WE, THE INVISIBLE
One evening, a couple of years ago, I had dinner in an upscale neighborhood in Mumbai (Bombay) with Bachtawar Shroff. Bachtawar is happily married, a mother, and she works as a finance officer for a major US airline.
I told her a bit about the life of the pavement dwellers in Byculla, about what I was doing with them. Dinner was about to be served. So Bachtawar suggested I come round the following week:
"Then, I'II
tell you what I think of them!"
A week later, cometh the hour, cometh the man with his tape recorder. I thought
I could guess what Bachtawar would tell me, so I robbed her a gentle first
question.
"Do
you feel these pavement dwellers should be allowed to live on the streets
of what were once beautiful residential areas?"
"I feel that, firstly, the migration into the city should be stopped! These people who live on the pavements should be sent back home to their villages and given work there, so they won't feel the need to come here and live on our streets.
Boy, oh boy, had I got Bachtawar wrong! She knew exactly what she was going to say. She might have been rehearsing this little speech for the past week. This wasn't Bachtawar trying to shock me, create a memorable soundbite. As she went on, I realised this was deeply felt, that she was probably having the courage to say what many people, maybe most of the Upper Crust in a city that prides itself on its tolerance and cosmopolitanism, really think under the breaths - Send them back home!
Bachtawar could find little good to say about the pavement dwellers.
"Give them a proper house and they'll turn round and sell it, pocket the money and be back in the slum the following week, It's their chosen lifestyle. It's because they don't have any proper education. Unless there is compulsory education for everyone, they'll never learn. They simply are incapable of understand what a better standard of living entails!"
I felt as if I'd been blown away by a howitzer. What the hell has going to school got to do with homelessness?
The equation Education equals Better Standard of Living equals living in a pucca, a proper house looks good, even sounds good on paper, in textbooks and policy papers. But out in the Real World a few hundred feet below Bachtawar's luxury high-rise apartment, it's a very different story.
In India, as elsewhere, you can work hard, be well-educated, and still not be able to afford something as basic as a proper house, and all that goes with it. The reverse equation, of course, is also all too-true also.
But the well-off are usually completely unaware of what poor people think and want, and how they try to live their lives. The Upper Classes, to give them their proper name, live in a world where too many things can be taken for granted, and usually are. Otherwise, how could Bachtawar make statements like this one?
"These people
think they have a wonderful standard of living. They have no overheads, no
housing costs, no utility costs. They live from day to day. They beg or they
work and earn just what they need to feed themselves. Why should they go and
shell out a couple of thousands Rupees a month on a small apartment in some
run-down part of the city, when they can live here free, in a good neighborhood,
and for absolutely free? They're never going to change!"
So what's
the solution? Demolish their huts? Clear the streets? Depart the pavement
dwellers beyond the city limits and just dump them there? Wash your hands
of the whole problem?
"You
bet! The streets should be cleared. The huts should be demolished. But these
people should be housed properly, preferably back in their native villages,
and given gainful employment there. Or, they could be housed on the city outskirts
and employed in special factories set up there.
Are we having
fun? Or what? Here's an intelligent woman, who should feel compassion, because
women do that sort of thing, and she's talking about human beings who cook,
clean house, drive her day-in,day-out, as if they were stray cats or dogs.
In the
apartment building next to Bachtawar's lives another friend - Sheela Patel.
Same age, same social class, same education. But a totally different social
awareness.
"Listen, if you go and talk to anybody in this city, they're always talking about these poor people. They refer to themselves as WE -that's the educated people. And they'll talk about the city as if it belongs to us. Everyone else is they. The thing they forget is that it's they who make the city work - who clean houses, deliver goods, repair everything, drive taxis, you name it, they do it. And the pavement dwellers are the most they of them all! But they don't show up in any statistics. Census people don't count them. City planners always ignore their very existence. And worse, they deny their contribution to the city's economy. To be honest with you, it's as if they were invisible
Now, I believe this is more than just a class thing. Or an advanced case of cultural myopia. At root is something you find in Bombay, Bangkok, Berlin or Boston - the First, Second, Third, Fourth and all the other worlds.
