Hafiz Mohammed* is a taxi driver. He comes home dog-tired at 1am, but wakes up just four hours later because of the commotion outside his 10-by-10 feet shanty at Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC). These days he is getting even less sleep because when it rains, his tin roof leaks.
But life is about to take a fairytale turn for Mohammed. Soon he will have a 1BHK flat in Bhandup and send his son to an English medium school. That is because he is within touching distance of Rs1 crore. It will not be a jackpot win. It is money a builder will eventually pay Mohammed and each of scores of hutment owners to obtain their land for development.
“He has offered us Rs90 lakh each. But we are waiting for the sum to reach a crore,” Mohammed says smugly.
Mohammed’s slum is in Tata Colony, near the BKC police station. Eighteen months ago, the builder offered Rs45 lakh per hutment, of which there were 486. More than half the hutment owners accepted the amount and moved out. But to persuade the ones who did not, the builder kept increasing the amount till it touched Rs80 lakh. Still, 60 hutment owners remained, for whom he has jacked up the sum by Rs10 lakh. Going by the trend, Rs1 crore might be some months away.
Tata Colony slum dwellers are not the only ones to witness the windfall. Builders are offering such bonanzas throughout BKC. Initially, though, the plan was to redevelop the slums by rehabilitating the people living in them in small flats in multi-storey blocks and use the remaining land for posh apartments for sale in the open market. But the builders found that there were few takers for the posh flats as the clientele did not like the idea of slum dwellers being housed in the same premises.
Once all the slum dwellers move out, the developers will apply for a change of land-use status. The Tata Colony developer is planning to build a mall in place of the slum rehabilitation blocks.
The plans of three other big developers involved in BKC slum projects are no different. But while these big shots will mint money in the long run, humble taxi drivers like Mohammed are at this very moment laughing all the way to the bank.
(*Name changed)
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