Professor Amita Bhide is Dean of School of Habitat Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She heads the project of Transforming M-east ward initiated by TISS in the year 2011.
What are the different problems faced in the M-east ward and how fast the cases are increasing?
In terms of cases I think we are the fourth positive, with most of the cases are in the Shivaji Nagar and Govandi area. Not so far from the Mankhurd, which is an adjoining area. But there is no testing done also, so we really do not know. The biggest concern just now is not so much on the infection but related to the livelihoods losses and the hunger part of it. There are also tensions because there are several communities geographically 15-16 who do not have good access to water and sanitation, and it causes problems as well in a lot of areas, almost in every area.
They are using community toilet also
That is the thing. Community toilets are something they have access to or any public toilets. And plus their numbers are also low. There are many places where 200+ people who are sharing a seat. Access to water, 10 days into the lockdown you still had areas like Mandala, Janata nagar which was not getting water for 5-6 days at all. So people who were not able to have a bath leave alone handwashing. Now there is a tanker which is coming every alternate day after intervention of the project. But this is how it is. So, I think there are larger issues which are at work here. Plus overall issues of nutrition and the issues of the co-morbidity. So there are lots of stories of how the lockdown has impacted. So this is particularly in the Mankhurd Cheetah camp areas in the Vashi naka areas not so much. In the Shivaji nagar Govandi because in the Shivaji nagar govandi you will see that there are least concerns but you will also see the infection spreading. So there are quite a bit of containment zones there.
I have noticed this pattern that reports coming in the media, the ones of Worli, Prabhadevi, Byculla, Sion, Andheri west and even Malabar hills. Are the reports so because there is more testing there than in M east ward?
I think there is a strategy for testing also. The minute they find somebody who gets admitted then through contact tracing then you are creating these containment zones. With that kind of strategy, we still have a large part of Mankhurd, Vashi naka, where testing has not been done so aggressively. I think one will need to think with a pinch of salt, how much is the infection and where. Within Mumbai more than 50 percent of the containment zones currently are in the slums. So, as a city per say we need to worry about it. And just now fear which is created by the lock down and loss of livelihood and pitching of the state system against the people. The worrisome part currently is that kind of picture you have seen is that BMC, police, the state government everybody is protecting the health of people, the only people who don’t know of their own. But that picture is not true, people also care about their own health.
The mass migration was already started before the lock down, especially towards Latur and Solapur?
Here within the M-ward we see different regions, different pockets of migration. So, you do see large scale migration towards western Maharashtra in P.A Lokhande marg and Vashi naka side. You see large scale migration from U.P, Bihar side around Mankhurd side. So, there are these different pockets which exist. And yes, it is true there has been a large scale migration from the ward. And there are also several people who attempted to escape but could not. They have been stranded. But what I have heard, there were around six trucks which left Mankhurd, Govandi side, just after the lock down. And people have spent around Rs 3000-3500 to actually reach home from their pockets. But several of these trucks were apprehended at different toll nakas, in Mankhurd and other places. People had to return. They lost their money.
We have seen from the rest of Mumbai so many people walking towards home. Ghatkopar-Mankhurd link road is like a main junction, connecting the roads which move out of the city to Konakans and Pune side. So there have been several people who were trying to escape, walking, walking. There have been so many reports from Delhi of people who are trying to leave. From Mumbai there was not so much, at least what was portrayed in the media. What you saw only was a large scale assembly at a railway station. The day when lock down was …
Yes near Bandra Terminus.
No, that was recent. I am saying the day when the lockdown was declared, railway stations were immensely crowded. Immensely crowded.
And, the media did not report about it?
Media did not report so much about it. And about the violation of law, even today what I am seeing now, and it is worrying that the entire Bandra east areas, they are covered by drones. And the drone shows so many people are walking by the narrow bylanes, that is seen as violation of law. I mean it is a violation of lock down, but if you start looking at houses, there is no humane perspective at all. If you look at the lines of informal settlements, eight to ten people live in a chawl, made of tin or plastic roof, in this hot weather.
