Photo source: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/city-and-architecture/a2592-a-history-of-the-slums-of-dharavi/
Introduction:
Mumbai (also known as Bombay, the official name until 1995[1]) is the regional capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra, which was the first city to undertake economic, technological, and social developments in India. Not only is Mumbai a regional, even national financial center, but it is also considered as a cultural cradle which has nurtured India’s literature, art, and movie industry. However, Mumbai has the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi,[2] which has haunted Mumbai for decades. The causes of the rapid development of Dharavi are multifaceted, and its growth mainly coincided with the urban industrialization. Initially, Mumbai’s economy began to prosper by exporting cotton to European countries and North America where there was a cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.[3] Since then, Mumbai attracted millions of migrants from the north, mainly from Parsee and Gujarati traders, who had commercial trades with indigenous partners and British businessmen. Meanwhile, floods of refugees flocked into Mumbai for shelter and food, who settled down in slums, causing a huge problem for the government to solve. Therefore, by the end of the nineteenth century the population had increased to approximately 800,000.[4] The immigrants had continued congregating in Dharavi until the twentieth century; as Dharavi’s residential populations and industries grew exponentially in the 1950s and 60s, Dharavi started to be referred as a slum by people.[5]
The governmental interventions in clearance and improvement of Dharavi started in the mid-1950s, and they continued until the nowadays. However, numerous programs, laws, and projects have been implemented with no significant accomplishment. Some of them even worsened the circumstances, and backfired against the government. Therefore, this article primarily focuses on three of the most important and heavily state-sponsored slum improvement projects. The first one is the Prime Minister’s Grant Project (PMGP) in 1985.[6] The Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Mumbai in December 1985 to celebrate the centennial of the Indian National Congress. Having been urged and petitioned to address the housing, human rights and health issues pertaining to Dharavi, he promised a financial subsidy of 1 billion rupees to improve conditions in Dharavi.[7] The PMGP attempted to improve harsh living conditions in Dharavi by developing its infrastructure and relocating the residents to new apartments. Approximately twenty thousand families were to be moved out of Dharavi.[8] Deeply concerned about being removed forcibly and convinced that the government conspired with private developers to take over valuable lands in Dharavi, residents refused to move, and several non-governmental organizations also criticized the displacement proposal. Beside confronting unexpected opposing forces from the residents, the government lacked sufficient land or financial resources for relocation of residents and construction of new housings.[9] Eventually, PMGP was proven to be a debacle since most residents could not afford new apartments.
The second stage of slum improvement and clearance plan was represented by the Slum Redevelopment Scheme (SRD), which was proposed by the Congress Party in 1990.[10] Unlike the PMGP, the SRD was intended to be voluntary and free for the relocated residents, because the costs of housing would be entirely cross-subsidized by private companies theoretically.[11] However, the progress was slow because private developers questioned the profitability of the project, and same as the PMGP, the SRD encountered vehement disagreements among social communities, organizations, and local residents.[12] In the 1995 election, the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance beat the Congress Party, and the newly elected government immediately dismantled the SRD and replaced it with the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS).[13]
Compared to its predecessors, apparently the SRS was more affordable and less coercive. By Match 2000 only 3486 units had been built for housing the removed households, which was far below its anticipated progress.[14] It is also reported that some SRS construction projects were left unfinished, so the residents had to temporarily share flats because the upper floors were still uninhabitable.[15]
Based on this brief description of three major slum clearance and improvement projects from 1980s to 2000s, there must be various reasons which caused the failure of these projects. Were there systematic flaws within the bureaucratic apparatus? Did officials collude with the private sector? Were the social opposing forces too strong? Did most Dharavi’s residents have a strong notion of self-identification caused by a severe demographic polarization? Therefore, the research question of this article is: what are the causes of the series of failure of three slum clearance and improvement projects on Dharavi? I attempt to use the slum clearance and improvement projects as a microscope to evaluate the extent of how either formal or informal institutional factors affect a large-scale social and political phenomenon.