And that's a basic failure to understand today's relationship between the city and the countryside.
"If you go and talk to any of our police-makers they still live in a mythical dream world," says Sheela, "In which they have these wonderful images that the solution to urban poverty and homelessness is simply for all poor people to go back to their villages."
And in the Developing World, it's true that national governments, international lending institutions, private development organisations, they've all poured oceans of money into rural development schemes designed to keep people on the land and out of the cities.
It's a great and generous idea. But it may well be money poured into the Past. When what's needed today are jobs and infrastructure for where the action really is - in the towns and cities in countries like India.
If I'm a businessman in India, I'm not going to invest my new factory out in the middle of nowhere. I want to build it near my markets, or near a good rail, sea or airport. In India, that spells Bangalore, Madras, Ahmedabad, or Bombay, where you've got everything - telephones that work, good links to the rest of the country and overseas, good schools, good hospitals, lots of banks, lots of head offices - in other words, lots of reasons to invest.
And plenty of reasons for people with no land or no future to up sticks and come to the city. If you invest in the city then it's natural it will attract migrants seeking fame and fortune.
"If your
bit of countryside has no industry, no employment, if it suffers from drought,
then why should anyone be surprised if you decide to come and work here?"
Sheela asks, "But city people do feel shocked. They look shocked and
they behave accordingly." You say "Come-on" and then when people
take you at your word, you get all huffy and want to keep them away.
If there's
one person in Mumbai who ought to know at least some of the answers, it's
probably JB d'Souza, a former Bombay Municipal Commissioner or City Manager,
who was in charge in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the city pulled
itself away from its colonial roots and became a modern metropolis.
Just about the
time that Samina, Sagira, Sona, Rehmat and the rest first came to the city.
JB d'Souza's
always been a bureaucrat. But that doesn't mean he's insensitive or blind
to the problem now. He admits that the city and state government have never
really ever clearly seen the homeless, the pavement dwellers,
"Because those governments are run by elitist class politicians and bureaucrats, people like me!" JB chortles in his high-rise office at the Jaslok Hospital, where he's now the CEO. "They regard these people as interlopers, as invaders, and from time to time, attempts are made to clean them out, throw them out. And what that means in practice is that they're thrown out of one place and simply go to another, and nothing changes."
D'Souza admits
that the city planners in his day, if they thought of workers' housing at
all, thought of it solely in terms of unionised industries, like the cotton
mills. They built them dormitories near their factories. But they completely
ignored small business, just like city planners all over the world.
"But those small industries, repair shops, they're vital parts of Bombay's
economy," D'Souza says. "Take them away and Bombay's industry -
its organised industry, may come to a standstill. Organised industry depends
on these people. They farm out parts of manufacturing to them and the city
depends on them for all its million and one services."
Shopkeepers, small businesses, repair shops - these people are always looking for cheap labor. That's why people migrate from their villages to come here to Bombay. But once !they're in the city, they're caught in a classic Catch Twenty-two. They're working, but they don't earn enough to afford decent housing. Four million of them end up in slums. Almost half a million can't find even that. So they end up in a place of their own, on the pavement.
In an ideal world JB d'Souza would love to be able to build permanent housing for the pavement dwellers of Byculla on the thirteen acres of the Khatau Mills site in Byculla, if and when the mill ups and leaves. But, in practice, even the best of intentions fly straight out of the window.
"It would
be a misallocation of resources, would it not?" JB says, "Because
that's very valuable land. Even if the mills go away, it's valuable land.
So, should it not go to the highest bidder?"
In the
most recent urban housing plans, the city wants builders to include some low-income
housing in their new developments. So if you build
a high rise you also have to reserve ten percent of the space for low-income
housing. Not a bad idea in the abstract. But totally off the wall in reality.
Because what
are the poor going to do? They'll move in all right. But a few weeks later,
some property developer will come along and offer them more money than they
can ever hope to earn in their lifetimes, if they'll just sell up and move
back to the pavements and slums on the northern edge of the city.