So what has been civil society and TISS is doing during the lockdown?
OK. I will talk about M East ward first and then what I see the general pattern emerging. What we have tried to do is to work in synergy with social movements which are working in M east ward be it Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan(GBGBA) or whether it is Pani Haq Samiti. We are like at the back end of many of these movements. We are continuing to work in this area with them. We have started three community kitchens covering roughly 1000 people each in the most vulnerable settlements. That community kitchens are where the GBGBA sathi (co-workers) are also working and one is in Adarsh Nagar where Pani Haq Samiti works and one is in Bhim Nagar where the GBGBA co-workers were there. They give two meals per day. We are coordinating this together.
The logic behind starting a community kitchen was that the corporation and the state government were doing it before and what we saw over a period of time the state and Corporation is taking a long time. We have pressed for Universal access to ration in Maharashtra, including in Mumbai. But, they are not willing to consider the universalization of ration. About providing cooked meals in M East ward, overall the experience is not so good, in the sense that the meals don’t come in time, the number of meals is not adequate, the quantity, often the meals are not enough. Then, there are issues of taste and quality. What we think is that the timing in which meals are made and it reaches to the farthest of the wards, like M east ward, is long. I am not necessarily saying that this has failed completely.
Are these meals coming from Atal Aahar Yojana or Shiva Aahar Yojana?
No, this is mobilised from different Corporates. All are involved like Big Bazaar, Zomato is also involved. They are involved with the state Government and BMC but if we have to give cooked meals, community kitchens are important. That gives the security of food. khana kab Milega khana Kisko milega ye sab thoda control mein rehta hai (when meals will be served and to whom remains in control of the community). So, this is something we have started.
We have also distributed 6000 r ation kits so far. Again in different communities where we have worked. And we have tried different models. Other than initial mobilization of 2,00,000 rupees, we have not done any monetary mobilisation so far. It has largely been supported in kind. In this State Government and BMC all have been involved. Now we are moving to something that the government is also asking us to increase to cover different pockets, so there is a better coordination.
In one ration kit, one family can survive for how many days?
That is one main point of advocacy.Ration kits which are given to non-ration card holders are given by different corporates. The content is different. Big Bazaar has different, Zomato has different. We are constantly pressing the government to take the leadership and say that this should be the content in the ration kit.
So the Corporations have come forward and TISS is coordinating the distribution and identifying the beneficiaries?
We are coordinating in our areas. I think ok, the problem is that there is too much division among civil societies, academia. So the coordination is very very loose. So, I have no claims to say TISS is coordinating all of it. But what we are trying to do is to cover areas where it has not reached so far. So we are trying to reach out to the people who are living on the inner side of the road and where we have good community contact.
This is about M East ward. I spoke with the TANDA project of TISS, the nomadic tribes in the periphery of the cities are facing another kind of issues.
Many groups have different issues which are not coming out. Like that of senior citizens and rise in domestic violence. The ones who are alcoholics, their issue is that all alcohol shops are closed. This sudden withdrawal will lead to another kind of problem.
And what about the daily medical needs of the people?
Exactly. You have been to Annabhau Sathe Nagar, your office was there. About 10 days ago there was a woman who died there. This was a woman who was suffering from blood pressure. It was a three member family. She was working as a domestic worker and the son was working as a daily wage labour and also her daughter in law. So, both of their earnings were gone. The one tablet of her blood pressure medicine cost rupees 50. So she stopped taking the pills for about 10 days. She wanted to save money for the food. Unfortunately so happened we could mobilize ration to her, reach it to her home. She was very happy and at the very same night she got a heart attack and she passed away.
So is there any mobile medical facility which is there?
There is a Doctors for you organization which is doing it in M East ward and in some other wards too. But what they are doing is giving generic medicine which is otherwise good as a principle. Many of the people who are being treated are foregoing their daily diagnostics; they are also foregoing their rest of medication and that is a very very big number.
