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A chain-marketing entity holds a meeting in a humid & congested community hall in Dadar, where man after man wearing cheap suits howls down his success story of earning lacs in a matter of months to an attentive crowd of un/under-employed. Mumbai’s bottomline is its unending capacity to provide jobs. However slowing growth means thousands who arrive in the city now begin to see a delusion, drawing them to such gimmicks that promise creating millionaires out of rubble!
A city that was born by reclaiming marshy land had to be hungry for more forever! Choke-full of built-up area today it is hard to find new land to build in Mumbai. So developers here are now buying, razing down and redeveloping any structure that is dilapidated or horizontal like Chawls, and has residents willing to yield.
By rough estimates, redevelopment of textile mill lands alone has pumped a few thousand crores in last decade in Mumbai’s economy. Jostling with trade union strikes and high decibel local politics mill owners in 1980s found a much better option in real estate and closed down the mills. After fighting a legal tussle for two decades mill owners and workers are finally finding common ground and mill lands have one after another turned to apartments and commercial complexes. While most signs of legacy are erased, some like Phoenix Mills (now shopping mall) have amalgamated a piece or two like chimneys in the current aesthetics.
High intensity real estate economy has been fueling the city since the factories said good-bye to Mumbai in 80s and 90s. The effort to promote Mumbai as financial center of India gave half-baked results. Now city stares towards a slowdown in real estate as well with developers for the first time struggling to sell, especially commercial set-ups. Slack demand for office spaces reflects that Mumbai’s economy is not making real money, and no new avenues are emerging to keep the city’s sun burning bright.
Not far from glittering jewelry stores of Zaveri bazaar and Kalba devi, hundreds of dingy rooms keep young boys who make these masterpieces. Small hands- a key to delicate and minute jewelry making is the resource exploited in return of hand-to-mouth wages and a scanty room where often 3-4 boys are crunched to work, cook, sleep all together. Many find themselves retiring by age of 25- physically too constrained to work anymore. However Mumbai jewelers have partners in crime- state governments of Odisha and West Bengal who for decades of socialist rule have turned their states to worse than sub-Saharan Africa. Hence the supply of labour is always too high for employers to demonically exploit Odiya and Bengali artisans
It is hard to imagine a thriving tropical forests at the edge of a metropolis like Mumbai, but Sanjay Gandhi National park is a real. Popular for its healthy population of leopards SGNP watershed also feeds 3 lakes that provide drinking water to roughly 20% of the city. In 90s when it looked set to be subsumed by real estate frenzy a boiling man-animal conflict at its periphery started typical development v/s environment debate drawing a counter-frenzy of active citizens who wanted to keep the park. Today conflict still exists but years of awareness and advocacy has made the same settlements at the periphery a human buffer between the city and the forest.
Mute Force 