Infrastructure

During monsoons, road infrastructure in Mumbai becomes a nightmare. Potholed roads are seasonal and don’t fail to appear after the first shower. Just before the monsoon set in this year, the Western Express Highway, SV Road and other major roads seemed to be in a better state, creating an illusion that they would survive the season. Within a few days of rains, craters and potholes appeared all over Mumbai. The Twitter timelines of MMRDA and BMC were filled with complaints. Updates by the Traffic Police on traffic snarls on roads across the city. Source: Mumbai Traffic Police, Twitter A distance…

Bengaluru’s Namma Metro has one major advantage. It does not get caught in the city’s notorious traffic jams. The ground reality however is, metro construction is today a major cause of these traffic jams. Which the humble Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) bus does get caught in. At the drawing board stage, the metro was touted as the solution to Bangalore’s two key issues. One, getting private vehicles off the roads, thus reducing traffic congestion and vehicular pollution. Two, as being a much greener, affordable and accessible commute alternative as compared to to other options such as the city bus…

On August 24th, deputy chief minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis announced that about 17,000 slum dwellers residing around the Mumbai airport would soon be rehabilitated in the Premier Colony buildings at Vidyavihar. The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) would repair and improve the existing tenements to make them habitable for people to live in, he added. The Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) would later allocate it to slum dwellers occupying the 276 acres of the airport. The purpose was to clear 100 acres of airport land for the expansion of the airport, he explained in his statement in the legislative…

Several years have passed since the Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) was launched to rehabilitate slum dwellers of Mumbai, and promises of free housing and proper water and sanitation facilities remain unfulfilled.  After facing eviction from their own homes, residents are stuck in rented houses with developers neither completing the project nor paying rent - owed to them - to slum dwellers. Some projects have failed to take off the ground due to reasons such as disputes between co-developers. In other cases, people are stuck in transit camps for years together.  Those who have managed to get houses, claim poor living…

In 1995, the Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) scheme was launched to provide free housing for slum dwellers. Twenty-seven years later, the scheme remains stuck in a maze of unkept promises, incomplete projects and poor slum dwellers caught up in rented houses waiting to get their own houses in Mumbai. Urban planners blame the builder-centric approach for the lack of progress on this scheme.  Since its inception, the SRA scheme has built only 2.36 lakh houses. As of date, about 5,20,645 houses are proposed to be built and approvals have been granted to start work on 2,75,942 houses.  The task to…

Many of us may have bought a beautiful apartment or villa by investing most of our savings or even on a mortgage/home loan. After a few months of living in your new home, you realise that there are a lot of issues. For example, you may find water oozing from the floor tiles, or your wooden flooring has been laid in an uneven manner, door frames are not finished to the level they should be, electrical fixtures are malfunctioning, and water pressure drops. All these are niggling problems that will not only take your time but also more of your…

Lallubhai Compound in Mumbai's Mankhurd is one of those areas where nobody wants to live unless they are compelled by their circumstances. All the residents here were rehabilitated about two decades ago by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) in buildings built with the sole purpose of providing a roof, everything else was left up to the people. Up until 2009, the area lacked access to clean drinking water, there were no schools and no street lights; late evenings were a big no for women. While some sent their children to schools at Sion Trombay Road, which is about 4 km…

For a majority of the population, moving homes is typically a voluntary decision made with great deliberation, taking into account the impact on education, employment and health. However, for the millions of slum residents in Mumbai, the same exercise is a result of routine eviction and demolitions. If these families are fortunate, they are moved to slum resettlements. Consider the case of one of the largest slum resettlement drives in Mumbai, documented through the eyes of women by Ramya Ramanath in her book, A Place To Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai. An associate professor at DePaul University,…

This is the second and final part in the series on the history of building regulations in Mumbai. This part continues where the first left off, at the turn of the twentieth century amidst the administration's efforts at slum clearance. The Development Plan Preoccupation with affordable rents and slum clearance remained the mainstay of urban planning and governance in the 20th century. At the same time, efforts to address issues such as access to open spaces, amenities and concerns of over-crowding, traffic on roads were formalised and debated upon. The very first Development Plan was introduced in 1964 and sanctioned…

This article is part one of a series looking at how the history of building regulations and development has shaped the built environment of Mumbai. Part two will delve into the changes in building regulations over the twentieth century, through suburbanisation, the development plans and liberalisation. Ask Mumbaikars about the housing problem in the city, and you’re likely to get a different take on the issue from each one. Some will be up in arms about the pervasiveness of slums, which they call ‘encroachments’. Others will point to the absence of affordable housing, laying the blame on either the gaps…