Mumbai    (2/3)

Mumbai is the boom-city of the subcontinent, masses throughout India dream about this city, a city of superlatives. Everything here is the greatest, the poverty and misery, the slums, the decline in urban infrastructure, but also the international spread of the "Bollywood" movies and the importance of the stock exchange.

Mumbai experiences as a megacity in the Third World an uncontrollable immigration from the country, enormous infrastructure problems, huge slums (about 55% of the 18 million habitants live in 2500 Slums) and a permanent social struggle for survival. The Indian author Suketu Mehta writes, that in the city the First and the Third World are lying side by side and sometimes collide (Claaßen 2008, Mehta 2007, Petersen 2007).

In the megacity of Mumbai, the core area "is pockmarked by squatter settlements". Unbelievably high population density and the rise in rock-bottom prices in the overcrowded city have led to the situation that new habitants increasingly settle in areas of minor value (e.g. direct on roadsides, embankments, drains and ditches), flood-prone and therefore also unhealthy "housing "areas. In some parts of the city the population density is above 30 000 P/km² (Bronger 2004, Claaßen 2008).

Satellite image and aerial photograph of Mumbai

Satellite image of Mumbai, July 2002. Source: NASA Visible Earth

Aerial Image of Mumbai 2008. Photo: Tobias Majer

In such marginal settlements there is an absolutely inadequate (social) infrastructure. Over 100 people share one toilet, nearly 200 one water supply. Barely one cottage has its own electric power supply. Next to the depressing squalor, the daily struggle against waste, smell, vermin, heat and floods, the situation in the slums is characterized especially by the insecurity of the living conditions (Bronger 2004).

Street scene in Mumbai. Photo: Tobias Majer

Bayview in Mumbai. Photo: Tobias Majer

The Indian city council consistently resorts to the instrument of "planar-rehabilitation" of urban marginal settlements. This means that whole neighbourhoods are destroyed with bulldozers in a "cloak-and-dagger operation" and the population is transported to the outskirts with trucks. Since the population of these marginal settlements is dependent on the opportunity to earn money in the city centre, they always return to the same areas. In Mumbai alone, up to 80 000 illegal cottages are evicted yearly. It is no rarity that shack dwellers have to rebuild their homes seven or eight times within several years (Bronger 2004).

In a "Vision Mumbai" the city planners want to make Mumbai "a city on the international level" by 2013. But, more urgently Mumbai needs a drastic improvement of the basic community facilities, like an expansion of the road network and waste water system as well as improvement of public transport. Furthermore, the health care services and security of most of the inhabitants needs to be improved (Bronger 2004).

Tasks: 1. Explain the development of slums and their spread in Mumbai.
2. "Slums can become the breeding ground for extremists". Evaluate this quote from Suketu Mehta.
3. Can you find such marginal settlements also in industrialised or developed countries? Why or why not?