Mumbai's building collapses and the debris of housing policies

The financial capital of the country has witnessed six major building collapses in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region in as many months. Over 150 people have died. The latest spate of collapses started in April, when the Lucky Compound building in Mumbra collapsed, claiming 70 lives – the entire building was illegal, was constructed in a matter of months and flouted every construction norm. That was April. Just over a month later, Altaf Manzil in Mahim came down, taking ten lives, including two children. There had been unauthorized repairs and damage to foundation pillars, alleged the residents. The BMC had not only received the complaint but had filed an inspection report stating all was in order. Days later, another building collapsed in Dahisar. Seven people died in the building, which had been declared uninhabitable and had been vacated. Those living weren’t supposed to be there. It’s a miracle the building didn’t collapse earlier – built as a residential space, it housed heavy machinery for many months. Then, in early July, a garment factory building in Bhiwandi collapsed, killing six. One more floor was being constructed atop the building, but work – including the graveyard shift that took the hit – at the factory continued. Then another collapse in September in Mumbra, killing 10. And then, days later, the Babu Genu Building in Dockyard Road collapsed, killing 61 of its residents. [caption id=“attachment_114220” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Over 90 buildings owned by the BMC are extremely dangerous. Firstpost[/caption] In terms of numbers, the Dockyard Road collapse has possibly taken more lives than most other similar tragedies in Mumbai, barring Lucky Compound in Mumbra. Twenty-nine people died in the Laxmi Chhaya collapse of July 2007, 21 in the Datta Nivas collapse in Kumbharwada in July 2008, one dead in the Yusuf Manzil collapse at Grant Road in August 2009. Among the more prominent incidents from a few years ago, there is the Govind Tower collapse in Khar, in which 35 people had died in the late 1990s. But there is one more reason that the Babu Genu building tragedy should worry Mumbai. It was not an illegal building, not privately owned and neglected through years of World War II era rents perpetuated by rent control. Worse, it’s not the only building owned by the BMC – the country’s richest municipal corporation with an annual budget outlay of about Rs 27,000 crore, well in excess of some small states – that has been termed dilapidated and urgently in need of repairs. Of 950-odd buildings declared dangerous (different grades describe the precise state of decay of each) this year, nearly 150 are buildings owned by the BMC. Sources say over 90 of these are “extremely dangerous” and perhaps two-thirds of these 90 are still occupied. The occupants of these buildings, and indeed those who died on Friday, are key service providers in Mumbai. Friday’s victims were civic employees and their families – conservancy staff, labourers. Those who keep in working order the country’s largest garbage disposal system and most extensive water distribution network. It’s not only civic staffers who live or work in appalling conditions. Police quarters across the city are equally decrepit. In fact, in 2010, a query under the Right to Information Act revealed that over 1,300 policemen, including inspectors and juniors, lived in shanty colonies. In 2005, that number was over 4,000. That was over 10 percent of the Mumbai police force, police investigators believed to be second only to Scotland Yard as crime-busters, living in slums. That a government cannot offer decent living for its key employees says a lot about Maharashtra and Mumbai, but that’s only one facet of the problem. The wider issue is that housing for government staff, housing for all, affordable housing and the problem of dilapidated buildings cannot be viewed divorced from one another. Perhaps one reason for the absence of any creative solution to the challenge of housing in India’s financial capital is that there has never been one holistic view, with the result that half measure heaped upon half measure have attacked various faces of this monster, with little effect over the years. The most annoying thing about plans in Mumbai is the sheer number of them – plans for makeovers and promises to turn this literally stinking city into Shanghai, Dubai, Singapore, London have multiplied rapidly while proposals and schemes floated in the 1990s continue to be reviewed and tweaked and finetuned, and never implemented. That’s why nobody is outraged anymore when announcements of a general structural audit for various categories of buildings is announced after a tragedy claims Mumbaiites’ lives. It’s difficult to remember that the exact same announcement was made last month after the previous collapse. Certainly, 60-odd “extremely dangerous” buildings owned by the BMC cannot still be occupied months after Lucky Compound if these audits are being implemented? Successive governments have had little success in denting what is easily Mumbai’s biggest challenge. Take a look at their record. In 1995, the then Shiv Sena–Bharatiya Janata Party government launched a unique cross-subsidy route to rid Mumbai of shanties. Put simply, private developers get an incentive FSI to build apartments for sale in Mumbai’s highly speculative realty market in return for rehousing slumdwellers in situ, at no cost to them and in fact setting aside a certain sum per family to help pay recurring expenses on maintenance. Data from 2012, well over 15 years since the Slum Rehabilitation Authority was set up, show that the agency has built less than 1,70,000 homes – a far cry from the city’s slum population of over 65 lakh people, and still far away from the original target of 5 lakh homes that were to have been built in five years. Other mega plans for slum lands, the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (between 56,000 and 1,00,000) families and the shifting of slumdwellers encroaching on airport land (between 85,000 and 1,00,000 families) have stalled. Despite the Congress-NCP government’s every effort to sell the so-called kickoff of the former project during the campaigning for the 2012 municipal body elections, the truth is that what kicked off was one single building to house 300-odd families, laughable election-time lip-service that we will no doubt see once again as 2014 approaches. On the latter project, Transferable Development Rights worth crores have been paid out to a private developer who has already built 17,000 two-room tenements, but political hand-wringing over the fate of those not “eligible” for rehousing by virtue of the date on which they occupied their shanties has left those 17,000 homes mostly empty still. The policy itself left out large numbers of those it affects: Slums on CRZ land, for example, are not eligible for rehousing, how koliwadas can be repaired/ redeveloped in view of their changing demographics is still unclear. Other affordable housing projects were announced and then rolled back too. For example, in 2012, a government panel said the government’s ill-conceived rental housing scheme to build 160 sq ft homes (later revised to 320 sq ft) was not viable in several locations and had to be reviewed. In the absence of a single holistic view to tackle Mumbai’s housing problems, buck-passing and repeated assurances are easy to dole out. The survivors of the Babu Genu building will be moved out to other locations, the ex gratia paid, and the matter forgotten. Perhaps some of them will be moved to ‘transit camps’, the shanty-like structures that house thousands of families moved out of either dilapidated buildings or slums that were slated for redevelopment. Maybe some of them will join the thousands of transit camp residents who have been there for decades. Living conditions in those transit camps have steadily deteriorated, some of those structures are now in need of repairs. It could have been funny, had it not been so tragic.