Mankhurd is also a high prone area for tuberculosis. Are the medicines for TB comes under the generic medicine?
No, it does not. There are separate treatments which come under DOTS programme. BMC has made some arrangements. So usually they give one month advance medicine for these patients but with the attention of BMC now so much preoccupied with covid patients, it is very possible that this whole system will get disrupted. We also need to remember that for TB patients nutrition is a very very important dimension, just like the medicines are and that linkage currently is also disrupted. So these issues are coming.
Announcement has come that shops can be reopened in India. I don’t know what has been announced in Mumbai.
I don’t know what will happen in Mumbai. This is also the month of Ramzan. Already everyday people are getting beaten by lathi (bamboo).
How to see the loopholes in the whole planning of Mumbai as a city in this situation? Like there are many people living in small areas..
But at the theoretical level this is also true that the informal settlements are not the planned settlements. But I think what has been exposed most is the neglect of entire informal settlements. Neglect of the entire Public Health system over a period of many many years so much so that today you have hardly any Primary Health care system. And if you don’t have a Primary Health care system, if you don’t have a good child care system, all of those things which have worked well in the case of Kerala. They could mobilize a very large force of volunteers on the ground. Today if this is happening in Mumbai, all of it cannot make up for all these defaults in the span of one month or 15 days and these are the fault lines which are visible now. We have completely neglected some of these departments, completely. There is no presence at all.
Maharashtra in the lockdown has announced 25,000 vacancies in the health department and that is just to give you one idea. In the Public distribution system ( PDS) system there are about 50 to 60% jobs which are vacant.
This I have checked on the Food Corporation of India website. In the state specific data there are 50 to 60% vacancies in many states.
So how will they deliver that.
And they are using biometric for distribution..
That is another issue that who will be, who are the people who will receive benefit. People who don’t have Aadhar cards are many like stranded migrants, dependent migrants whose owners have left them all of a sudden.
What do you think should be done immediately? What should the government do, there is still one week before they end the lockdown.
They are saying the lock down in Mumbai and Pune will be extended. They might extend it till June end. So, I cannot say about the lock down, but whether it extends or not Mumbai is going to see a massive surge of cases. I also think that this is going to be story between formal settlements vs informal settlements especially in Mumbai and therefore I think and it is better that we try to understand the situation, the better that we are able to coordinate, the better that we can make the makeshift infrastructure for water, for sanitation makeshift. If they are not able to give permanent toilets, give them mobile toilets. The more that we are able to mobilise the neighbourhood quarantine systems.
Current quarantine system has containment zones in slums, this is not going to work. It is better to move people out, who were suspected to a neighbourhood quarantine facility or a neighbourhood Hospital. Most patients are not going to be converted into serious patients, so the serious patients can be hospitalized.
In the slums also there are chances of less immunity and the male population above 60 year olds are also very less.
Yes they are very less. But there are two reasons for it. First reason is obviously there might be the issues of mortality definitely. Also it is like the second third generation of people who are living in the City and the rest who are old they stay in villages and also keep ration cards at villages so that they can have food. What you are talking about vulnerability is correct but at the same time in the slums the recovery rates are also high, that is the overall experience of covid from all over the world. The mortality rate is around 6% in the world. So suppose we say in the slums it is around 10%, ok. Then you have to monitor these 10% patients and then you hospitalized them. Especially the patients who have co-morbidity but the rest of the patients you can treat with the primary treatment that is why then they have to prepare it in that neighborhood and if you hospitalised them, that capacity the state government does not have to treat everyone.
The central government has announced to allow intra state migrants to move. Have they allowed it in Mumbai?
Till now they have not done it in Mumbai. They have created such a long application form and process. So I don’t know how it is working. As far as I know in the slums in large scale it has not happened. That is theoretical permission. But what are the options for the transportation? There are no buses, no railways.
Uttar Pradesh government always has thousands of buses for rescuing.
Yes, I see they are doing it for Kota students and in Haridwar for religious pilgrims.
Uttar Pradesh government has also announced this for its labourers In Maharashtra this has not happened. In Maharashtra there has been no effort regarding this.
Even if it gets implemented, the non- Maharashtra labour force, will they not be isolated? Like even in Varanasi, it happens that people taunt that you are from Bihar, it is better you should get a ration in your native state. It is this othering situation that has been created in this crisis
This is there in Maharashtra. There is so much pressure from the Civil Society of Maharashtra, pressing for universalisation of ration. But they are not ready to do it in Mumbai.
In other places are they ready?
I have come across a very interesting circular of Pune, Pune rural not Pune city. Pune rural where they have allowed but these are the places where the migration rate is very less.
Recently our Prime minister announced village mapping at the Panchayati Raj anniversary through video conferencing. It is a separate issue. They will do the drone mapping of village area.Through this wherever the people are there now, the land would be legalised and then they can now take loan from the bank on this land. In the village, already due to caste system the ownership of land is starkly skewed, but now due to this do you think the corporations and businesses owned by the same brotherhood of caste, will start occupying the small land holdings?
This is a different thing. It is not related to Covid but I think it is a good move. Good move because we are still living with the survey maps which are made during the British Times, including in Maharashtra. So what you will see is that in the villages there is no transaction on paper. If you just go to the villages near Panvel, on the ground everything is changed but on paper it has not. So doing mapping will help us get more realistic pictures about land use and it has helped the states like Odisha who did this. But the thing is the drone mapping will work only when you have the principles of entitlement intact first. When you have the principles of entitlement which are secured, the mapping will work. Currently we don’t have that.
During mapping, if land is found occupied, the status quo of occupied land might be maintained by this process. Who will be the people who would get this registration done. If this will be done automatically, who will be able to use this system? Because there will be another system which will be created by this process.
Definitely. So you have to define the process of entitlements before you do this. In Odisha what they said was that after the slum mapping, the state will ensure that everyone will get the land. Now we have not decided that here.
The profile of M east ward, which I can observe whether from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Maharashtra are mostly lower caste Hindus and Muslim religion. Yes Do you have any data about their land owning pattern?
No we don’t have. I can check our data from the M east Ward survey but I don’t think that has been collected.
Have you ever seen any policy about reverse migration where the state has given some incentive? Which state are you talking about? I mean in India or even abroad. The idea of the city itself is a question where there are lots of people in small areas with inhuman conditions as a labour but overall as a consumer. If they want to return back or not, what is not making them not want it or why they are not able to, even if they want to return?
We cannot link everything just to land ownership. I will give an example of the Konkan area which I know very well. There I have seen the pattern of migration. A PhD student was doing research there. Clearly there was a systematic effort to keep the Konkan area under developed for long time in the British era and on the other hand there were clear intention in their policy such that they control the labour fluctuation.They had family labour, so the couples were working, then they built chawl to control their movement.
The Dalits and other aboriginal castes were not the first generation who migrated. The first wave of migrants were the Brahmins and they migrated to Mumbai and Pune in search of better prospects. We have done this intergenerational migrant study in this region and we found that the second wave of migration were from the Dalit community and now the people who are left behind whose one leg is in the Konkan region one leg is in the big city are mostly from the middle class family. They are not the big land holding community like Marathas but the small and most of the Muslims have come here are not from the Dalit class. Most of the Dalits are from the lower Maharashtra and Karnataka region.
So there will be more Ashrafs or more Ansaris in this community of M east ward?
I have seen less Ashrafs.
Around TISS there are many taxi drivers who are from upper caste, mainly Brahmins from Purvanchal area like Jaunpur, Azamgarh and Varanasi. Maybe, I don’t know. And where do they stay? They stay in chawls near TISS, some of them even have 1 BHK flats, in Govandi.
