Subir Roy: Minimum sense on Maximum City

A draft development plan seeking to chalk out the trajectory that Mumbai will take over the next 20 years to 2034 had been published last year and immediately trashed, the Maharashtra chief minister promising a better draft for public discussion. Another draft has now been published and there is no comparable outrage. But key issues remain.

First, a report in The Indian Express points out, the two drafts are based on different population projections. Plan one (the first draft) reckoned that Mumbai's population will keep rising right through the period. Plan two (the second one) foresees that the population will rise till 2021 and then start declining. This makes a lot of difference in terms of infrastructure needed. Plan one projects a 13.75 million population by 2031 and plan two 11.91 million by the same year. Breathtaking how municipal authorities can make nearly two million people disappear by choosing an appropriate estimate.

This should be one more reason (the longer term one is that they are invariably flouted or mostly left unfulfilled) why the minutiae of master plans need not be taken too seriously. In India they matter only in so far as they show the attitude of those who matter to a set of critical interconnected issues - the need for affordable housing (nearly half of Mumbaikars live in slums), open spaces (you need them to be in minimum good health) and supporting infrastructure (shouldn't spend a huge chunk of your day commuting, often through traffic jams).

Second, there is also something more fundamental at stake - the issue of nomenclature. Is it a "draft" development plan or a finalised plan? The official position is there will be public consultation on the draft until the government adopts a final plan. But the latest draft, as a report in The Times of India has highlighted, has put beyond public discussion issues like the alignment of metro, mono, elevated corridors and mass rapid transport systems, including bus rapid transport. If the transport system is critical to the future survival of a congested city (can you live a little better a bit far away and take a longish commute to work?), then surely the public should at least be heard on the matter. Discussing a draft plan without discussing future transport alignments makes the consultation process a bit of a joke.

Third, a critical issue has emerged on the future of the saltpans that border the island city's meeting with the sea. These act as natural barriers during floods. Destroy or amputate them and you increase the vulnerability of the city to the ravages that floods can cause. The beauty is that all this is being done for a good cause. A chunk of no development zones, including saltpans, will be given over for the construction of new roads and affordable housing. The official argument is: want a million affordable homes, agree to give up a bit of no development zone, so beloved of you NGOs!

Third, how will no development zones, mostly owned by businessmen and government agencies, be utilised? A landowner who brings his plot into play will have to build affordable housing on 33 per cent, develop 34 per cent for sale in the open market and leave the rest for open spaces which will also house public amenities. An old people's home, built on such open space, will certainly be socially useful but take away even further from actual open space which is needed to keep breathing.

Fourth, what is most disturbing is the provision that on a base floor space index (FSI) you can add any transferable development right (TDR) you acquire anywhere to build anywhere. This means that, at least theoretically, you can keep building upwards in an already highly congested area which simply does not have the supporting infrastructure (for example, narrow roads that cannot take any more traffic), because you have acquired TDRs elsewhere.

Fifth, commercial structures will actually be encouraged by allowing them an FSI of five to, guess what, create employment, when the need of the hour is to stop the flow of rural people into cities like Mumbai in search of jobs because these urban sprawls are already bursting at the seams. This is a recipe for disaster.

There seems to be a reluctance to even acknowledge that slums exist. When the key issue should be, what to do with a megacity so teaming with slums, the draft plan has not mapped out the slums. The job has been left to the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. That is indeed the key agency in this regard, but then why have an overall picture in the form of a development plan with key areas left fuzzy?

A major focus of the development plan is to give more incentives to builders to "develop" slums when the existing incentives have already proved to be highly lucrative for them. The emerging leitmotif of the city is some of poshest developments coming up on former slum land. This brings us to the final question: where did the earlier slum-dwellers go? Did a reasonable proportion of them move into proper housing? Or did they end up creating new slums in the city's outskirts? And if they did, will the city's civil society be able to have a say in the delineation of commuter links that enable them to come to the city rapidly to work? On present reckoning, no.

subirkroy@gmail.com