Articles by Kavitha Iyer

More than four days after his younger brother died in a flooded sewer in Govandi in suburban Mumbai, 27-year-old Rahul Kumar was still in a hearse, headed to Gogri in Bihar’s Khagaria district, nearly 2,000 km from the financial capital, where the brothers worked as daily wage labourers.  “He did not want to enter the manhole, usko jabardasti utaara gaya (he was forcibly lowered into the sewer),” Rahul said of his brother Ramkrishna, 25, who died along with their uncle Sudhir Das, 35, on June 24. Rahul said they were construction labourers, who had worked earlier on building underground drainage…

On May 25, the Maharashtra government cleared the decks for the first-ever departure from Mumbai’s free rehousing scheme for residents of informal settlements since its inception nearly 28 years ago.  With elections due to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), and also to the state Assembly and Parliament next year, the state government announced that slum structures built between 2000 and 2011 would now also be eligible for rehousing under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) projects—only, this category of slum structure owners would not get free houses, but would pay Rs 2.5 lakh each. Until now, structures built after 2000 were…

Indian cities have long suffered the absence of coherent and consistent policy-making on urbanisation. As a result, they are plagued by governance deficits, inadequate infrastructure, poor land management, unequal access to clean drinking water, repeated bouts of flooding, severe densification of some areas and poor quality of air and public spaces.  For Devashish Dhar, a former public policy specialist at NITI Aayog, these are evidence of Indian cities being a blind spot in planning and policy. In India's Blind Spot: Understanding and Managing Our Cities (Harper Collins India, 2023), Dhar examines historical processes that led to haphazard development of Indian…

Ravindra Jhagde, 42, has a story to underscore how well-respected his father’s job as an operator in Standard Mill, Prabhadevi, used to be. “My cousin’s husband had to pick between two job offers. He could be a teacher in a government school in or around Bhor in Pune, or he could be a mill worker in Mumbai like my dad. He chose the latter.” Jhagde is a vegetable and fruits wholesaler in Dadar, barely a stone’s throw from the slum home he grew up in, where his mum and sister operated a khanawal, a traditional Maharashtrian eatery, from where they…

Whether a stampede may recur at a railway station you use everyday, whether property prices in your suburb will appreciate with the addition of a modern mass transit system, whether decrepit chawl buildings will be redeveloped before they collapse, each of these quintessentially Mumbai concerns, are or should be, addressed through an urban planning exercise. Unknown to us, urban planners’ designs and agencies implementing them dictate how far from work we live, how we commute to work, what quality of life we may enjoy, how tools such as floor space index and transferable development rights may densify a particular area,…

Weeks before her daughter was born, a heavily pregnant Chandni Bibi boarded a train to Murshidabad in West Bengal, from where she had another hour’s journey to her native village. Had she decided to deliver her baby in Mumbai, she would have to navigate the waist-high tidal waters that flooded the area around her home twice every day. A single room built of wood and sheets of scrap metal in a slum, her home stands on uneven wooden and bamboo poles driven into the soft soil where land meets the sea.  Among an estimated 6,000 homes built on the coastal…

Panchasheela Nikalje, 43, almost walked into a ditch full of water one wet July morning in 2022. “I don’t know if we have more rain or worse roads, or both,” she said over the phone. It had been a long day of work swabbing floors of vitrified tile in apartments in suburban Mumbai’s Malad. “But walking to go to work seems riskier every time it rains.” A resident of Ambujwadi, a sprawling colony of informal homes adjoining a coastal swamp in north-west Mumbai, Panchasheela says she goes to work regardless of the weather. “Bahut baarish ya bahut dhoop me bhi. (On…