Mumbai carries out ‘world’s largest slum survey’

The survey aims to provide private developers with the information they need to rehome slum residents in new high-rise apartments when they take over the land to build luxury homes. It is all part of a bid by the city to wipe out its slums.

Mumbai is carrying out what officials have described as the world's biggest slum survey. Subhash Sharma for The National

MUMBAI // Govind and Pramiladevi Nishad hand over documents, including income tax cards and electricity bills, to an official who then takes photographs and fingerprints of the couple and their four young children on a tablet device.

Outside the family’s three metre by two metre windowless home, monsoon rains beat down, flooding the narrow lanes of the crowded slum in the Mumbai suburb of Ghatkopar.

The heavy rain has not put a stop to what authorities have described as the world’s largest slum survey. Since the start of the year, officials have been going door-to-door across an estimated 700,000 structures in Mumbai’s slums, collecting details and biometric data of millions of residents and numbering and mapping their homes.

The aim is to provide private developers with the information they need to rehome slum residents in new high-rise apartments when they take over the land to build luxury homes.

In a bid to wipe out slums, Mumbai has launched a rehabilitation scheme under which developers are given the land free of charge, provided they develop it and rehouse slum residents for free. Developers can then build luxury apartments there, with the former slum-dwellers housed in separate high-rise apartments on the same piece of land. Each apartment measures 269 square feet in size.

According to the World Bank, more than half of Mumbai’s population of more than 20 million live in slums, which cover 3,260 hectares in a city where space for development is scarce.

“There are huge space constraints in Mumbai,” says BI Kendre, chief coordinator of the slum survey group at the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), a government body. “We need to understand who is eligible for apartments when the land is developed – we take an undertaking from the slum residents that they have no other house in India apart from the one in the slum.”

The homes in the shanties do not have toilets and running water, so he says the scheme will improve the quality of life for the poor.

The SRA hopes to survey more than 200,000 slum structures by the end of this year. Not only is this a major logistical challenge given the size of the labyrinthine slums but some local politicians and slum dwellers are opposed to the survey. Officials have faced protests and even violence as they try to carry out the work.

“Sometimes the slum residents get violent and they try to hit us,” says Vidyadhar Mirajkar, the field manager in Mumbai for Innowave IT Infrastructures, one of three private companies that is carrying out the survey for SRA. “Sometimes we have to call the police. If they don’t want to be surveyed, they come in a mob and they try to hold you and they won’t let you in.”

He says slum dwellers who protest are a minority and they can usually be brought around once the survey is explained to them.

“It’s the local leaders and goons (criminals) that are opposing us,” he says. “It’s a challenging job.”

Local politicians and criminals are opposed to the rehousing scheme because they do not want to lose their control of the slums.

Asked if he ever finds such situations frightening, Mr Mirajkar says: “If I got scared, I would not be able to complete this survey in Mumbai.”

The squalor in some of the slums is so overwhelming that Mr Mirajkar’s workers have to wear surgical masks and a few of them have contracted hepatitis and other illnesses from drinking contaminated water there, he says.

“Sometimes it stinks so bad, you can’t even stand there.”

The firm uses high-tech biometrics and light detection and ranging (lidar) technology to carry out the work.

Many slum dwellers welcome the survey.

Shashikant Rama Kamble, 52, a farmer who works outside of Mumbai and lives in the Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar slum in Ghatkopar, welcomes the scheme becomes his tiny home keeps sinking and he has to raise the floor every few years, which is costly.

Prashant Chalase, project manager of the biometric part of the survey at Innowave, says that collecting the identification and property documents from the residents, which the survey workers need to take copies of, is also a challenge. This is because many of the residents do not possess the necessary documents.

As well as taking photographs and measuring the slum huts, they also collect short videos documenting living conditions and oral interviews with residents.

“The information will be most helpful for the rehabilitation process because the SRA will be able to analyse everything,” Mr Chalase says.

Once the SRA has completed surveying the more than 200,000 slum structures by the end of this year, residents will be issued with special identification cards linked to the rehousing scheme.

Mr Nishad, 43, and Mrs Nishad, 37, are only too happy to cooperate with the survey because they cannot wait to move their family to a new home built by a developer.

“We’re concerned about the hygiene conditions in the slum,” says Mr Nishad, who delivers cooking gas cylinders for a living. “Our children fall sick regularly.”