Slums in Mumbai

Bombay – now known as Mumbai – is the home of Bollywood movies and India’s city of gold, its financial capital. Like a magnet, it draws in people from all over the country. But behind the glitz, glamour and the hype lurks a different reality – a city landscape dominated by massive, sprawling slums – some of the biggest in the world. According to the city housing authority, eight million out of the twelve million people in Mumbai live in the slums. And Mumbai is not alone. Slums are a global problem. They are home to one billion people – one in six of the world’s population. UN-Habitat predicts that by 2030, one in every three people in the world could be living in a slum.
      Mumbai is expensive, and even the middle classes have difficulty in buying property. P K Das, an architect and town planner, says: “I know examples of professionals including architects who live in slums, there are engineers who live in slums, there are police who live in slums, municipal officials who live in slums.”
[pic]

      There are people who stay in two tiny rooms where her family of 16 sleep in shifts. They have no electricity, an illegal supply of water and no toilet. Things have got worse since she first arrived: “People come to Bombay only when they have problems in their village. When People come to Mumbai they get squatted wherever they could: on land owned by the government, Mumbai municipality, the railways and on private land. The authority responsible for Mumbai’s slums is the Maharashtra state housing authority. Their attempts to get rid of the slums have failed and the infrastructure is almost at breaking point.
      But there is one fact to be noted out that, the city simply wouldn’t function without the slum dwellers. Slum dwellers, are“60% of the population that provide all the services in the city; from the boy who brings in your milk, to your newspaper vendor, to the maid who works in your house to the driver who takes you to work, to the people who works in... [continues]

Read full essay