Fire, a death and the cooking pots: how Sanjay Gandhi Nagar came into being - and how it survived against all odds until the day police moved in —

New Internationalist, May, 1997 by Jeremy Seabrook

IN 1976, a construction company leased a piece of wasteland close to Nariman Point to house its workers. Mostly migrants from Karnataka, they built the 20-storey blocks that create the impressive skyline of Marine Drive. Normally, building workers live in huts or barracks on site until the building is completed; they are then expected to disappear.

In this case they didn't. When the lease expired in 1979, they stayed on. There was plenty of work in the area. Some worked on the cancer hospital, others on an extension to the five-star Oberoi Hotel.

Their land had been reclaimed from the sea, and was considered worthless - a place of marsh, rugged rocks, coarse grass, unsuitable for more formal

building. To the same site came others, attracted, paradoxically, by the security that came from its undesirable condition - poor peasants from all over India. Many found work as hawkers, sellers of paobhaji (puffed bread with spicy vegetables) and snacks to the thousands of people commuting to Mumbai and working in offices at Nariman Point. Others sold cold drinks - from a metal cart of refrigerated water at 50 paise a glass - plastic windmills for children, balloons and novelties around the Gateway of India.

Eventually, the huts covered more than one hectare: a conspicuous pocket of squalor in a high-rise city which makes Marine Drive one of the most dramatic urban landscapes in India. The people levelled the ground, strengthened the flimsy huts of construction workers, reinforcing them with wood and tin; bricks and old tyres were placed on dusty polythene roofs so that they would not be blown away in the fierce sea-wind.

Although a number of women worked as construction labourers, the majority were servants in the houses of the well-to-do in Colaba. (Some women reject the word `servant', and insist that they are domestic workers.) They washed vessels and floors, looked after children, maintained the houses they had helped to build.

It was not long before the people they served expressed their distaste for them as neighbours. The Cuffe Parade/Colaba Residents Association brought pressure upon the local authority to remove them from sight. As a result, the colony was demolished by the Municipal Authority in 1980. Having nowhere to go, the people simply rebuilt their huts. In 1981, the same thing happened.

In 1982 the slum was to be razed once more. Thanks to the intervention of Nivara Hakk, a local non-governmental organization that works with the urban poor, it was reprieved on condition that people would move voluntarily to a suburban site at some point in the future.

The people began to organize in preparation for the move. A residents' society was registered in April 1982. A school was established thanks to the efforts of some of the more far-sighted women in the rich high-rise buildings. They understood that if their servants were not allowed to stay close to their workplace, they would be denied the cheap labour which makes their lives conspicuously more pleasant.

The society took 10 rupees a month from the residents towards the costs of relocation, whenever that would be. In the meantime, the pressures of daily life gave little time for distant dreams. They had to live and work where they were, raise their children. Food absorbed the greater part of their daily wage. In the evening, by the light of kerosene lamps, in the little market and shops that had grown up in the slum, they bought rice, dal, vegetables, bananas, sugar and tea for the evening meal.

The rudiments of community were born under the constant threat of eviction. Removal meant more than loss of shelter: it involved the destruction of livelihood too.

In November 1985, the slumdwellers received notices from the Collector's office declaring each hutment owner an encroacher and liable for demolition. It was said that the site was to be occupied by a fire station.

That same evening, the slum was destroyed by fire. A child was burned to death. Although there was no evidence of arson, the use of fire by the authorities has now become a well-established means of clearing sites required for urban development - shopping malls, condominiums, urban expressways.

In this instance it was probably started by people inside the slum, with the support of outsiders, so that in the confusion they could loot and steal. It was just after the payment of the bonus given at the festival of Divali; many people lost their life savings, their wedding jewellery, the few belongings they had accumulated over a decade of labour.

The day after the fire, the State Government announced cash aid of 70,000 rupees -- just over 100 rupees (about $4) per person. Relief material offered by charity was pilfered. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the Government promised that the slum would not be demolished; but when the commotion died down, the State Housing Minister insisted that the people could not stay on the site.

Evictions in Mumbai were stepped up after July 1985, following a Supreme Court judgment that the municipality had the right to evict people obstructing footpaths or encroaching on public land. The words of the Supreme Court judgment became notorious for the social bias of judges. Of the street dwellers, the Supreme Court declared: `They cook and sleep where they please. Their daughters come of age, bathe under the nosy gaze of passers-by, unmindful of the feminine sense of bashfulness. The cooking and washing over, women pick lice from each other's hair. The boys beg. Menfolk without occupation snatch chains with the connivance of the defenders of law and order.'