City Profile:
Geographically, Mumbai can be defined in three ways. In its early history, Mumbai was seen as an island city. Like Tokyo which incorporates its surrounding prefectures to form a gigantic metropolitan region, Mumbai was agglomerated with the neighboring areas into the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). The MMR which covers an area of 4,355 square kilometers, incorporates seven municipal corporations, thirteen municipal councils, and many villages, with a total population of 18 million.[16] The political and economic epicenter of the MMR is the third entity, Greater Bombay, which is a region with a population of 12 million. It has its own municipal corporation called the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM).[17]
Politically, in terms of the governance of Greater Bombay, the authority is divided among three political entities: the government of India, the state of Maharashtra, and the MCGM.[18] The government of India is responsible for ensuring nationwide public facilities such as the suburban railways which are part of the rail network run by the Railway Board of the Indian Railways. The state of Maharashtra effectuates various social, political, and economic policies in Greater Bombay, which includes land reforming, housing for the poor, and slum removing programs. On the local level, the MCGM implements the most basic infrastructures including water supply, sewage systems, public health programs, education, urban forestry, etc.[19] Among the three levels of governance, the state government usually takes a dominant role in decision-making processes. Usually politics in Mumbai has been dominated by three political parties in the parliament; one is the Indian National Congress Party, which is bolstered by the Marathi-speaking population and the non-Marathi traders and industrialists; the second party is Shiv Sena, a far-right religious party which bolsters Hindu nationalism; and the third one is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).[20] In 1989, Shiva Sena and the BJP formed an alliance and successfully replaced the Congress party and has dominated the parliament since then.[21] Besides these three major parties, other forces including socialists, communists, and Dalits have wielded a limited extent of significance in city politics. Unlike Singapore which is ruled by an authoritarian party, India has a multi-party system, democracy, free elections, and parliament both on national and local levels. However, compared to the state, other entities including the judiciary, social organizations, private sectors, and the press are relatively weak. Therefore, the state is the key player in implementing a variety of policies in Mumbai.[22]
Historically, Mumbai experienced several phases of life to become a metropolis in India and a megacity in the world. Mumbai was used to be composed of fishing villages, which shared a lot of similarities with Shenzheng. After 1850s, because of its closer location to Europe, Mumbai gradually developed into a center of commercial trades dependent upon British imperialist interests.[23] Therefore, sharing a lot of similarities with many old colonial cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong, Mumbai’s initial economic, social, and political planning were largely influenced by the British whose implications have still existed until nowadays. Initially Mumbai’s economy began to prosper by exporting cotton to European countries and North America.[24] Since then, Mumbai attracted millions of migrants from the north, mainly from Parsee and Gujarati traders, who had commercial trades with indigenous partners and British businessmen. Meanwhile, floods of refugees from peripheral areas flocked into Mumbai for shelters and food, who settled down in slums, causing a huge problem for the government to solve. Therefore, by the end of the nineteenth century the population had increased to approximately 800,000.[25] After the Indian Independence, with a gradual loosened tie with the UK, India had developed its own domestic market. In this vibrantly labor-intensive market, profits doubled and tripled which were reinvested into the textile industry and other emerging industries ranging from pharmaceuticals, and food processing, to engineering. A substantial amount of capital was invested into the booming art industry, such as theater, dance, painting, and cinemas. Since then, Mumbai was no longer a port city, but a financial and cultural hub which extended its ties into the interior regions.
Modern capitalism is accompanied by deindustrialization and spatial decentralization. For Mumbai, the progress of capitalism coincided with a series of implementations of different policies which intended to develop small-scale industries and decentralize massive industrial estates to move some units to peripheral areas. Since the 1970s, the MMR was set up to spread industries into hinterland and rural areas, and delegate more responsibility to local government instead of amassing too much on Greater Bombay.[26] In the course of moving towards modern capitalism, a large number of textile mills were closed, representing a gradual decline of labor-oriented industry in Mumbai and an expansion of capital-intensive sectors characterized by substantial investment, high productivity, and sophisticated differentiation.