When I
was writing my radio scripts the next lines read "as long as market forces
determine land use, the poor will probably always get shafted. " Seems
obvious to me then, and it seems even more so today. But NPR listeners were
outraged: the free market of market forces is held in this country to be not
just an ideological article of faith. After all, it contains that word Free,
so it must be good.
Many, perhaps most Americans believe market forces are natural and immutable laws that you cannot suspend or change or manipulate. The analogy is with the laws of gravity.
And that analogy is false, radically false. In whole areas of our private and national lives, market forces are suspended and manipulated to suit out values or whims. Timber in some national parks is sold year in, year out, at a fraction of its market value. Same thing with water out West. All sorts of things are subsidised, from the cost of the roadways on which we drive, to public transport, to milk. Not to speak of rent control! The idea that market forces are laws of Nature is bogus through and through. They're man-made and as such can be subject to the foibles, myths and attempts at control by humans.
If we decide that certain things must be made available to all - housing, education, food, public transport - then we make a conscious political choice to devote public resources to making those social goods available to all, whatever their ability to pay for them.
When you hear someone talk about Housing and Market forces, you can make a fair bet what they're really saying is they either don't care about the homeless, or they're annoyed they can't make a proft out of housing. Immutable laws of Nature these market forces are not!
It was a February afternoon, when Sheela Patel dragged me along to the Sea Green hotel on Marine Drive to meet a bunch of architecture students from London. They'd come to make a study of Bombay's city planning, or lack thereof. And they were still at that stage of innocence, when it's assumed there must be a rational, considered and fair solution to any problem.
One of them put
up a hand and asked Sheela: "Is there a plan for the city's future development?"
"Yes there was, and there still is," replied Sheela, "and I
first saw it back in 1984. We were very naive, We wanted to find some land
in the city where the pavement dwellers could build houses. So we assumed
there must be land allocated for poor people's housing. After all, why would
City planners exist if they didn't plan for low income housing?" And
sure enough, there on the Bombay 2000 blueprints were marked areas for low-income
housing.
The way Sheela tells what happened next is funny in retrospect. With Samina, Sagira, Sona and the rest they took trains and buses and went round to inspect each of the sites reserved for them.
And what do you think they found? Where the Plan shaded green for parks they found factories going up. On the land reserved for low-income housing they found luxury high-rises.
Money had changed hands. Officials had been bribed to turn a blind eye, to allow a variance here, an exception there. The result was that the planner's blueprints were pure fantasy. Let Sheela deliver the punch line
"So we went to the Chief Secretary, who was reviewing these plans, and we said: why is this happening like this? And he looked at us wearily and said: This is a notional plan. This is how we'd like it be! It's not meant to be a real plan. It's our dream plan!"
Back here in Byculla, across from Jhula Maidan, where thousands have made permanent homes as best they can on the pavements, these plans seem to come from a different world, figments of a planner's imagination, light years away from the reality of how thousands of people live here on the pavements.
And in the end, we always seem to come back to the same two basic hang-ups.
First, that pavement dwellers are social parasites. The plain truth of the matter is that they're not. But nobody really seems to be able to see them for what they are and do. They're all but invisible, even though they're a vital part of the city economy. Businesses and the Upper Classes want their labor. But they want it as cheap as possible, even if that means forcing them to live near their employment, and therefore on the pavement.
The second hang-up is that cities are just crumbling nightmares, urban cancers entering into their final death agony. And whose terrible growth must be contained, even reversed, at all costs.
The plain fact is that cities are where growth takes place. They're where the jobs are. That's why people migrate to cities. It would be far better to recognize this truth and then plan accordingly. Cities are not a dirty word. Cities exist and they flourish precisely because of what they are, and what they can offer. The sooner we realize this reality and stop shutting our eyes to it, the better!
Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes 33 - 35
Main
Episode List
Cast of Characters
Credits
MP 3
© 2002,
Independent Broadcasting Associates, Inc
Privacy Policy |
Terms of Use