City like Bombay is different from other cities like Orissa. In slums of Odisha almost all the people who are staying are Adivasis. This you will not find in Mumbai. There is a fair presence of the middle class in the slums. You will find Brahmins very rarely. Like in our M east ward survey hardly two or three households of Brahmin family were enumerated among one lakh households. I agree with you that there are more lower castes and there are also pockets where there are no higher caste presence at all. But you will find a fair presence of the middle class.
There is also a hierarchy of ease of labour here, where the taxi and auto drivers are more from the upper caste, unlike in the sanitation work or cleaning jobs.
Yes as you go in the more risky jobs you find more Dalits and Muslims.
I have talked with some of the people who have been there for the last 20-30 years in Mumbai and I asked why they are not going back to their village? They said that even if they have savings, the dignity is the concern and because of the caste discrimination they cannot move back to the village.
There are different factors working in this. One is, migrants who already have the small land holdings, like in Konkan can have only uni crop, one crop in a year which are some cash crops. Because of dependence on one crop and one seasonal crop and the exploitation in the whole agriculture business chain and the scale of production, there is a constant need of cash. So, there is an inevitable need of cash in hand for the people who are cultivating. When you have this kind of cultivation you have one son staying and one son going as a migrant worker, or the elderly stays with the children and the young generation migrate. They go forward like this as there is a constant need of cash.
The city needs informal migrants. But for the Welfare of the city and for the people or as well as the whole state there is a need to decongest the city. What can be the policy which can do that?
You have to see that the infrastructure, health facilities, and education have to be improved in villages. It is not just land ownership. They should be able to have the marketing system, and the state should give them a choice. Migration will stop but the migrants will get a choice because of this. Most of the migrant workers coming to the cities are very less skilled or under skilled. With very less knowledge to survive. They live in the most risky settlements, where there are no facilities and they are dependent on the network through which they have come, for everything, for their household. Everything is dependent on this network
What you are pressing on is infrastructure, employment generation. I was talking about people’s dignity and their freedom. Like in Bhopal there are Pardhi and Gond tribes who are doing rag picking, similarly in Europe there are Roma communities who are engaged in this, picking things from the garbage. The whole system including universities are not designed to, accept them as human and to accept their knowledge system and they don’t get dignity. So they used to do all this because they think they are at least free. Free from system, that they are not working under anyone. Even if they return for good infrastructure and employment, they will be still most probably working under upper caste people, and these villages also repel dignity.
At least my research and experience doesn’t suggest that there is a direct relation. If it was so straight and easy, and it was just relation of exploiters versus exploited, then the reverse migration would have been an easy policy.
But how will they have freedom, independence to do whatever they can? If I have land and I can’t do nothing I can still do farming and like the boatman community, Nishad in Varanasi, if nothing happens they still can do fishing. The people whom I am talking about, they don’t have ownership, they don’t have this choice. And this dignity cannot be created with infrastructure and employment generation alone. The land ownership alone can also not do that. It is not the only thing but important one.
With that we need many more systems. There are very few landless migrants. People have land but they are not fertile. There is the cost of cultivating then there is no water there is no Road No education system. There are multiple issues attached with this land ownership, and migration.
So if you give somebody a shop in a second tier city, third tier city and push the sense of ownership… Even see the example of Namami Gange in Varanasi. Most of the people who are working as sweepers are from Valmiki caste and the supervisors are Brahmins and Rajput caste.
See that in my area in Mumbai that is always 100% the case where the D category workers are from the Dalits. Then you will find some of them sitting who are permanent employees and recruiting three other people from the same community for that work. Now what is the caste relationship in this?
They are copying what they have seen from the upper caste.
Now there is not only one story of exploiter versus exploited. There are multiple layers now which have come within this system, developing all the while with time.
I was asking about the village land mapping announced by the government so they will know how much is occupied land, how much is the free land. You said that that entitlement should be there at the essence of this policy or it will not work. People who don’t have land should get some land and this is directly linked to the present problems of the idea of city.