Having gone through economic restructuring, the central areas of the city, the Greater Bombay, has become less manufacturing-centered since more secondary sectors have moved out into the peripheral areas such as Thane, Kalyan, and Navi Mumbai, all of those are within the MMR in the 1960s and 70s.[27] Other production have relocated further to neighboring cities, including Pune and Nasik.[28]Just like Tokyo, as a national engine of modernization not only for its prefectures but also for the whole nation, Mumbai has taken the role of globalizing its own market and industrializing the rest of India since the 1990s.
Even though Mumbai has undertaken a relatively successful economic transformation from an manufacturing factory to a national financial center, Mumbai is still encountering various knotty issues. The most pressing problem for Mumbai is a huge wealth disparity which polarizes the population. On the one hand, Mumbai is often referred to as “the City of Gold,” where there are plenty of opportunities for upward mobility, and millions of capitals have been invested in a variety of industries. On the other hand, Mumbai is known as “the City of Hell,” which has the largest concentrations of slums and millions of destitute people desperate for basic necessities.[29] Generally speaking, this extreme polarization of wealth is caused by three factors. The first one is a series of actions of restructuring the urban economy and the urban labor market. In the 1960s and 70s, the government began to reorientate the labor-intensive market to a more capital-oriented market, which eradicated plenty of middle-class employees.[30] The second major factor comprises of the developmental tendency towards the information economy that bifurcates labor force into the educated and professional versus less-qualified and low-skilled. Thirdly, as a magnet attracting capital, professionals, business acumen, and talents, Mumbai is also attracting millions of displaced peasants, beggars, and refugees who aim for jobs and charity, and are unfavorably viewed as sources of contagion and possible perpetrators.[31] Categorizing the distressed as undesirable and poisonous, and valuing the professional and wealthy as assets, Mumbai has planted polarization on multifarious levels.
Another unresolved problem is a huge gender inequality in Mumbai where patriarchy still prevails in various aspects of daily life, and women’s safety is not secured by law enforcement. “Life on the streets is purely that of exploitation,” a girl gushed out: “three boys misbehaved with me. They beat me… took me to the beach. They forced me… I shouted for help, but no one came!”[32] Furthermore, women are obliged to observe moral codes; for example women are supposed to be highly loyal to their husbands and not allowed to interact with strangers in a public space. In some extreme cases, they are prevented from consuming in a tea shop because they are accused of being unaccommodated and unethical.[33] Besides being viewed as economically and socially inferior, women are stereotyped as sexual pleasure, which psychologically and physically distresses women in Mumbai.
Moreover, water scarcity has devastated Mumbai for years, and the poorer people are, the less access they have to clean water. With the high water-consuming economic activities and population growth, water availability per capita has dropped significantly in Mumbai. Approximately, 70 percent of diseases are caused by consumption of uncleaned water.[34] For the poor, they cannot afford collecting clean water which is economically expensive and physically time-consuming; instead, they rather compromise their health in order to get better education and higher income. However, without sanitary water, they are more susceptible to different kinds of diseases such as malaria and cholera, which prevent them from working and learning and even cause death. Therefore, the implications of a lack of clean water have kept the impoverished in a vicious cycle of poverty forever. Not only is cleanliness of water an issue, but also the water supply is unstable and its duration is limited.[35] There is never 24/7 water supply, so households store water in tanks and containers. In Mumbai, about 84.4% households have only a few hours of water supply daily.[36]
Furthermore, similar to most developing countries whose healthcare facilities have not been applied nationwide, India is confronted with a serious maternal and child health (MCH) issue, specifically indicated by under-five and maternal mortality rates.[37] The primary reason causing the MCH issue is an explosion of urban population outpacing the implementation of basic healthcare services. Like the availability of clean water, access to MCH services including contraceptive use, antenatal care, medical assistance at delivery, child immunization, and nourishment, is correlative with economic ability.[38]
Mumbai is always seen as India’s most modern city in view of its finance, culture, manufacturing, and technology. Mumbai is also seen as an old colonial city laden with history, trauma, and memory even though in 1995 the Shiv Sent, a chauvinist ethnic party, assumed power in Maharashtra and officially changed the name of Bombay to Mumbai to disassociate the city from its colonial ties.[39] Keeping abreast with globalization and technological development, Mumbai has undergone several phases of economic changes from a labor-intensive cotton factory into a capital-oriented mega-city. In reference to Ong’s concept of “worlding,” Mumbai has transformed its social, political and economical structures and integrated different components shared with other mega-cities to become an emergent system.[40] Viewing Shanghai as a model and competitor, Mumbai has adopted Shanghai’s economic strategies and applied them to its local circumstance. Undeniably, Mumbai has done its economic reform successfully but the economic reform is accompanied by widening the wealth disparity, firing a large number of workers, and orienting the majority of capital to economic development instead of improving social welfare. Mumbai is a city of heaven and it is also a city of hell.
