The planning committee for Mumbai’s new development plan has recommended a review of the builder-driven Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme, which has created “miserable living” conditions for slum dwellers dumped in congested high rises.
Earlier this week, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said, “We will review the development control rules of SRA.” He was responding to a TOI query about the recent report by a team of health experts who found a high incidence of TB among people living in three resettlement colonies in Govandi and Mankhurd.
The government is expected to release the new approved plan for the city later this month. Last week, prominent citizens wrote to Fadnavis asking him to amend the rules so that better buildings are constructed to rehabilitate slum dwellers. Planning committee members said over the past 20 years, barely 10% of 12 lakh slum families, including project-affected persons (PAPs), have been rehabilitated in new homes.
“At this pace, it will take another 250 years to rid Mumbai of slums,” they said, adding that SRA projects have benefited builders more to take advantage of the policy. Some of the most expensive and luxury residential towers in Mumbai have come up as part of slum rehabilitation schemes.
Under the policy, builders must rehabilitate slum dwellers free of cost by building homes for them on a portion of the plot. They can then exploit the remaining portion to build skyscrapers and sell high-end apartments. Since the past few years, though, the SRA has allowed builders to squeeze slum dwellers in a tiny portion of the plot. “We have seen that in most SRA projects, slum dwellers are accommodated on 25% of land while the builder exploits a much larger portion with better amenities for the free sale component,” said a planning committee member. When the scheme commenced in the 1990s, the ratio was 40% land to rehouse slum dwellers and 60% for free sale. The official was responding to a series of reports in TOI about sub-human conditions of PAPs and the high incidence of TB in three resettlement colonies in Govandi and Mankhurd.
A survey carried out by Doctors For You in 4,080 households in three low-income resettlement colonies in Govandi and Mankhurd (M-East Ward) proves what housing activists and town planners have warned—that Mumbai’s development control rules push the poor into sub-human existence under the guise of rehabilitation. M-East Ward has the worst health indices, and is home to 10% of TB cases and 20% drug-resistant TB cases in the city. Mumbai has around 45,000 TB cases. Doctors For You data says some 5,500 TB patients are under treatment in this ward alone.
“The SRA policy has led to further ‘slumification’ of the city’,” said architect and housing activist P K Das. “It is a deliberate attempt to kill the city because the quality of life is severely impacted in such high-density towers,” he said and added that rehabilitation buildings were meant to be seven-eight storey high but the norm was relaxed and permissions given for over 20-storey towers.
Improve miserable SRA living quarters
