The shanty town on the outskirts of the airport impede its extension. Mumbai government aims to transform the city into a financial hub similar to Shanghai, but over 60% of the population live in shacks. Now it wants to renovate the Dharavi district, a shanty town home to one million people.

Mumbai (AsiaNews/Agencies) – “Clear” the area surrounding Mumbai airport of a shanty town home to 350 thousand people to allow for its extension.  This is the job handed down to Housing Development and Infrastructure on October 16th last by the Mumbai International Airport Ltd (Mial), group of GVK and South African Airports.   The .7bn redevelopment of the airport is seen as a critical test of the city’s ability to overcome the problem of shanty towns that are threatening to hold back its growth. In fact Mumbai government wants to eliminate the city’s largest shanty town in the centre which houses over one million people.

Mumbai airport handles about 18m passengers and 400,000 tonnes of cargo a year but is rapidly being overwhelmed by a boom in air traffic in India. It is not uncommon for aircraft flying into Mumbai to circle above the city for half an hour waiting for landing slots. Passenger traffic in India grew 15 per cent a year on average over the past five years while India’s airlines are expected to add about 400 aircraft over the next five years.  Mial consortium has been charged with expanding the airport capacity to 40m passengers and 1m tonnes of cargo by 2010 through the creation of a new terminal building and cargo facilities and an increase in runway capacity. But in order to do so it will have to take over the land currently occupied by the shanty town.

Mumbai is India’s economic heartland.  The demand for housing is on the increase with the arrival of large industries and thousands of workers.  Pranay Vakil, president of the housing giant Knight Frank, says that “Mumbai has a yearly request for 84 thousand new houses, while the government and private constructors offer only 55 thousand”.

60% of the 18 million inhabitants live in shacks in Dharavi shanty, found in the heart of the city. It is the world’s largest shanty town: 600 thousand people are crammed into 200 hectares. Entire families who live in huts made of cardboard boxes, plastic and metal, with little or no access to water and one toilet for every 800 people.  Beside it the Bandra Kurla Complex, business centre as been built.  Nearby the Diamond stock exchange and not far off the Bollywood cinema studios.  

The Indian economy is growing at an average annual rate of 8.6% and authorities want to transform Mumbai into a financial hub, a type of Shanghai of the Arabian Sea.  The government aims to form a consortium to demolish Dharavi and build a state of the art residential zone complete with a golf coarse, clinics, schools and the country’s biggest cricket stadium, investing over 2.3 billion dollars.  It is offering mini apartments of 21 square metres to families who can prove that they lived their prior to 1995.  It is estimated that over 57 thousand of them can, while many more have lived there for decades indeed, generations.

Moreover the shanty dwellers have their livelihood here, craft work and activities of all sorts, (tailors and leather workers for example) for an estimated 39 million dollars a year.  They say they cannot afford the cost of an apartment, that they would loose there support network and all human contact.  In August a hundred of them (Hindu, Muslim and Christian together) marched to ask the government to consult them first to find a solution and threatened a sit in on the railway.  “We built   Dharavi – they say – why should we leave?”.

 

• INDIA
• MUMBAI
• ECONOMIC
• EXPANSION
• SHANTY
• TOWN