Issue Analysis:
Formal Institutional Causes:
1. Fragmentad Governance and Planning:
First and foremost, the failures of slum programs were caused by the fragmented and diffuse authority and governance. The complicated, overlapping, and conflicting nature of the Mumbai bureaucracy is a legacy of colonization.[41] The British established their governmental system by tearing apart existing institutions and sovereignty. In the postcolonial period, the Indian government inherited a highly fragmented bureaucratic system whose exercise of power was partial and provisional.[42]Theoretically, the framers of the Indian Constitution desired a three-tier federalism which is one of the five core elements of the independent Indian state along with sovereignty, democracy, socialism, and secularism; specially on urban development, the state governments take the major responsibilities to finance and regulate.[43] However, in practice, various players with competing interests intervened throughout the course of implementing the projects, including the municipality, the state government, the central government, and even the World Bank.[44] In local administration, there were hundreds of ministerial and administrative positions within the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), and many agencies whose responsibilities were overlapping.[45] The municipal commissioner of the MCGM was directly appointed by the state government who served in the interests of Maharashtra’s chief minister.[46] The mayor of the MCGM, who was supposed to be well-informed on local issues and directly responsible for urban planning, was merely ceremonial and symbolic.[47] The actual planning for land-use, building construction, and other urban issues were delegated to roughly fifteen agencies that were affiliated to the local, state, and national levels of government.[48] Former municipal officer, David Pinto, harshly criticized bureaucrats in Maharashtra’s planning agencies: “often they lack transparency in their functioning and are ridden with corruption. They are highly bureaucratized and lack knowledge and experience of grassroots problems…their functional autonomy is reduced because of State controls and statutory constraints.”[49]
2. Centralization v. Privatization:
There was also a severe tension between centralization and privatization. During the first redevelopment program, the PMGP, the state government of Maharashtra was the only executer of the project, which eventually was destitute of funding and information. Since the second phase of the redevelopment project, the SRD, private sector entered in the 1990s.[50] The original intention of delegating projects to various local and private actors was to improve political participation and attract more funds and resources. However, this decentralized public-private partnership precipitated the aggravation of the projects. One of the most notable entrepreneurs collaborating with the government of Maharashtra was Mukesh Mehta, who was granted the “monopoly powers by the state” to carry out the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP).[51] Given the absolute authority, Mehta sold the projects to various outside investors and developers, which jeopardized the development coalition.[52]Deliberately positioning himself as a political outsider who could garner whatever endorsements he could find, Mehta failed to establish a stable connection with the government to get necessary support.[53] Moreover, he overestimated his authority and underestimated how diffuse and fragmented the political system was when he sought for governmental backup. Additionally, unlike traditional construction projects which were usually financed by capital from either speculators or end-users as pre-sale, slum redevelopment was difficult to follow suit as pre-sale, since the projects were perceived as too risky.[54] The plummet of property prices after 1995 further deterred developers from entering the projects.[55] Therefore, over-privatization like re-selling and re-delegating the projects to private subcontractors by Mehta, did not refurnish the project with more capital but even exacerbated the project which ended up being unfavorable to both private entrepreneurs and the government.
