Comment

Most of Mumbai’s area of 437 sq km is super built up. Super built up is illegal, but who cares. Illegal keeps the wheels of Mumbai’s real estate industry running. Within that 437 sq km, some 140 sq km is taken up by the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. This is a protected area, which means that it has to be left as it is — full of hundreds of species of flora and fauna and several water bodies. No humans.

But imagine the horror which a developer feels — 140 sq km which cannot be built upon, made into buildings, multiplexes, shopping malls. That’s outrageous, they fume. How are Mumbaikars to live happily when there’s so much land just crying to be used? So for years, everyone tried. They chipped away here, chiselled away there. For years, people watched. On the western side — around Jogeshwari, Goregoan, Kandivili and Borivili — there were some concerned caretakers who paid attention, court cases were filed, encroachers were removed. This was till about 15 years ago, when the cranes and concrete mixers took over the city and nothing else mattered.

On the eastern side of the park, it was a whole other story. First Powai lake got completely developed. It went almost overnight from a picnic destination to a sought-after address. Areas like Mulund, which were thought to be forest land — and they were —also got developed. And once it started, no one could stop it.

Mumbai grew, everyone watched, and no one checked. So now 1.5 lakh flat owners find that their properties are illegal, as they are built on private forests. Huge institutions — some of them belonging to government — are also illegal. Refugees who were given homes after Partition — by the government — are being told that those are illegal. Various government departments, from revenue to forests to the municipal corporation to the collector’s offices are passing the buck.

Two things are clear: those flat owners who are innocent — they got their flats registered, they have water and electricity connections, they got loans — cannot be turfed out or if they are, must be compensated. All the government departments involved have to be punished.

But there is one more player in all this. What are we going to do with the private developers and builders? If government officials accepted a bribe, someone paid it. Someone built homes on land after paying a bribe — with full knowledge therefore that it was illegal — and sold them to people with the assurance of legality. What price are they going to pay? Or will they be made to pay a price at all? Will their money and connections see them through and so will their misdemeanours fall through the cracks?

There was a time when Mumbai’s developers used the underworld to get their work done. Clear land of encroachments, threaten legitimate home owners into moving away, getting things ‘arranged’ with government offices. Today it appears they have more powerful friends. They use the police and important politicians. Laws are changed to suit them. Coastal zone regulations are bypassed. No development zones are re-zoned. Green zones are un-greened. After all this has been done, some NGO or some municipal ward office may discover the discrepancy and try to demand or ask for corrective action. But the damage has been done right from the top. Who is going to fix that?

There is a chance, according climate change experts, that Mumbai will be submerged in the next century and so will no longer exist in its present state. That doomsday scenario may or may not come to pass. Until then, all of us who live here have a responsibility to the city, not for any other reason but that while we live here we want a life worth living for ourselves. The more we destroy and damage, the worse it’s going to be for us.

July 26, 2005 showed us the dangers of construction without any sense or regulation. Now we’re destroying our main green lung and people’s lives. You can’t say that we haven’t been warned.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net