In his book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis presents the concept that the capitalist world system views billions of people as, "surplus" population, and scarcely attempts to change their status. These slum dwellers, due to lack of formal housing, infrastructure adequate for recent urban growth, have existed outside of the higher echelon of consumers living within the cities.. Davis points out that the British colonization of Bombay, now Mumbai, brought about horrific sanitation and terrible infrastructural building the neighborhoods that resulted in large numbers of deaths and started the current status of the urban slums of Mumbai (Davis, pg.52). In the late 1940's and 1950's, Bombay had a surge of refugees as a result of the Partition and Indo-Pakistani War. The population of Bombay doubled at this time. Then the population again swelled with expansion of the textile industry (Davis, pg. 56). Some of the changes in India's globalized economy on account of the more recent explosive slum growth. In 1990, India faced an economic crisis and was on its way to defaulting on its foreign debts. India's New Economic Policy of 1991 was a Neoliberal Structural Adjustment Program that allowed India to qualify for aid from the World Bank and IMF.

 

Slums have sprung up all over the Mumbai area in an illegal or unplanned design, and governments have rarely given these areas even basic infrastructure of public resources, like access to fresh drinking water, sewage disposal, and more necessary resources. In Lisa Bjorkman's article “Becoming a Slum: From Municipal Colony to Illegal Settlement..”(2014) , she states,

 

Indeed, the advent of slum redevelopment in 1991 sidelined policies based on the formal definition of ‘slum’ as an under-served neighborhood eligible for infrastructural upgrading. This presented an increasingly acute problem throughout the 1990s for the growing neighborhoods on the periphery of Shivajinagar-Bainganwadi which were not fitted with underground water mains. (Bjorkman,pg. 46).

 

This is especially the case in Mumbai as evidenced in a 2013 study, by Subbaraman et.al, “The Social Ecology of Water” which found , “During the Monsoon season, 50% of point-of-source water samples were contaminated”(Subbaraman et,al, pg.1).

 

Mankurd is a Mumbai slum with one of the worst levels of adequate living conditions, the lowest number of schools and hospitals per capita, inadequate sanitation, high levels of pollution, and acute water shortages. In Sapana Doshi's article “The Politics of the Evicted: Redevelopment, Subjectivity, and Difference in Mumbai’s Slum Frontier”, Doshi says that the type of displacement that Mumbai endures is a, “accumulation by differentiated displacement”, as Doshi explains, with more than 55% of its citizens living in the slums of Mumbai, diverse groups have actively negotiated urban transformations in varied and unpredictable ways: “Here, dynamic articulations of class, ethno-religious, and gender inequalities and differences fundamentally shape political subjectivities” (Doshi, pg.845). Furthermore, Doshi explains that through this subjectivity, “Interventions in slums shifted from welfare accommodations distributed through patronage to neoliberal resettlement practices aiding the proliferation of new land markets and lucrative re-development opportunities” (Doshi, pg. 847). The profits accumulated through these neoliberal practices are gained by displacement of Mumbai's poor slum dwellers.

 

There are so many critical issues facing Mumbai in this century that is impossible to narrow down the struggles between the rich and poor and the global implications that are being pressed upon the population of this mega-city. The research done so far has specifically pointed to the growth of the slums surrounding Mumbai. The largest of the dozen named slums is Dharavi. It is one of many slums that houses close to million people. The rich and poor are separated in their ability to gain access to the same equitable resources as in they may be able to in the global north. Alex Kuczynski described it in “Mumbai's Moment”, patched-together shanties propped up next to gleaming apartment towers and housemaids returning to their tarpaulin shacks 100 feet from the air-conditioned bedrooms where their employers sleep on Pratesi sheets (Kuczynski, 2007). When government and private entities try to relocate slum residents to clear land for gentrification and skyscrapers the effort is often a failure.