3. Lack of Judicial Support:
Since India is a vast and heterogeneous country in which various religious codes, indigenous laws, and British common law system have coexisted, it is extremely difficult for legal specialists, politicians, and scholars to have a sense of nationwide generalizations in terms of the use of law. In most cases, doctrine does not necessarily reflect practice on a regular basis, and legal materials are normative rather than descriptive.[56] Therefore, people have gradually lost incentives to resort to the courts, and some of them, especially from lower social stratum, do not believe in the common law system applied by the British.Furthermore, the common law system is inherently flawed, and its fundamental architecture limits the possibilities of using the system as a means of redistributive change which is an equalizing process.[57] The slum dwellers who rarely appeal to the courts are one-shotters (OSs). However, their opposing party, usually real estate enterprises or the government, are repeat players on the courts (RPs). Compared to OSs, RPs who are accustomed to the legal system have more intelligence, expertise, experience, informal relations with institutional incumbents, and resources. Thus, RPs have more possibilities to win the case than OSs.[58] In the landmark Supreme Court case, Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, the justices unanimously ruled that the government had the authority to evict “those unlawfully dwelling, or “trespassing,” on public roads, pavements, and footpaths.”[59] With the Court decision, pavement dwellers were legally categorized as the lowest class subject to the enforced removal, and the government began demolishing hutments and evicting explicitly pavement dwellers in full force.[60]Even though the petitioners vehemently argued that it was a violation of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution,[61] which provides, “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law,”[62]they had less resources, experience, and connections than the Bombay Municipal Corporation which was a RP.
Informal Institutional Causes:
1. Culture of Corruption:
Confronted with an unprecedented value and moral dilemma and political uncertainties brought by democratization, governmental officials sought to compensate for their insecure and unpromising careers by amassing capitals through corruption.[63] The most commonly seen type of corruption was crony capitalism which is baed on rent seeking. Rent seeking is an illicit practice through which firms accumulate public assets at bargain prices though political connections.[64] In addition to the “grand corruption” which was government-business collusion, “petty corruption,” referring to individual bribes, occurred frequently.[65] Since giving bribes and receiving kickbacks were deeply embedded within the governmental system, Gupta, an Indian specialist, said, “instead of treating corruption as a dysfunctional aspect of state organizations, I see it as a mechanism through which the state itself is discursively constituted.”[66] A Transparency International Report on Corruption reveals that 50% of respondents in India reported paying bribes for admission, extra pay for tutoring or donations to the school; the police is bribed to interfere with due process of law; judges, doctors, and teachers all accept bribes from various people.[67] Therefore, corruption has permeated through every aspect of the government and society whose decision-making processes and intentions are no longer out of the public interests, but are beneficial for the wealthy who are capable of bribing.
2. Patronage, Brokerage and Dependency:
Deprived of wealth, social status, power, and enough political representation, slum dwellers were called “social handicaps” who were often illiterate, and from low castes or minorities. Politically vulnerable and socially insecure, they were susceptible to any predatory actions by the government. Organizing a collective action to defend for their rights was also difficult, since slums shelter heterogeneous populations among which divisions existed by income, caste, religion, ethnicity, language, and gender.[68] Therefore, without an inherent cohesiveness from within, slum dwellers relied on various social organizations and governmental agencies. The relation between the disenfranchised and urban agencies were characterized as a patron-client relationship which did not empower slum dwellers nor engage them in political participation. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on slums often blocked and captured benefits aimed for the poor and misappropriated fundings for private interests.[69] The nature of this patron-client relationship was not reciprocal but exploitative. Another form of relationship between the slum dwellers and outside agencies and organizations was brokerage relationship, whereby people had recourse to some specialized agents who were capable of providing institutional linkages with the government including various offices, and the police.[70] There were two major drawbacks of depending upon a brokerage relationship. Firstly, most agencies were outside the bureaucracy, which means they could not affect the decision-making processes. Secondly, as a broker, the agency was both a gate-opener and a gate-keeper to the government at the same time, so in some cases, brokers deliberately discouraged the slum dwellers from contacting the government.[71] Thus, disenfranchised themselves and unsuccessfully replying on various agencies, slum dwellers lacked any political representation and were unable to make their voices heard by the top level officials.
