Right to Housing in Contemporary India: Why it remains a mirage?

SIMPREET SINGH
Presentation at National Workshop on ‘Right to Housing’
NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, 8th August, 2014

The concern of this paper is not about the issue of housing in general, rather it revolves around the issues specifically in regard to housing and urban poor. For this paper I have drawn upon my experience of working as a housing rights activist in the city of Mumbai and interactions with other activists from different cities over period of time.

Makaan (house) is one of the constituent of the trinity of roti-kapda aur makaan (food, clothes and shelter) the fundamentals of human life in addition to other things. An official estimate of shortage of 21 million homes tells us that even after 65 years of independence which promised us a democratic socialist republic; we have failed on this front though some half hearted efforts have been made. The Right to Housing has no direct guarantee in the Indian Constitution. Instead the right to housing has been defined through judicial interpretation of the Right to Life.One of the cornerstone of our Constitution is Article 19 which provides for Right to Life which provides for right to life in general and has been expanded to include right to education, information, work, food due to demands of people’s mobilizations and judicial activism at times.

The biggest flaw in Mumbai’s Development Plan: it misunderstands both development and planning

The document’s authors concede it is not really a ‘plan’. Well, it is not for ‘development’ either.

by HUSSAIN INDOREWALA
Originally published on scroll.in
Sunday, April 19, 2015

Mumbai’s new draft development plan has evoked massive public outrage. The plan, which may serve as the urban planning blueprint for the city for the next 20 years, has been criticised as patently myopic, misdirected, inaccurate and in essence disastrous. But none of this uproar has upset the plan’s author, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. The corporation has dismissed all criticism of the draft as based either on a misreading or a misunderstanding. It fails to realise that a cross-section of Mumbai’s residents have raised objections not simply to this proposal or that – but to the conception, the framework and the process that has fashioned this plan. What is being challenged here is not what the development plan means for Mumbai – but what the planners mean by “development” and “planning”.

As we shall see, how one uses the words “development” and “planning” determines the approach they adopt. Let us look at how the MCGM uses these words and how others do.

Mumbai’s coastal road plan is a welfare scheme for the well-to-do

By HUSSAIN INDOREWALA and SHWETA WAGH

Originally published on Scroll.in.

Thursday April 2, 2015

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in Maharashtra has been on a building overdrive. In the five months it has been in power, the dispensation has taken several decisions to construct infrastructure in the state without paying any heed to the impact it will have on communities and ecology. Few projects perhaps capture the government’s callousness as perfectly as the proposed Rs 8,000-crore coastal freeway in Mumbai, from Nariman Point in the city’s south to Kandivali in the western suburbs.

Though it is not a new idea, the coastal freeway has received an impetus under the BJP-led government, which feels that the 34-kilometre road is desperately needed to improve Mumbai’s traffic. This thinking echoes the recommendations of a technical committee set up by the government whose report, submitted in 2011, had advanced two incredibly counterintuitive arguments for building a coastal freeway.

The first said that a freeway would “take away traffic from internal roads”, reduce Mumbai’s notorious congestion and cut down the pollution levels, thus diminishing public “health hazards”. The second said the coastal road would supply “significant green space” to the city by reclaiming 160 hectares of land from the sea. It would also beautify the city’s western edge by creating recreational spaces, such as jogging and cycling tracks, waterfronts, promenades, gardens and landscapes. On the whole, the committee’s report claimed, the freeway will result in a “quantum leap” towards enhancing the “quality of life” of its citizens.

Both arguments are misleading.

Is “Tactical Urbanism” an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism? By Neil Brenner Posted on March 24, 2015

What can “tactical urbanism” offer cities under extreme stress from rapid population growth, intensifying industrial restructuring, inadequate social and physical infrastructures, rising levels of class polarization, insufficiently resourced public institutions, proliferating environmental disasters, and growing popular alienation, dispossession, and social unrest? The current MoMA exhibition Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities aims to explore this question through speculative interventions by teams of architects whose remit was to make design proposals for six of the world’s megacities—Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition has provoked considerable debate about our contemporary planetary urban condition and, more specifically, about the capacities of architects, urban designers, and planners to influence the latter in progressive, productive ways.

Such a debate is timely, not least because inherited paradigms of urban intervention—from the modernist-statist programs of the postwar epoch to the neoliberalizing, market-fundamentalist agendas of the post-1980s period—no longer appear viable. Meanwhile, as David Harvey notes in his comment on the MoMA exhibition, “the crisis of planetary urbanization” is intensifying. Megacities, and the broader territorial economies on which they depend, appear to be poorly equipped, in both operational and political terms, to resolve the monstrous governance problems and social conflicts that confront them. Under these conditions, Harvey grimly declares: “We are [ . . . ] in the midst of a huge crisis—ecological, social, and political—of planetary urbanization without, it seems, knowing or even marking it.”1….

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