A friend from Spain who is spending 6 months in China on a sabbatical (lucky bum!) sent me a mail asking: "are you OK?!"
She adds: "Nature and its elements are just inpredictable; here in China there also were floodings in the mid-south but you don´t hear that much since mostly negative things are covered up or simply not talked about".
Hmmm. I wonder - if Shanghai had received 944 mm of rain would it have coped better? Or would we just not have seen ugly pictures and hence never known about the magnitude of the disaster??
I think that kind of cover-up would be hard for a major commercial center housing so many expatriates. But then China - you can never underestimate that country!
Anyhow, I take back some of my words on the suburbs vs south Bombay situation. It did, apparently, rain far far less in 'town'.
But as I drove past the filthy slums on Mankhurd-Ghatkopar link road this morning, where kids routinely shit on the street in full view of cars, where garbage always lies in fly-infested piles, I still can't help feeling... This was a disaster waiting to happen.
70% of our citizens can't 'somehow' manage in sub-human conditions, without the System breaking down at some point. These are people who probably earn Rs 3000-4000 a month - they own small TVs, even mobiles but can't afford a 200 sq ft room with concrete roof over their heads.
And as mill lands are becoming available for redevelopment, all that developers - even the likes of Manohar Joshi and Raj Thackeray - can think about is constructing more malls...
I'm not saying *free* houses should be given. I'm sure low cost housing can be commercially viable. Many slum dwellers pay 'rental' for their kholis anyways. So if the govt, partically subsidises they could pay 500-1000 bucks a month as housing loan.
ReplyDeleteSee this Dec 2003 story in Businessworld http://www.businessworldindia.com/Dec0103/coverstory02.asp
A large part of this land will end up with the paying public, but what about those who are less well off? They are the ones forced to encroach on public land. The only way to prevent this is to make sure that builders provide for low-cost housing while developing dream homes for the rich. The plan is to develop 300,000 houses where rents would be below Rs 1,500 a month. This, the report says, can be done through incentives the way China did it. In China, government auctioned the public land with the condition that a fraction of that be developed into low-cost housing. The other method is through tax breaks, which is the way US does it. Builders who build affordable housing get tax concessions. Both these measures are over and above the rehabilitation schemes for slum dwellers that are being implemented currently in Dharavi, the largest slum area in this part of the world. These measures, if implemented in letter and spirit, should reduce the familiar sight of entire populations existing at the street level.