Historical context

Unlike most large traditional Indian towns built around religious centres or royal courts, Bombay’s significance as a “centre for exchange’ truly began with the advent of the East India Company in 1667 (Thorner, 1995). The primary objective being the establishment of trade and not conquest, the company encouraged a diverse community to settle and develop the city. The main settlers were Parsi, Hindu, Jain and Muslim merchants from the neighbouring state of Gujarat. They were given freedom to practice any religion and as an added those born in Bombay were considered ‘natural subjects of England’ (Dwivedi and Mehrotra, 1995).

The ‘Native town’, beyond the Esplanade, was a mixed-use commercial and residential space. The only spaces of interaction for all the communities living in the Fort were the bazaars, maidaans (open spaces) or other communal spaces.

‘Mumbadevi’, the original name given to the city made up of seven small islands with scattering fishing villages.Indian bazaars situated in Bhuleshwar, Kalbadevi, Girgaon, Nagpada were the hub of economic, social and cultural exchange. The Marwari bazaar in Bhuleshwar that traded in textiles and jewellery does so to this day.

While Kolkata and Chennai with their access to a fertile hinterland and good communications were dominating urban centres, Bombay (Mumbai) needed to exploit its proximity to Europe and build on trade and manufacturing for the export market. To secure Bombay’s position, the business class pushed the government to improve access to the hinterland and overseas communications.Infrastructure improvements and political manoeuvres ensured access to cotton growing areas of Nagpur and Deccan establishing Bombay as an important trade centre in the first half of 19th century.

To secure Bombay’s position, the business class pushed the government to improve access to the hinterland and overseas communications.

The booming cotton trade led to the expansion of mills in Tardeo, Parel, Lalbaug, and Byculla, collectively called as Girangaon or the mill village, to the north of the Fort. In 1863, the railway link between Bombay and Deccan plateau brought Marathi speaking migrant mill workers to settle around the mills. However most of these chalws had a vacancy rate of 50 percent till 1932, owing partly to the social control exercised by the jobbers/mukadams, pathans and gatekeepers of the mills in the neighbourhoods (Sen, 2002). Some Indian mill owners built chalws like the Kohinoor mills, Lakshmibhai Krishnaji and Shantaram’s chawls in Dadar (East), Parel and lalbaug, providing housing of 300-400 single rooms per chawl usually occupied by a particular caste or community of people (Dwivedi and Mehrotra, 1995).

The mill workers and other labour were housed in chawls (tenements) developed by the Bombay Development Department (BDD).The tradition of a single caste of people according to their occupation resulted in chawls like the Lohar (ironsmith) chawl, Sutar (carpenter) chawl and the likes in Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar.

With Independence in 1947, there was freedom to overcome differentiations and redress inequalities. The Urban land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCRA) was enacted in 1976 to prevent concentration of land holding in urban areas by limiting individual land holdings to 500 sq.m and to obtain surplus land for construction of middle and low income housing (Urban India, 2002).

The ideology of redistribution and social equity promoted urban policies such as the Rent Control Act (RCA) of 1947, devised to freeze rents and protect tenancy rights of the urban poor.

However, the legacy of the British rule in showing favouritism to elites as well as corruption and mismanagement in the municipal administration maintained a status quo in the spatial pattern of the city with the Indian bureaucracy taking over where the rulers left off. The policies backfired due to unsuccessful implementation creating an artificial constraint on land supply, which drove the real estate prices disproportionately higher than the rise in income.

Compounded by post-partition migration from Pakistan, the Indian cities faced the pressure of a rising urban population with inadequate housing and basic services. However, the assumption of the policy makers that India being an agrarian economy should be protected from over-urbanisation that could lead to a drain of resources from the country side to the city, led to urban problems being sidelined as welfare problems rather than those of critical national importance (Urban India, 2002). Mumbai was meted the same treatment with a total lack of note of its potential as an instrument of economic development of India (Harris, 1978).

Further the restricted land supply due to ULCRA and RCA is said to have induced large-scale corruption, the involvement of the underworld and organised crime in Mumbai.


First mill in Tardeo in 1854                             growth of mills by 1870s                      over 50 mills in the island by 1900s

There have been only minor changes in the RCA, the ULCRA has been repealed by the central government in New Delhi in January 1999 and by the state government recently. The impact of these policies on the spatial dynamics of the city was a consolidation of the existing spatial segregation, driven by market differentials.

Those who inherited the location advantageous properties in south and central Mumbai remained firmly in place or made sizeable profit from selling residential units for commercial use. Thus, the island city of Mumbai has seen a progressive decrease in its share of population from 1961. The new entrants into the land markets with the capacity to buy could afford the central areas and the elite suburbs, those who could not were driven further north to suburbs those who could not were driven further north to suburbs.

WARDS	Area in sq kms	Population	A category	B category	C category	Total dilapidated
A ward	12.5	210926	936	83	41	1060
B ward	2.84	140481	1256	37	38	1331
C1/ C2	1.78	202216	1536	81	16	1633
C3/ C4			1708	51	18	1777
D-1	8.03	378607	1606	117	130	1853
D-2			1053	214	71	1338
E ward	7.32	410824	2025	179	83	2287
F / north	12.94	702470	2056	560	699	3315
F / South	14	477136	1336	180	179	1695
	59.41	2522660	13512	1502	1275	16289