BackClamour for housing in Maximum City
The only way one can solve the problem of housing stock for the working-class population in Mumbai is by offering incentives to developers
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Mumbai: The 1955 Raj Kapoor and Nargis-starrer Shree 420 had a scene where huge crowd gathers outside the office of Raju, played by Kapoor, after he publishes an advertisement in the city newspaper promising a home for ₹ 100. A similar scene was played out at the Mantralaya, Maharashtra’s state secretariat, last week. Thousands of people thronged the Mantralaya for three days in hope of getting a flat for just ₹ 54,000 at the Hiranandani Garden complex at Powai, one of the toniest addresses in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai.
Activists of the Maharashtra Democratic Front (MDF), an alliance of the Republican Party of India faction led by Prakash Ambedkar, and various small outfits with socialist and communist leanings, encouraged people living in slums and chawls of the city to rush to the Mantralaya and submit an application with chief minister Prithviraj Chavan’s office demanding 400 sq. ft homes at Hiranandani Garden in Powai.
Most of those who came to the Mantralaya were under the impression that the state government has indeed launched a scheme that gives homes at Powai for ₹ 54,000. They were not aware that it was a clever ploy by the MDF to corner the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government, which had failed to take any action against Hiranandani Builders, which was given 230 acres of land in 1986 by the state government for building homes for economically weaker sections. Instead, it has built homes for the super rich.
Indeed, the episode raises a question about ethicality of the tactics used by the MDF, especially when having a roof above one’s head is an emotional issue for everyone. At the same time, the mad rush to the Mantralaya underscores the fact that successive governments have not able to solve the problem of homes for the city’s working class population in the past 60 years. Two regressive laws—namely, the Bombay Rent Control Act, 1948, and the Urban Land Ceiling (ULC) Act of 1976, enacted in the name of poor—have contributed to the sorry state of affairs.
Before 1948, many mill owners, high court lawyers, cotton traders and others who had extra cash often used to invest their investable surpluses in rented housing schemes better known as chawls with the intention of earning steady and secure income through rent. However, the 1948 rent control Act froze rent at that year’s level and removed the incentive to invest in rented housing projects.
The second blow was dealt in 1976, when the ULC Act was enacted, restricting individual land holding to a mere 500 sq. m. Under the Act, the government was supposed to acquire all excess land and use it for affordable housing. But a recent reply by the state government under the Right to Information Act shows that out of 1,251 hectares (ha) of so-called excess land, only 42ha was acquired till the law was repealed by the state in 2007.
This simply means owners of nearly 1,200ha were denied the opportunity to use their land for development. Had this land became available for development over the years, it would have helped keep prices of property in Mumbai under check.
Instead, land in Mumbai has literally turned into a gold mine, with land prices skyrocketing and attracting all kinds of vested interests, ranging from the mafia to politicians. The play has been aptly depicted in several Bollywood movies of 1990s and the early part of the last decade such as Sattya, Company and Vaastav, among others.
By the mid-1980s, the government realized that it was beyond its comprehension to acquire the so-called excess land under the ULC Act. So it launched what is better known as the 10% chief minister quota scheme. Under the scheme, owners of the land who have excess land under the ULC Act were allowed to develop their land with a condition that 10% of flats will be made available to the state government at the construction site.
Such flats were allotted by the chief minister to various categories of people, such as freedom fighters, artists, journalists, sportspersons, bureaucrats, and members of Parliament and legislative assemblies, hardly benefiting the poor.
Getting approval for the 10% scheme also used to be a Herculean task as too many people at the municipal corporation, the Mantralaya and elsewhere needed to be pleased for such a scheme to take off.
The only way one can solve the problem of housing stock for the working-class population in Mumbai is by offering incentives to developers to build rented accommodation and small houses and not by announcing populist schemes of providing free houses to slumdwellers.
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