Mumbai : Booming Realty - But where is the Infrastructure to handle new Developments ?
Central Mumbai, undergoing change at fever pace and witnessing a real estate boom that’s seen prices shoot up by two or three times, has a single problem: Missing infrastructure.
From Sangam Nagar’s slums in F North to the old chawls of Parel in F South, from the British-era middle-class colonies of Dadar and Hindu Colony to the once-Tamil Brahmin colonies of Matunga, residents of these two central Mumbai wards are seeing construction dust and new multi-storey apartment complexes at a never-before speed. Slum rehabilitation schemes, dilapidated building redevelopment, BIT chawl reconstruction plans, mill lands development—every manner of realty development is on in central Mumbai. And, incredibly, a clutch of services won’t improve just yet: Transport, parking spaces, water supply, electricity, open spaces.
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“Near Shanmukhananda Hall, a parking lot has been turned into a hawking zone,” says activist G R Vora. “One corporator has built a gymnasium through his corporator funds inside an area reserved as a garden. Another corporator wants to transform the lush Five Gardens area with a skywalk, a food court and a host of other things the citizens simply don’t want.” What F-North really needs, Vora says, is that corporators respond to citizens and address critical issues urgently. Not far from where Vora lives, Gandhi Market and King’s Circle are chronic flooding zones. So is Hindmata, a little further south. The railway tracks between Matunga and Sion stations get submerged after every heavy shower too. Sion Circle, a major traffic node, has seen no improvements in traffic management for years. And that’s why, the middle-class of Sion, Matunga and Dadar have been voting much more enthusiastically than in the past, he says. “Political parties have to view us as votebanks too,” he says. “The age when just slumdwellers were wooed at election-time is over. The middle classes who make up most of central Mumbai is now very aware and alert.”
Though Matunga and Hindu Colony-planned layouts executed by the British-do not usually flood, the slums lack even the most basic open drainage. Especially in Wadala’s dozens of slum settlements like Shivaji Nagar, Sunder Kamala Nagar, Siddarth Nagar, Valmiki Nagar, Nityanand Nagar, Sadashiv Wadi, Ajmat Nagar, Aazad Mohalla and Rawli Camp, there are neither enough public toilets nor storm water drains.
While Vora says the key issues are slums, unauthorized hawkers and traffic, right to information activist from F South Ward, Bhaskar Prabhu of the Mahiti Adhikar Manch says the need of the hour is information to be freely available to people wishing to empower themselves. “We are in the dark about too many things,” he says, adding that ward committee meetings’ agenda should be circulated to members earlier, and, as per the 74th Amendment, ward committee meetings should be made open to the general public. “For use of corporator funds—Rs 25 lakh per year per corporator—there should be a plan of action approved by citizens,” he says.