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Why Goans won and Mumbaikars lost

Kalpana Sharma

If the Goa victory illustrates one thing for Mumbaikars, it is the importance of combining popular and vocal opposition with other strategies.

THEY ARE calling it a "people's victory." The Goa Government's decision to denotify the 2011 Regional Development Plan is an outstanding example of the power of protest by non-political groups. Opposition to the plan, mounted by the Goa Bachao Abhiyan, finally led to the Chief Minister denotifying it on January 18.

Political parties have latterly jumped on the bandwagon. But it needs to be recognised that the decision to denotify was the result of people's vociferous opposition. The fact that the Assembly elections are due in May also helped.

For people living in a city like Mumbai, the success of the Goan civil society groups comes as a reminder of what is missing in the city. Despite some opposition and several court cases, the Maharashtra Government continues to push through its plans to transform Mumbai into a "global city" that will ultimately have no moorings in its past, nor serve the needs of the majority of its residents.

This is precisely what could have happened in Goa had the people not raised objections. Goa is everyone's holiday resort. Its lush rice fields, forested hillsides and stunning beaches draw people from all over India and the world. Once you go to Goa, you become an addict. You have to go again, to breathe the clean air, to imbibe the laid-back atmosphere and to absorb its beauty.

But even as you return, you cannot ignore the gradual destruction of this unique and special place. Had the 2011 Regional Development Plan gone through, what little remains of Goa's forests and hills would have disappeared under a forest of houses and buildings. It would not have been Goa any more. It would have become one more polluted, unplanned Indian urbanscape.

To mount a civil society opposition of the kind seen in Goa in the last six months is not an easy task. It succeeded because it built on over two decades of environmental activism. In small villages and towns, people have become vigilant. They watch every development carefully and raise questions. The beaches of Goa have been a battleground for years. When five-star hotels tried to cordon off sections for their patrons, the locals fought and succeeded in establishing that the beaches are a public space and not private poverty.

The Goans fought for the Coastal Regulation Zone to be implemented and stopped the construction of a number of five-star hotels that came right up to the beach. There have been scores of such stories of struggles, big and small, over the past two decades. It is this cumulative experience that contributed to the mobilisation that has taken place since August 2006.

The Regional Development Plan would have critically altered land use in the State. This is what was resisted. In Mumbai, such changes have been made incrementally. And people seem to have failed to comprehend the consequences of such changes for the future of the city.

A classic example of such a drastic change is what happened to the lands occupied by the now largely closed textile mills in the heart of Mumbai. The battle to get a comprehensive plan for the entire 600 acres so that adequate land would be available for open spaces, public utilities and affordable housing was lost when the Supreme Court permitted developers who had bought these lands to go ahead with their plans. Earlier, the Bombay High Court stayed all development of the lands until the question of how the land would be divided for different purposes was settled.

The Supreme Court's ruling last year and the State Government's amendment to the development control rules governing land use in this area earlier have set an unfortunate precedent for the city. Mumbai has lost a crucial claim to open space — people have less open space per capita than residents of any other large city in the country. As important is the loss of land for affordable housing for millions of people who, over the years, have had no option but to cling to buildings that are about to collapse or live in slums.

All that is now history as developers have moved in with amazing speed, razed every structure, uprooted trees and filled up old waterbodies as large tracts of land are flattened for their new constructions. Within one year, century-old structures that were an integral part of the history of Mumbai have been obliterated. Within the next year, the area will be overflowing with swanky residential and commercial buildings, shopping malls and multiplexes. Traffic jams are already the norm in the area as no thought has been given to increasing road space. In future, north-south traffic in Mumbai will be effectively blocked with the explosion of vehicles emanating from these developments.

Yet people living in Mumbai have never understood how the development of the mill lands will affect them. They viewed the issue as someone else's problem, that of mill workers or some conservationists. There was little popular opposition. And the court battle was irrevocably closed once the Supreme Court gave its ruling. Yet the mill lands development concerns a change in land use that will ultimately tell on the entire city.

Furthermore, unlike Goa, which at least has a Regional Development Plan, Mumbai's efforts at planned development have long since been abandoned. If mill lands are one example, another is the plan to develop the large slum colony of Dharavi, located at the crossroads between south Mumbai and the suburbs. Once again, a top-down approach has been adopted to sell the land to the highest bidder. The kind of development planned — not very different from that on mill lands — will ensure that the poor are driven out while the valuable real estate on which they live will be used to serve the needs of the better off people. This pattern of development has now been recommended as ideal for all large slums in the city.

Is anyone bothered about these changes? Last week, some concerned citizens did come together as they heard about the lost struggle to save the mill lands at the launch of the book Mills for Sale: The Way Ahead published by Marg Publications and edited by Darryl D'Monte. The book establishes how rules were changed or manipulated to accommodate the interests of private mill owners and builders to the detriment of the larger interests of the city and the mill workers.

`Post-planning'

Architect Rahul Mehrotra makes an interesting point in the book about the absence of planning in Mumbai. He points out that over the years the "planning authorities" that drew up long-term plans for the city and were led by technocrats, have been turned "into powerless agencies run by bureaucrats that are often easily manipulated by their politician bosses." Mumbai is in a phase "in which commercial gains are not only taking precedence over everything else, but, in fact, are also challenging and actually erasing all traditional planning processes." Instead of any planning, what is taking place in the city is "post-planning," a term coined by Hou Hanru, a Chinese art critic, he says. "This is a situation where any planning is systematically `posterior' — as a recuperative and securing action. In this post-planning condition, economics and profits are the central players. They have clearly replaced traditional ideological, social, environmental, historical, and aesthetic elements as the main driving forces behind the creation and expansion of cities." In effect, this means the city is being divided into pieces of real estate up for development to suit the demands of developers setting aside the larger interests of the city and its residents.

At the same time, the very nature of a large city and its changing profile over the decades seem to have erased any sense of ownership of the city as a whole. It could be argued that such a sense of ownership rarely exists in large cities and that at the most people relate to their neighbourhood or their precincts. But at least when events happen that affect the entire city, as the floods of July 2005, there is a sense of belonging to an entity, a city, a place called Mumbai.

But such a sense of identity and ownership is not consistently felt and emerges only in times of crisis. As a result, there is no sense of outrage at the recent developments. Meanwhile, the Government is steadily moving ahead with its piecemeal "post-planning" process. If the Goa victory illustrates one thing for Mumbaikars, it is the importance of combining popular and vocal opposition with other strategies. Politicians in the end pay heed only when lots of their constituents shout and protest. But is it already too late for Mumbai to be saved?

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