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If there is ever a competition for a bird to represent Mumbai, the hands down winner will probably be the crane. But this crane is a mechanical one — the large one, with a hoist, wires and chains. All round this vast city, this crane is a dominant feature of the landscape, looming in an almost menacing way. It symbolises rapid change in a city that is always in the throes of transition and progress.
Mumbai is undergoing one of its biggest restructurings in its history. Old buildings are coming down at a fast pace and new ones are going up even more speedily. From the north to the south of this island, there are buildings under construction. In some cases, entire neighbourhoods are being brought down and spanking new precincts are coming up.
Many old buildings have blue and white corrugated sheets around them — this is the first clue that the building will be torn down and a spiffy new skyscraper will come up. The old one is inevitably a low rise — three or four storeys at the most. A smart new board announces what the new one will look like — a much taller structure, with stilt parking, in-house gyms, swimming pools and even, in some cases, a temple.
Depending on the deal worked out with the current residents, the builder either buys them out or temporarily places them in rented accommodation (he pays the rent) till the new construction is over. When they return, it is usually to an apartment bigger than the one they had and with better facilities. Who wouldn’t want this kind of deal? The builder gets a few extra floors that he sells at high prices — in some areas this can go up to Rs one lakh per square foot, (approx $2000). A large, luxurious apartment in the tonier areas can go for up to 5 million dollars. Yes, it’s absurd, but there it is.
Property markets the world over make very little sense; in an opaque system like prevails here, even less so. It all depends on the deal the buyer and seller strike; there is hardly any scientific benchmarking except for a general sense of what the going price in the neighbourhood is. Nor can one fully understand why the prices are so high; a plethora of archaic laws, the high cost of land in a city with no room to expand and the free availability of unaccounted money are cited as the reasons.
Today, the average price of a simple two-bedroom apartment in the city is around a crore, which is roughly 200,000 dollars, out of reach for a vast majority of citizens. Experts say that many of the new flats will not sell and the builders will have to reduce prices — but that rarely happens.
More than this price rise is the sense of displacement that citizens are feeling as parts of the city undergo a rapid change. The loss of that old shop, the disappearance of a favourite cinema, the makeover of even a barber shop; this leads to a feeling of loss.
When an old building is bought out, tenants and apartment owners often take the money and buy a place somewhere else. This destroys communities, as long-standing relationships are destabilised.
This then is the Mumbai contradiction — we are witnessing the birth of a smart new city, but at the same time, much that was valued in the old is getting lost forever. In Beijing, the government wilfully destroyed old hutongs (traditional villages) in its bid to move into the future and now the short-sightedness of that policy is being felt. But in China it was done by official diktat. In Mumbai it is the free market, helped along by government policies that are responsible. Not that everything old is good. But some of it definitely served an important purpose and not taking that into account and mindlessly racing to create tall, alienating monsters without equally working on building a sense of community can be soul-destroying.
Perhaps this is the nostalgia of an old time citizen of this wonderful city. If you have been to Mumbai, you will know what I mean, or indeed feel it even if you haven’t.
Meanwhile, if you are planning to visit, do so fast. The city will still be its energetic, frenetic, vibrant self, but something would have gone forever.
Sidharth Bhatia is a journalist based in Bombay (Mumbai).
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
