Mumbai developers co-opt slum dwellers

[MUMBAI] By the time Indian developer Babulal Varma stepped in, bulldozers and police with truncheons were a day away from forcibly evicting the last residents of a corrugated-roofed, rain-tarped slum that had grown like a tumour into a prime area of central Mumbai.

This time, Mr Varma recounted, it was an old woman holding up his plans to replace the slum with a US$1 billion complex: six luxury towers with million-dollar apartments overlooking the Arabian Sea, coupled with housing blocks nearby with free homes for all the slum dwellers with rights to the land. It was not that the old woman did not want a free apartment. She wanted two. Yet the law permits developers to give only one.

So Mr Varma paid her a visit. The woman lived with her two sons, and the sons' wives, in a 90-square-foot shack. The wives argued. Constantly. Mr Varma listened and came back with a piece of paper showing a separation line drawn through the unit that they would be getting, with a second door cut into the hallway. The wives could live separately, he explained. Agreement came in 45 minutes. Construction began the next day.