed. And earlier this year, the Mumbai Port Trust began demolition drives against the slums, breaking down hundreds of homes in Powder Bandar and Kaula Bandar.
These demolitions contradict the government’s own official recommendations. A report produced in December 2014 by a panel on dockland redevelopment, headed by former MbPT chairperson Rani Jadhav, proposed comprehensive rehabilitation of all slum residents. This was a reasonable plan that should have been embraced and implemented. Instead, MbPT officials have dismissed these slum dwellers as “encroachers”, painting a picture of opportunistic migrants who just recently set up shanties to freeload off Mumbai’s law-abiding citizens.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Long-standing disregard
Since 2009, PUKAR, a Mumbai-based research collective, has been conducting public health research and education in Kaula Bandar, a slum of more than 14,000 people on MbPT land. The work showed that, far from being recent in origin, the nucleus of this community migrated from Tamil Nadu three to four generations ago when they were recruited to work on Mumbai’s then burgeoning port. Some of them continue to work for the MbPT informally.
Many other men work for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai as drain cleaners, sewage workers or garbage collectors for the rest of the city – which is especially ironic given that the city provides no sanitation or garbage collection within Kaula Bandar. These slum dwellers now face the tragic possibility of being evicted by the very government entities that employ them.
Even those who do not work directly for the government provide immense value to the city, filling jobs that few other Mumbaikars would wish to perform. In the last three decades, many of the migrants arriving from Uttar Pradesh have started small-scale industries, producing bags, belts and other trinkets for consumption of the middle and upper classes. Other men in Kaula Bandar work in Darukhana’s ship-breaking industry, which is described by the International Labour Organisation as being “amongst the most dangerous of occupations”. As they rip apart these massive ships, their limbs are threatened, their lungs scarred with asbestos, their kidneys poisoned by lead paint.
The residents of Kaula Bandar and other MbPT slums have provided crucial contributions to the city despite being systematically denied access to nearly all civic amenities for decades. Formal water and sanitation infrastructure has never been built there. As a result, Kaula Bandar residents pay about 50 to 200 times the price of water paid by more affluent city residents. There are fewer than 19 functional toilet seats for the entire population of the slum.
The city stopped giving the area new electrical connections in the early 2000s, which forced many residents to tap into the power supplies of the minority of households that have meters. Children have been electrocuted and died from these tenuous connections. Overloaded fuse boxes periodically explode, and one such explosion led to a major fire that burned down more than 90 homes in 2013.
Serious toll on the health
Not surprisingly, this government neglect has taken a serious toll on the community’s health. After performing an in-depth health survey, PUKAR published a study comparing Kaula Bandar’s health statistics to a representative sample of other slums in Mumbai captured in India’s 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey.
The results were sobering. An infant born in Kaula Bandar is more than twice as likely to die as those born in other slums in Mumbai. Forty-six per cent of children in Kaula Bandar are moderately or severely underweight, as compared to 36% in other Mumbai slums. While 69% of children in other Mumbai slums received all government-recommended immunisations, only 47% of children under the age of 5 in Kaula Bandar were fully immunised. This child immunisation rate in a community living less than 6 kilometres from India’s stock exchange is comparable to those found in India’s far-flung rural and tribal districts.
There’s more. Men in Kaula Bandar are substantially more likely to be underweight, and women are less likely to give birth in healthcare facilities. The rates of illiteracy among men and women in Kaula Bandar are two and three times as high as compared to other Mumbai slums, partly because of barriers to creating municipal schools on MbPT land. Due to stress, nearly one-fourth of all residents met the criteria on a screening questionnaire for major depression or anxiety disorder – possibly the highest rate found in India. These dramatic disparities are evident when comparing Kaula Bandar to other slums in Mumbai, much less to the city’s formally housed population.
What do the city of Mumbai and the MbPT owe to the people of Kaula Bandar and other MbPT slums? We believe the fate of these slums, which are among the most severely marginalised in Mumbai, is central to the city’s moral identity. As the government seeks to displace them – to create floating 5-star hotels, public monuments and “leisure zones” for the affluent – their contributions to the city’s past and present have been forgotten. Their very existence is being written out of the city’s future.
The municipal corporation and MbPT should implement the recommendations of their December 2014 report and comprehensively rehabilitate all slum dwellers on MbPT land. After decades of filling Mumbai’s most unwanted jobs, often at the cost of their limbs and lives, while being starved of nearly all civic resources, the slum dwellers on MbPT land have suffered enough.
