Dinesh Kamath's Editorial (Slum dwellers need justice) that was published in Newsband

Slum dwellers need justice

Slums in Mumbai need to be rehabilitated. The slum dwellers in Mumbai need stable housing, access to sanitation and quality life since they make up more than half of the city's population. This vast marginalized group lives under a cloud of fear unleashed by vested interests who want to appropriate their land. Mumbai has a huge number of people living in slums. The state government did realize this fact and they set up the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) in 1995 with an emphasis on using the slum lands as a resource. The idea was to rope in private developers and encourage them to redevelop areas by permitting more dwelling units than what the building rules allowed. The excess units were to be sold and the money so mobilized was meant to subsidize reconstruction of slum tenements. This approach appeared well meaning. However, it was blatantly misused, denying the needy the benefit of owning a house even as small as 270 sq. ft.

The SRA adopted improper practices that affected the performance of projects: proper evaluation of builders was not undertaken; dues were not recovered; projects were not properly monitored, resulting in poor construction and delay. As a result, Mumbai has so far rehabilitated only about 15 per cent of the targeted four million slum dwellers, even as the number of people living in slums has crossed 6.5 million.

To solve the problems of the slum dwellers, what is required is total transparency in decision-making, complete disclosure of project details, clear enunciation of specifications and deliverables, undiluted monitoring and periodic public consultation. Slum rehabilitation should be given the topmost priority by the government.

Mumbai is supposed to be the Bollywood capital. But it has most number of slums. Yet we don't see any movie or documentary depicting the truth of the city called Mumbai.

The true state of affairs in other cities like Delhi, Chennai, Kolakata is no better. The system obviously has failed to do justice to slum dwellers. Our system functions in a weird way. The upper authorities consume their share, the middlemen consume theirs and if the resource reaches in the hands of poor the bigger fishes there eat away the share of the smaller ones.

So the authorities should realize that it is the slum dwellers in Mumbai who are worst affected and hence it is necessary for them to take swift action to solve their problems.