3. Enforcing Legibility and “Accumulation by Dispossession” v. Bottom-up Resistance:
For many people who dwell in Dharavi do not agree with the term “slum” being used to identify Dharavi. Dharavi which incorporates multiple schools, hospitals, pharmacies, restaurants, bars, markets, etc., has already formed its own self-run system.[72] Dharavi itself definitely had plenty of problems ranging from security issue to health problems, but as long as the inhabitants felt convenient and livable, they had the right to stay put. However, what the government intended to achieve was not as simplistic as just promising the inhabitants better places to live; a part of its incentive to initiate these projects was out of political and economical considerations. Based on James Scott’s theory of legibility, the original Dharavi was the worst thing the government wanted to deal with, which was not legible at all. With zigzag roads, shabby houses, unregistered immigrants, and underground gangs, Dharavi, which was obscure, insecure, and unaccessible, was entirely out of the government’s control. Like what Scott said, the government wants “sheer simplicity or efficiency,”[73] which was the hidden rationale underneath the three slum improvement projects. Furthermore, coinciding with globalization and a gradual process of gentrification and capitalization, Mumbai aimed to attract and accumulate capital to transform itself to a mega-city like Shanghai. Therefore, Dharavi was a major obstacle of the progress of capitalization, which occupied a huge tract of land. From David Harvey’s perspective, the Dharavi projects were merely land grabbing in his framework of “accumulation by dispossession.”[74] He said, “Dharavi…is estimated to be worth $2 billion. The pressure to clear it—-for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab—-is mounting daily…Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost.”[75] Masked by promising better social welfare and housing, economical and political schemes were the real incentive which drove the government to launch the projects, and the failure was caused by their miscalculation and regardlessness of various variables.
4. Marginalization of the Slum Dwellers:
Since slum is an outcome of social inequality and huge influx of low-end population, slum dwellers do not have political representation, social status, or identity. They often encounter rancor from urban residents who employ strategies to discourage immigrations and to withhold opportunities from outsiders.[76] In Mumbai, the slum dwellers were marginalized by both the government and people from other social stratums. Economically, urban inhabitants and natives were afraid of a large inflow of low-skilled and cheap labors whose demands for public welfare imposed an extra fiscal burden upon them.[77] Furthermore, competitions for job opportunities between the slum dwellers and natives would cause pressure on natives’ earnings and unemployment, so a lot of social anxiety towards the slum dwellers was provoked.[78] Ethoculturally, human beings have tendency to live within communities where they share characteristics including race, tribe, religion, and language, so didnatives in Mumbai.[79] They identified themselves as a high-class and native community, and felt threatened by the slum dwellers who were “outside groups” from their perspectives. Not only was this hostility derived from the society, but also the government was antagonistic to the slum dwellers. Political nativism, which is a political ideology of preferring natives over outsiders, was revived since the 1920s in Mumbai.[80] Among various nativist political movements, the Shiv Sena, the far-right religious party founded in 1966, was the most prominent. It proposed “to safeguard the welfare of the people of Maharashtra who are sons of the soil.”[81] Having formed its local branch, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), the Shiv Sena played a significant role in Mumbai’s politics by holding offices at the municipal and state levels.[82] Specifically, the Shiv Sena intended to reserve public-sector jobs for speakers of the regional language, Marathi;[83] denied migrants voter identification cards, housing, and other social welfare;[84] accepted violence and practiced extralegal intimidation of immigrants at the neighborhood level;[85] and encouraged private employers, sometimes through intimidations, to hire more natives.[86]
Conclusion:
The causes of the failure of slum improvement and clearance projects on Dharavi involved various social, economic and political factors from both formal and informal institutional perspectives. The formal institutional causations definitely provided local officials with institutional incentives to be derelict, and moral justifications to conduct corruption. The fragmentation of the bureaucratic system and the ambiguity of allocation of responsibilities retarded the decision-making processes, obstructed suggestions and information from being delivered to the right departments, and disabled the local agencies from enforcing the policies. Furthermore, privatization crippled the governmental control, and put the projects at risk whose funds were not secure and whose managers, the private contractors, were not reliable. Moreover, institutionally, the slum dwellers lacked legal support. Apparently, the legal institution was impartial, but actually it was inherently favorable to “the Haves” who had more resources and experience. The informal institutional causations perfectly elucidate other cultural, social, and political factors outside the institutional systems, which contributed to the failure of the projects. The ingrained culture of corruption among officials in the government swayed their judgements in favor of the bribers, and since corruption was epidemic within the government, officials did not feel morally obliged any more. On the social level, the only channel connecting the slum dwellers to the government was through an uneven patron-client or brokerage relationship. Instead of making people’s voices be heard by the government, these two types of relationships tended to be exploitative, and discouraging the clients from reaching to the top. Additionally, a vehement hostility against the slum dwellers by other social classes was formed because of various economic, political, and ethnic reasons. Furthermore, the government’s publicly alleged purposes of the projects were highly dubious, which deserve to be scrutinized. Partially driven by political and economical incentives, the projects made by an arbitrary top-down decision-making process, ignored various essential factors which led to the failure. Therefore, the formal and informal institutional causations co-existed and mutually interacted with each other throughout the course of the three projects.