Definitely, that’s why I think the laws like forest rights act, the laws in Tamilnadu and Andhra related to land entitlements where they say two Katha land for landless, was very very important legislation. The non implementation of this legislation in India from 1960s,1990s which had the character of this entitlements is history. But they are not enough.
Till now we don’t have a list of people working in informal sectors. The government doesn’t have, the Civil Society doesn’t have. Like in Uttar Pradesh, the government announced thousand rupees help for the daily wage labourers but the workers registered are very low in comparison to actual figures. Bihar government, Jharkhand government, Odisha government are announcing similar relief through Aadhar card and apps. So when the crisis came, the people are searching for the data, where are the people, who are there and where are they coming from? Never has this happened to them before to organise the informal sector labourers?
Right now what I feel, I am being Frank. This is what I have seen regarding street vendors legislation and their association. Just as there are interests of the state for not registering workers, there is also the interest of trade unions who are owned by political parties and for civil societies which have also used the situation. So there is a street vendor act, which says something on the ground, that will see registrations of workers and elections. It is not happening on the ground and you will see the same thing happening with respect to registration of construction workers, domestic workers or unorganised sector schemes. All of these registration figures are pitifuly low. Rules are not amenable to do this. There is no incentive to register what they will get after registration? Kya milega registration karke?
Even if somebody wants to start this, to register in an unorganised sector like Barbers or for domestic workers. Is the whole process itself so difficult?
Actually it is very complex. For example, you need to show four months of continuous work for construction workers. Like this in every sector you need certification. Who will give a certificate for the domestic worker that she is a domestic worker? For one domestic worker there are many employees. There is not one employee for them, who works in small small jobs. So registration is very few and there is no incentive. If the decision is based on an affidavit system of incentives to get registered, it might work.
Whatever they are pushing, it will increase the registration but still it will be a very low number because what I see is why workers are running? Why are they hiding in the villages in the narrow bylanes? Because they want to be invisible from the state. They distrust the state. How to make that trust is the biggest challenge.
So when you see the states are making apps and distributing five hundred to thousand rupees to the workers, like in Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha, they have announced it for the migrant workers. What do you think the states will do with all this registered data? There are many people who applied and have received this benefit.
I don’t know what they will use it for. Frankly, I don’t see Indian state capable of using this data or into a conspiracy theory.
So they are not too smart to do that?
I feel that. I think but on the other hand I don’t see them using this data for any productive use, that is the other part of this process.
Related to University, I don’t know when the colleges universities will be reopened in Mumbai but is there discussion on the table that the Social Work students wherever they are in their native place, that they should contribute in the neighbourhood or in that place in some ways?
There is some thought happening within the university level particularly for the second years. How to restart courses online and how for the people it is difficult to connect digitally and what to do with that and how to reach out to them, also for shifting the entire course and reorganising the entire structure.
Can students not be placed for block field work in their city, in the native place?
That requires more thought, more work, and a well-thought-out process. It becomes more complex and complicated. At present our thought is how we can reorganize the semester, to rearrange field work schedules..
Before when disaster happened, I don’t know whether this was a disaster or an epidemic, Government is calling it a disaster too, but TISS used to be at least in forefront to announce that we will at least go there in the disaster zone and do survey, whatever comes out that is not in our hand but we will let our students go there and do our part. Is it happening now that actions are not visible this time?
No, there is action. You will see our new website in a few days. There are a lot of initiatives which are coming up now. This is not a situation where it requires large scale students going out on the field physically. That contains a lot of risk and many ethical issues. All the initiatives will be there on this website in two days.
In the long term do you think Mumbai City will change due to this situation?
I hope so. Definitely in both ways the government at all levels Centre, State or Corporation have to think about the entire issue of informal settlement and what is the relation with the city of these settlements, they have to think.
So, now the fight is between formal and informal sectors. And the formals are very few!
In Mumbai at least but in other cities it is not like this. But I hope it brings us to a more indigenous, pragmatic and just mode of being..
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