IT TOOK the bulldozers just minutes to destroy the home that it had taken Inamullah and his family 13 years to build, brick by brick, on the meagre proceeds of his work labouring on Bombay’s highways.
Without warning, the massive machines appeared one December morning, flanked by truckloads of police armed with batons, driving into the densely packed slum dwellings in Ambujuradi in the west of the metropolis.
“They shouted to us: ‘Get lost, get out of your homes’,” Inamullah recalled, standing amid the rubble of what was once a vibrant community. “They barely let us rescue anything, just a few papers, and then our homes were gone.”
Since the beginning of December, more than 80,000 homes have been destroyed and about 200,000 people left homeless in the name of turning Bombay into a new Shanghai. Unsightly slum dwellings illegally crowded on to prime real estate are not part of the vision and so the authorities have deemed they must go as part of a 260 billion rupee (£3.17 billion) drive to transform the city.
“There is no alternative,” Vilasrao Deshmukh, the state Chief Minister, said bluntly as the demolitions began. “Many people will be inconvenienced and will have to make sacrifices if the city has to develop.”
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What the authorities seem to have failed to take into account is where these people should go. Bombay is the world’s eighth most expensive city for property and 60 per cent of its 16 million people live in slums because there is nowhere else they can afford to go.
Less than six months ago, when it was seeking election, the Congress Party said that it would rehouse anyone who had been living in a slum since before 2000. After its victory, the party reneged on that promise and rolled the cut-off date back another five years, a decision that it described as “a breach of trust, not of law”.
But as the bulldozers moved in, thousands of slum-dwellers such as Inamullah, who have lived in their homes for much longer, have found themselves with no home to go to, despite the grand promises of shiny new and affordable apartment blocks for the displaced.
Most of the 7,000 families of Ambujuradi came here in 1992 on being moved from another slum in a previous demolition scheme. Ambujuradi was unwanted pond land in the distant shadow of Bombay’s high-rise skyline; the families reclaimed it by filling it in with limestone. Bringing their few belongings, they began building homes, financed by their work as labourers on the city streets, maids in the homes of the rich and vegetable sellers in the wealthy nearby suburbs. “We put every bit of what we earned into making our homes,” said Laxmi Bai Mahadge, 45, a mother of three, holding the papers to prove that she has lived here for 13 years.
“Now it’s all gone. We feel betrayed. Nobody has suggested anywhere else for us to live. They want us to go back to our villages.” Most, however, cannot. The failure of the rural economy is what brought the rural poor to Bombay, drawn by the bright lights, the racing economy and the chance to make money serving the moneymakers.
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In the countryside most could hope only to make about 40 rupees (under 50p) a day labouring; here they can make up to 200. And the benefits have gone both ways.
“Bombay was built on the backs of these people,” Sundar Burra, an adviser to a nongovernmental agency working for the rehabilitation of slum-dwellers, said. “The middle classes are against the slum-dwellers and yet the whole of middle-class life depends on the slums. Who are the people who clean our homes, look after our children and build our city? They are the poor. Life in Bombay would grind to a halt without them.”
But leaving seems exactly what the authorities want them to do. After the demolition, private security guards hired by the state government moved in to prevent their rebuilding.
Inamullah points down at what was once a clean water well, now filled with rubbish. “The guards put it there, to pollute the water, to try to make us leave,” he said. “But we can’t, even if we don’t have homes any more. We have nothing to go back to, so we will stay here if it kills us.”
It may well do. “When we launched the drive, we never thought of their rehabilitation,” R. R. Patil, the state Home Minister, said. “Legally speaking, that is not the responsibility of the Government.”
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The plight of the slum- dwellers garners little sympathy from Bombay’s swelling middle classes, who regard them as a nuisance rather than a cheap source of labour. “They are right to demolish the slums,” Kanchanta Khanchuria, a housewife shopping at one of the flashy new malls, said. “The people there are just robbers and beggars. They’re not even that poor.”
Activists argue that what worked for Shanghai may not work for Bombay. “China is not a democracy, we do not know how many slums were razed to make room for skyscrapers or what happened to the people there,” Mr Burra said. “India is a democracy. People here have rights.” Anger is growing over the state government’s attempts to deny them theirs. Not content with destroying their homes, city authorities have asked the election commission to remove the slum-dwellers from the electoral rolls, presumably to avoid retaliation at the ballot boxes from the very people who helped to bring them to power.
Community leaders have their own ideas on how to take revenge: by giving middle-class Bombay a glimpse of what life might be like if they do drive out the poor. “It’s my dream that one day, all slum-dwellers will refuse to go to work,” Jockin Arputham, who founded the National Slum-Dwellers’ Federation, said.
“Will Bombay survive that day? Who will build your grand projects and work in your malls? You want us to be your coolies but you don’t want us to live here. It’s the whole serving class that has made Bombay a world-class city, not the middle class.”
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
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BOMBAY
Population: 16.5 million
Area: 440sq km (170sq mile)
Property value: £459/square metre
Living in slums: 60 per cent
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Average annual income: £732 (60,000 rupees)
Industries: Transport, trade, banking
Tallest building: Mumbai Television Tower, 300m (984ft)
Attractions: Gateway of India triumphal arch commemorating George V’s visit in 1911; Bollywood film industry.
History: Founded 2nd century BC; became trading port for East India Company in 17th century; introduced the name Mumbai in 1996
SHANGHAI
Population: 12.8 million
Area: 6,340 sq km
Property value: £268.40 per square metre
Living in slums: none
Average annual income: £776
Industries: iron and steel, cars
Tallest building: Shanghai World Financial Centre. When finished in 2007 it will be 472m (1,549ft) high
Attractions: The Bund, historic quayside foreign quarter; world’s fastest train (266mph)
History: founded 14th century. 1842: open to international trade after First Opium War. 1937: Japanese occupy it. May 1949: Communists enter