The correlation between the formal and informal institutional causations cannot fully explain the failure of the projects. There were other potential reasons including religious conflicts, geographic remoteness, etc. Although sorting things out with an absolute answer saying which factor played the dominant role is impossible, it is rational and reasonable to argue that the failure of the three projects was a microscope demonstrating how institutions, norms, political environment, and social context work together. Beyond this conclusion a little bit further, this scenario is also applicable to other issues happened in other Asian cities, such as the eviction of residents in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project in Seoul.
[1] Christopher Beam, “Why Did Bombay Become Mumbai? How the city got renamed.” Slate News, December, 2008, accessed October 16, 2017. [2] Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 25. [3] Sujata Patel, “Mumbai: The Mega-City of a Poor Country,” in The Making of Global City Regions: Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai, ed. Klaus Segbers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 68. [4] Patel, S., “Bombay’s Urban predicament,” in Bomaby: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. S. Patel and A. Thorner (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiii-xxxv. [5] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 26. [6] Ibid, 76. [7] Ibid, 76. [8] Vinit Mukhija, “Enabling Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai: Policy Paradox in Practice,” Housing Studies 16 (2001), 796. [9] Ibid, 797. [10] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 99. [11] Times of India (1990) Thackeray’s housing plan unrealistic, 11 August, cited in Mukhija, Policy Paradox, 798. [12] D. K. Afzulpurkar, Program for the Rehabilitation of Slum and Hutment Dwellers in Brihan Mumbai (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1995), cited in Mukhija, Policy Paradox, 799. [13] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 100. [14] Times of India (2000) Maharashtra government scraps slum scheme, 12 March, cited in Mukhija, Policy Paradox, 801. [15] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 102. [16] Patel, The Mega-City, 65. [17] Ibid, 66. [18] Ibid, 66. [19] Ibid, 66-67. [20] Rajendra Vora and Suhas Palshikar, “Politics of Locality, Community, and Marginalization,” in Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, ed. Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 162. [21] Ibid, 162. [22] Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 108-109. [23] Patel, The Mega-City, 68. [24] Ibid, 68. [25] Patel, S., “Bombay’s Urban predicament,” in Bomaby: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. S. Patel and A. Thorner (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiii-xxxv. [26] Patel, The Mega-City, 70. [27] Ibid, 72. [28] Ibid, 72. [29] Jan Nijman, “Mumbai’s Mysterious Middle Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (2006), 759. [30] Ibid, 760. [31] Alice Thorner, “Bombay: Diversity and Exchange,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1996), xviii. [32] Ranjana Raghunathan, “Street Diaries: Gender, Poverty and Homelessness in Mumbai,” in Understanding Urban Poverty in India: Experiences from Mumbai, ed. Olivier Brito and Aditya Stingh (New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2014), 58. [33] Ibid, 57. [34] Abdul Shaban, “Water Scarcity in Major Cities in India,” in Understanding Urban Poverty in India: Experiences from Mumbai, ed. Olivier Brito and Aditya Stingh (New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2014), 33. [35] Ibid, 47. [36] Ibid, 48. [37] Abhishek Kumar, “Economic Inequality in Maternal and Child Health in Urban India,” in Understanding Urban Poverty in India: Experiences from Mumbai, ed. Olivier Brito and Aditya Stingh (New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2014), 79. [38] Ibid, 97. [39] Sujata Patel, “Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics, and Populism,” in Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, ed. Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. [40] Aihwa Ong, “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 10. [41] Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), cited in Weinstein, Durable Slum, 57. [42] A Raffin, “Imperial Nationhood and Its Impact on Colonial Cities: Issues of Inter-Group Peace and Conflict in Pondicherry and Vietnam,” in D. E. Davis and N. Libertun de Duren, ed., Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2011), 28-58. [43] S. Corbridge and J. Harris, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and Popular Democracy (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2000), cited in Weinstein, Durable Slum, 58. [44] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 59. [45] Ibid, 118. [46] Ibid, 118. [47] Ibid, 118. [48] Ibid, 118. [49] D. A. Pinto and M. Pinto, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai and Ward Administration (Seattle: Konark Publishers, 2005), 494, cited in Weinstein, Durable Slum, 119. [50] Mukhija, slum redevelopment, 802. [51] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 123. [52] Ibid, 139. [53] Ibid, 139. [54] Mukhija, slum redevelopment, 802. [55] Ibid, 802. [56] Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3. [57] Marc Galanter, “Why The “Haves” Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” Law & Society Review 9 (1974): 95. [58] Ibid, 98-100. [59] Supreme Court of India, Olga Tellis & Ors v. Bombay Municipal Council (1985) 2 Supp SCR 51. [60] V Mukhija, Squatters as Developers: Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), cited in Weinstein, Durable Slum, 74. [61] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 72. [62] Indian Const. art. 21. [63] Joop de Wit, Urban Poverty, Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai (New York: Rutledge, 2017), 36. [64] Ibid, 36. [65] S. K. Das, Public Office, Private Interest: Bureaucracy and Corruption in India (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), cited in Wit, Urban Poverty, 37. [66] A. Gupta, Red Tape, Bureaucracy. Structural Violence and Poverty in India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 78, cited in Wit, Urban Poverty, 37. [67] A. Heston and V. Kumar, “Institutional Flaws and Corruption Incentives in India,” Journal of Development Studies 44 (2008), 1257, cited in Wit, Urban Poverty, 37-38. [68] Wit, Urban Poverty, 40. [69] J. de Wit, “Decentralized Management of Solid Waste in Mumbai Slums: Informal Privatization through Patronage,” International Journal of Public Administration 33 (2010): 767-77, cited in Wit, Urban Poverty, 40. [70] Wit, Urban Poverty, 41. [71] S. Jha, V. Rao, and M. Woolcock, Government in the Gullies: Democratic Responsiveness and Leadership in Delhi’s Slums (Washington: The Word Bank, 2005), Wit, Urban Poverty, 42. [72] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 10. [73] James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 108. [74] Weinstein, Durable Slum, 14. [75] David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Life Review 53 (2008): 35, cited in Weinstein, Durable Slum, 14. [76] Nikhar Gaikwad and Gareth Nellis, “The Majority-Minority Divide in Attitudes toward Internal Migration: Evidence from Mumbai,” American Journal of Political Science 61 (2017): 456. [77] Giovanni Facchini and Anna Maria Mayda, “Does the Welfare State Affect Individual Attitudes toward Immigrants? Evidence across Countries,” Review of Economics and Statistics 91(2) (2009): 295-314, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 457. [78] Rafaela Dancygier and Michael Donnelly, “Sectoral Economies, Economic Contexts and Attitudes toward Immigration,” Journal of Politics 75(1) (2013): 17-35, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 457. [79] Henri Tajfel, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” Scientific American 223(5) (1970): 96-102, Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 457. [80] Ram Joshi, “Maharashtra,” in State Politics in India, ed. Myron Weiner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 177-214, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 458. [81] Ram Joshi, “The Shiv Sena: A Movement in Search of Legitimacy,” Asian Survey 10 (11) (1968): 967, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 458. [82] Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 458. [83] Thomas Hansen, “Predicaments of Secularism: Muslim Identities and Politics in Mumbai,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(2) (2000), 52, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 458. [84] Suhas Pashlikar, “Shiv Sena: A Tiger with Many Faces?” Economic and Political Weekly 39(14) (2004): 1500, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 458. [85] Ibid, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 459. [86] Ibid, cited in Gaikwad, Majority-Minority, 459.
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