Ramnath Subbaraman is a research advisor at Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research (PUKAR) in Mumbai. He is also an Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.
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These demolitions contradict the government’s own official recommendations. A report produced in December 2014 by a panel on dockland redevelopment, headed by former MbPT chairperson Rani Jadhav, proposed comprehensive rehabilitation of all slum residents. This was a reasonable plan that should have been embraced and implemented. Instead, MbPT officials have dismissed these slum dwellers as “encroachers”, painting a picture of opportunistic migrants who just recently set up shanties to freeload off Mumbai’s law-abiding citizens.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Long-standing disregard
Since 2009, PUKAR, a Mumbai-based research collective, has been conducting public health research and education in Kaula Bandar, a slum of more than 14,000 people on MbPT land. The work showed that, far from being recent in origin, the nucleus of this community migrated from Tamil Nadu three to four generations ago when they were recruited to work on Mumbai’s then burgeoning port. Some of them continue to work for the MbPT informally.
Many other men work for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai as drain cleaners, sewage workers or garbage collectors for the rest of the city – which is especially ironic given that the city provides no sanitation or garbage collection within Kaula Bandar. These slum dwellers now face the tragic possibility of being evicted by the very government entities that employ them.
Even those who do not work directly for the government provide immense value to the city, filling jobs that few other Mumbaikars would wish to perform. In the last three decades, many of the migrants arriving from Uttar Pradesh have started small-scale industries, producing bags, belts and other trinkets for consumption of the middle and upper classes. Other men in Kaula Bandar work in Darukhana’s ship-breaking industry, which is described by the International Labour Organisation as being “amongst the most dangerous of occupations”. As they rip apart these massive ships, their limbs are threatened, their lungs scarred with asbestos, their kidneys poisoned by lead paint.
The residents of Kaula Bandar and other MbPT slums have provided crucial contributions to the city despite being systematically denied access to nearly all civic amenities for decades. Formal water and sanitation infrastructure has never been built there. As a result, Kaula Bandar residents pay about 50 to 200 times the price of water paid by more affluent city residents. There are fewer than 19 functional toilet seats for the entire population of the slum.
The city stopped giving the area new electrical connections in the early 2000s, which forced many residents to tap into the power supplies of the minority of households that have meters. Children have been electrocuted and died from these tenuous connections. Overloaded fuse boxes periodically explode, and one such explosion led to a major fire that burned down more than 90 homes in 2013.
Serious toll on the health
Not surprisingly, this government neglect has taken a serious toll on the community’s health. After performing an in-depth health survey, PUKAR published a study comparing Kaula Bandar’s health statistics to a representative sample of other slums in Mumbai captured in India’s 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey.
The results were sobering. An infant born in Kaula Bandar is more than twice as likely to die as those born in other slums in Mumbai. Forty-six per cent of children in Kaula Bandar are moderately or severely underweight, as compared to 36% in other Mumbai slums. While 69% of children in other Mumbai slums received all government-recommended immunisations, only 47% of children under the age of 5 in Kaula Bandar were fully immunised. This child immunisation rate in a community living less than 6 kilometres from India’s stock exchange is comparable to those found in India’s far-flung rural and tribal districts.
There’s more. Men in Kaula Bandar are substantially more likely to be underweight, and women are less likely to give birth in healthcare facilities. The rates of illiteracy among men and women in Kaula Bandar are two and three times as high as compared to other Mumbai slums, partly because of barriers to creating municipal schools on MbPT land. Due to stress, nearly one-fourth of all residents met the criteria on a screening questionnaire for major depression or anxiety disorder – possibly the highest rate found in India. These dramatic disparities are evident when comparing Kaula Bandar to other slums in Mumbai, much less to the city’s formally housed population.
What do the city of Mumbai and the MbPT owe to the people of Kaula Bandar and other MbPT slums? We believe the fate of these slums, which are among the most severely marginalised in Mumbai, is central to the city’s moral identity. As the government seeks to displace them – to create floating 5-star hotels, public monuments and “leisure zones” for the affluent – their contributions to the city’s past and present have been forgotten. Their very existence is being written out of the city’s future.
The municipal corporation and MbPT should implement the recommendations of their December 2014 report and comprehensively rehabilitate all slum dwellers on MbPT land. After decades of filling Mumbai’s most unwanted jobs, often at the cost of their limbs and lives, while being starved of nearly all civic resources, the slum dwellers on MbPT land have suffered enough.
Ramnath Subbaraman is a research advisor at Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research (PUKAR) in Mumbai. He is also an Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.
