Mumbai: When 40-year-old Asha moved into a sprawling slum rehabilitation colony near the Eastern Freeway’s exit in Govandi six years ago, she was happy that the 225 sq ft tenement was self-contained and her three daughters would be better off. But last year she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and, now despite completing the treatment, she feels a dull ache in her chest. “I fear TB is back,” she said. “We shouldn’t have come here from Nagpada. The sunlight wafts into my room only for a few days in the year. Moreover, there is no movement of air in the room.”
Indeed, the Natwar Parekh Compound with 1,797 households is far from being a coveted address—mainly due to environmental health reasons.
A freshly released study of 4,080 households in three rehabilitation colonies of Mankhurd and Govandi, including Natwar Parekh Compound, commissioned by MMRDA and carried out by Doctors For You, along with IIT-Bombay, found that almost 10% of the people living here have TB that has possibly festered due to poor living conditions.
A TOI team that visited the MMRDA-built resettlement colony on Monday was made to wear N95 masks by local health experts to protect against infectious diseases. As many as 35,000 people have been dumped in pigeon-hole tenements with poor sunlight and air ventilation.
“This place seems unlivable. It is close to the dumping ground. There is a lot of pollution. There is no sunlight even in flats on the fifth floor,” said Dr Ravikant Singh, founder of Doctors For You. The main problem, he added, is the inadequate distance between two buildings. “The distance between two buildings should be its height divided, but there is barely 8ft distance between most buildings. These closely packed buildings are designed for death.’’ Doctors For You has treated 400 residents in six years.
As reported by TOI on Saturday, Mumbai’s development control rules allow rehabilitation buildings for slum-dwellers and project-affected persons (PAPs) to be just 3m from each other. But the buildings at Natwar Parekh Compound are of poor quality, congested and garbage and sewer water flowing in the narrow gullies. The stench was overwhelming. Children play cricket in the tiny spaces between the buildings because there is no designated play area or a ground. “This is appalling, sub-human existence,’’ said one of the several health workers in the locality.
Recently, the grey-black buildings were painted as a part of the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. But the bright hues cannot dim the ill-health stalking the residents here. Till the fourth or fifth floor there is no natural light.
Rehana (26) got a double-whammy when after being diagoned with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, her husband and in-laws asked her to leave along with her two children. She now lives with her parents in a nearby colony.
Salma, a 43-year-old widow, left her self-contained room in Natwar Parekh Compound to live with her brother in the nearby shanty at Baiganwadi. “I lived on the second floor for nine years, but don’t remember sunlight shining into my home,” she said. The treatment for her abdominal MDR-TB made her prone to depression, prompting her to leave the “dark home’’ to stay with her brother in Baiganwadi’s slums in Govandi .
A walk with Saina, a counsellor with NGO Doctor For You, maps the outbreak of TB in Natwar Parekh Compound. The 10th row of buildings in the closely packed compound has the worst count: 51 patients in various stages of treatment or just been cured of the deadly bacterial infection that has returned to haunt Mumbai since 2012.