Sanjana Krishnan
Alumnus St. Xavier College, Mumbai
10 years ago, the Maharashtra Government promised to make Mumbai like Shanghai. From a slum ridden, poor city in 1990, by 2005, it had become the epitome for transformation. The Mumbai to Shanghai phrase caught on like fire, generating huge amounts of excitement among the citizens. The old Shanghai reminded them of Aamchi Mumbai, It could be transformed by 2020 too!
There is no doubt that Mumbai needs to change. With 62% of it’s population living in extremely unhygienic slums, quality housing for them is the need of the hour. The slums have to go; not because they were ugly, but because their inhabitants deserved better.
People often (read ‘always’) compare India to China and Mumbai to Shanghai. Shanghai grew from a moderate town to one of the most vibrant economies, it grew from a dilapidated, dirty city to a swanky, modern city. Its seen as what Mumbai would grow to become. Even though we know that Shanghai turned over a new leaf in 20 years, the circumstances are completely different. And though the end result may seem good, in the process, homes are demolished along with humanity.
The Chinese till 2000, followed a system called the Hukou. “Simply stated, under Hukou, rural migrants are allowed to work in the city. The city, however, is not responsible for providing social benefits for them. For example, migrant children typically were not allowed to attend local public schools. In addition, opportunities for migrants to change their rural Hukou status and permanently settle in the city are quite slim. For example, despite employing millions of rural migrants, Shanghai has only granted urban Hukou to 43 of them so far.”
The Hukou system created numerous problems for rural migrants who had to keep travelling between their home villages and cities where informal housing is their only option. For many, this endless trip has lasted for decades and spanned generations. Even though there have been hundreds of millions of them, migrants in the cities were highly atomized and marginalized. This is the major reason why there are no expanding slums seen in the Chinese cities. For the government, however, the benefit of implementing Hukou is obvious. The system has enabled Chinese cities to obtained necessary laborers for economic growth and a busy, large and clean-looking city. At the same time, it lets cities avoid the costs of providing housing and other social service to rural migrants. It is the Hukou system that, for better or worse, has created China’s slum-free cities.
From around 1953 to 1976, police periodically rounded up those who were without valid residence permits, placed them in detention centers, and expelled them from cities.Administration regulations issued in 1982 known as “custody and repatriation” authorized police to detain people, and “repatriate” them to their permanent residency location.
There is no doubt that the Hukou system could never be imposed in India. As a dictatorship and it’s citizens having a completely different value systems, Mumbai can never take the same path as Shanghai, Though this system has not been enforced since 2000, the Chinese had it easy when they wanted to redevelop their cities.
The other thing the Chinese government has successfully been able to do, is provide alternate housing in a time bound manner of much better quality.
“1991-2000 witnessed a brand new development. The Shanghai Government promised in 1991 to demolish and reconstruct 3.6 million m2 of ramshackle housing and huts in the next 10 years. By 2000, more than 5 million m2 of shacks and huts had been removed, benefiting more than 650,000 families. Newly built housing had a total floor space of more than 100 million m2. Living space per person increased from 6.7 m2 in 1991 to 11.8 m2 in 2000”-The case of Shanghai, China – by ZHU Linchu and QIAN Zhi
Comparing it with the situation in Mandala in Mumbai, citizens have been fighting for 10 years demanding alternate housing for their forcibly demolished slums, but all these cries fall to deaf years. Numerous policies by various governments have promised the people of hope umpteen number of times, yet, the benefits of these have passed through the residents untouched. This is just one of the numerous cases from around the city- Golibaar, Malwani, Indira nagar…
Mumbai is not Shanghai. Each city needs to build its own road to success. Copying the model of one city to another is illogical, impractical and simply trying to take the easy way out. Serious planning and thinking needs to go into this. And everything needs to be done keeping in mind the rights of the poor who sustain this city.
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