 

The proliferation of the middle class into slum cities is apparent in the last ten years with a difference. There is a movement of middle class homeowners selling their small houses located outside the city to live within the city in the illegal settlements that keep them from having to commute. The wave of gentrification and slum clearance by developers is pushing many traditional, poorer slum-dwellers out of the city and into sprawling new illegal settlements , Also in Mumbai, Deonar, has now outstripped Dharavi, the neighborhood made famous by the film Slumdog Millionaire, as the largest slum anywhere in Asia (Pagnamenta, 2011). This is not something expected in the cities of the global north for middle class to sell their nice, spacious homes in the suburbs to cut down the commute. In Mumbai, the poor transportation infrastructure has created a demand for inner city housing by the middle class resulting in more slum displacement.

 

The construction changes within the massive city would seem to be a welcome change into progression, unfortunately these kinds of changes just bring in new problems like sanitation and water supply problems. The city's infrastructure is already overloaded. If more constructions are allowed on port land, it will definitely lead to congestion in island city and on the eastern corridor. Unlike many mega-cities, Mumbai has a clear reason to fear major changes into infrastructure because the city is literally dependent on the slum population that has limited water resources or sanitation for itself for better; for its own use. It is a circular conundrum of reliance on the population from the rich to the poor.

 

The proliferation of these slums in global Megacities has is roots in the British colonization and through the NGO's more recent manifestation, these slums of Mumbai have mushroomed into a current total number of people living in slums. According to the World Population Review, is estimated at 9 million, which is up from 6 million just a decade ago. That means about 62% of all Mumbaikers live in slums. With this extremely high density of people residing in the city area, there is a flip side, the “Evil Paradises” that are created as a direct result of of the forced exodus of populations to go into the city.

 

 

1 in 6 People live in Slums in Mumbai--

Huffington Post Article

Shivajinagar-Bainganwadi  

 

Of Pipes and Slums: Understanding Mumbai’s Proposed New Water Rules for Residents of “Illegal Structures”

 

More on this subject, please check out this informative and current article from Lisa Bjorkman,

Access to water is a basic right

And this article from also from Lisa Bjorkman,

 

Growth of Population in Mumbai
Census	Population	Growth in %
1971	5970575	-
1981	8243405	38.1%
1991	9925891	20.4%
2001	11914398	20.0%
2011	12478447	4.7%

"More than half of Mumbai's population now lives in its slums, according to latest statistics from the World Bank (WB), one of the world's largest financial institutions. While almost 54% of the metro's inhabitants live in shanties, another 25-30% live in chawls and on footpaths, with just 10-15% living in apartment buildings, bungalows or high-rises. However, experts rubbish the claim that from being the slum capital of India, Mumbai is now set to become the slum capital of the world. " (http://infochangeindia.org/poverty/news/54-of-mumbai-lives-in-slums-world-bank.html )

The Mumbai Suburban Railway consists of rapid transit on exclusive inner suburban railway lines augmented by commuter rail on main lines serving outlying suburbs to serve the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Spread over 465 kilometers (289 mi), the suburban railway operates 2,342 train services and carries more than 7.5 million commuters daily. By annual ridership (2.64 billion), the Mumbai Suburban Railway is the busiest rapid transit system in the world.[2] It has some of the most severe overcrowding in the world. Trains run from 4 AM until 1 AM, and some trains also run up to 2:30 AM.

Conditions in the slum

In the slum people have to live with many problems. People have to go to the toilet in the street and there are open sewers. Children play amongst sewage waste and doctors deal with 4,000 cases a day of diphtheria and typhoid. Next to the open sewers are water pipes, which can crack and take in sewage. Dharavi slum is based around this water pipe built on an old rubbish tip. The people have not planned this settlement and have no legal rights to the land. There are also toxic wastes in the slum including hugely dangerous heavy metals. Dharavi is made up of 12 different neighborhoods and there are no maps or road signs. The further you walk into Dharavi from the edge the more permanent and solid the structures become. People live in very small dwellings (e.g. 12X12ft), often with many members of their extended families.

 

Many architects and planners claim this slum could hold the solution to many of the problems of the world’s largest cities.

 

Water is a big problem for Mumbai's population; standpipes come on at 5:30am for 2 hours as water is rationed. These standpipes are shared between many people. Rubbish is everywhere and most areas lack sanitation and excrement and rats are found on the street. 500 people share one public latrine.

The famous cloth washing area also has problems, despite its social nature sewage water filters into the water used for washing clothes.