#1 — What happens when your local government operates like a jugaadu capitalist?
I’m currently reading Vidya Krishnan’s phenomenal book, Phatom Plague. It is about the tuberculosis crisis that we have been living…
I’m currently reading Vidya Krishnan’s phenomenal book, Phatom Plague. It is about the tuberculosis crisis that we have been living through (in ignorance by wider public and denial by the government). The book is spectacular and contains many themes that go beyond just TB. I wanted to capture some interesting stories from the book here. This one is from chapter titled, “Inside building number 10”.
Summary: What happens when your local government operates like a jugaadu capitalist? Answer: ghettos that make poor people invisible when they aren’t serving the rich / an avoidable public health disaster / all while bombay still gives you the posh city of dreams #vibes.
The full download:
Rich people hate looking at slums but not in an absolute sense. On one hand, we need slums and chawls to ensure workers live close to their place of work and also so we can enjoy an artsy slum tour. We are fine with abject poverty so long as it doesn’t stare blatantly in the face of our obscene opulence. In Mumbai, this duality exists as if a renaissance artist had crafted it to make a perfect point. What’s the point? When the government operates like a jugaadu capitalist, public health disasters occur and poor people die needlessly.
To balance the need for a sufficient reserve of labor while also ensuring that poverty (caused by low wages) is invisible to the employers living in their posh high rises, Mumbai’s local government transitioned the responsibility of building affordable public housing for slum dwellers to private developers by selling slum land to them at 25% of the market value if they sought 70% of the community’s consent (which they were able to through the promise of affordable housing).
Did the slum dwellers receive housing? Inarguably, they did not. Only 2.5 lakh homes have been built in the last 25 years and <20% families of the promised families have been rehabilitated. 55% of Mumbai’s population was still living in slums in 2018 compared to 41% in 2011.
What about the houses that were in fact built? Scam. The private developers must be congratulated for the shoddiest housing ever made. Meanwhile, the government resold the surplus land at market rates. To make things worse, they also developed special slum redevelopment regulation to ensure that poor people didn’t receive the regulation that oversees regular residential housing (for the rich):
“.. builders were allowed — for the first time — to stack buildings just three meters apart instead of sixteen meters.”
And what else? This cramped and suffocating farce for a housing project caused a severe and concentrated public health disaster. These houses lack proper ventilation, plumbing, sanitation, waste management, etc. Further, they are stacked so closely to each other that sunlight doesn’t even reach the lower floors. This has led to several health problems but most painfully, it led to tuberculosis outbreaks within these buildings. In this post-covid world, we imagine that a disease is “contracted” from somewhere else and safety is found by sheltering at home. In this case, you contract a deadly disease because you are at home.
“..There is a direct correlation between the height of the building and tuberculosis — families living on lower floors have more TB cases because they have less access to sunlight and fresh air. Second, the disease affects more women, and especially women of reproductive age, since they are most likely to be home bound. The researchers ..found that less than 20 per cent of all indoor space was getting natural light. All ..buildings face each other, and most windows aren’t used, further causing shortage of fresh air and sunlight.. Residents on upper floors toss garbage out of their windows because of the lack of a functioning trash collection system, and since it can fall into the chawls below if the windows are left open, the residents there tend to shut them.”
Mumbai’s experience with scam-my affordable housing is not an isolated incident. Poor people everywhere are denied access to decent, safe and stable shelters. First, they are paid abjectly low wages that prevent them from affording residential housing ‘acceptable’ to the “formal” class of residents. When they do create housing alternatives such as cluster and slum settlements, they are abruptly and violently evicted from them through institutional police force. Jhuggi jhopris (or informal, cluster shelters) have often been demolished to ensure clean public spaces, i.e. private open spaces for the rich. In 2017, Delhi’s Development Authority (DDA) violently evicted informal residents (or “encroachments” as the law prefers to call them) living in and around the a park in South Delhi. It’s believed that the community living there was predominantly Muslim and consisted of beggars and street hawkers. Rehabilitation was either insufficient or completely absent. Just today, Muslim Bengali migrant workers in Bengaluru are being assaulted by the police and being forced to prove their Indian-ness. Injustices against poor people in India are routine and commonplace, but we refuse to grow accustomed to them. As Vidya Krishnan says towards the end of her book,
“The fundamental question here is.. whether individual decency — that encourages us to fight for the right to health and the right to dignity for the poor and vulnerable — will prevail.
There lies our salvation. No one is safe until everyone is.”
Additional reading:
Phantom Plague by Vidya Krishnan
Why Loiter by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade