On Tuesday, after four years in
gestation, a 20-year master plan to govern Mumbai’s development received the
final nod from the Maharashtra government. The Mumbai Development Plan 2034 notched up a significant first to its
credit in the drafting itself, through a first-ever
consultative process with citizen-stakeholders.
Once it comes into effect, its
biggest interventions will include two more firsts — a planned and systematic stimulus for affordable housing amid India’s
most unaffordable real estate, and steps to reinforce the financial capital’s somewhat enfeebled claim to the
position of urbs prima.
The new DP makes many right
noises. While promising to protect
coastline features including beaches, estuaries, mudflats and mangroves, it
proposes adding over 3,700 hectares of land currently marked as no-development
zones, including salt-pan lands, for various
segments of affordable housing. Sixty hectares of the Mumbai Port Trust’s
721.24 ha have also been earmarked for affordable housing. In all, nearly one-eighth of Mumbai’s existing landmass
is to be infused as newly developable land, especially for housing for economically weaker segments, low income
group housing and slum rehousing.
In another first, the “accommodation reservation policy” that
will incentivise private landowners who choose to develop amenities that their
lands stand reserved for could finally see these amenities — playgrounds,
gardens, health centres, shelters for the homeless, etc — actually be built
instead of remaining on paper.
But curiously, after putting the
planners through the paces of an unprecedented consultative effort, the
government then proceeded to undermine
the plan with multiple, unilateral alterations over the last several months.
These tweaks include some so critical as to all but fritter away the wins of
the previous participative process.
For example, while previous
regimes protected a cap on FSI (floor space index, which limits the floor area
on a given plot) in the congested island city, Development Plan 2034 will now permit additional FSI in South and
Central Mumbai upon payment of a premium. The plan does not venture to
offer any explanations on how additional construction will impact creaking
infrastructure in these areas. So after first claiming, during the process of
framing this very plan, that a universal base FSI of 2 would suffice for
population projections in Mumbai until 2034, the government has now reversed
its own contentions in permitting further densification. As reported by The
Indian Express earlier, further
densification on account of higher FSI for a range of schemes — building
hotels, redevelopment of old buildings, slum rehousing, fin-tech or bio-tech
parks, medical or educational hubs, parking lots on private land, mill workers’
housing, etc — will clearly require mitigation measures, also not currently in discussion.
This FSI largesse for commercial construction has been sought to be
explained away as essential impetus for commerce and growth, but without
commensurate additions to transport infrastructure and mass transit systems,
a further gridlocking
of commercial hubs appears inevitable. The inability to reconcile planning for social equity and for
economic growth could raise the threat of tragic scenarios of the
kind that Mumbai has witnessed only recently — 14 dead in a fire in a plush
central Mumbai pub in the heart of a commercial and entertainment hub, and 23 dead in a stampede at a railway station
that was neither originally designed nor retrofitted for the commercial hub
that the area has turned into.
This fragmented nature of planning was at
the root cause of the stampede and the pub fire, for both were symptomatic of
central Mumbai’s haphazard boom, an unplanned growth but one that took place
with the full blessings of the government and municipal authorities.
On slum rehousing, in a reversal of the
free-homes policy in place since the 1990s, the government has now
proposed that all slum-dwellers living
in shanties since after the cut-off date of January 1, 2000, will also be
eligible for rehabilitation, but on payment of construction costs of their new
homes as provided by the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. Every second
Mumbaite’s residential address is a slum, and political expediency could easily
lead to the new proposal’s collapse.
But for once, alongside the glib targets, planners have
sought to admit the flaws and failures of the previous plan. A review committee suggested a “cafeteria”
approach or a “banquet of options” for slum upgrade and redevelopment to
replace the failed SRA model. At some point in the not-so-distant future,
planners will have to acknowledge this.
But in the end, Development Plan
2034 is tragically limited by what it does not do — go beyond the exercise of a
statutory obligation. It doesn’t take a qualified urban planner to concede that
Mumbai’s two previous Development Plans
completely failed to imagine a city where 60,000 taxis
with no designated parking place would be on call via apps, or that plastic waste would clog Mumbai’s drains to
catastrophic proportions, or that a Deonar dumping
ground fire would rage for weeks.
In a self-perpetuating failure of
planning, this DP makes scarce mention of sustainability. It fails to envision a city run on artificial
intelligence, a Mumbai with driverless cars, of
even electric cars, or even further agrarian
distress and de-peasantisation of Mumbai’s immediate outback areas.
What infrastructure demands would these entail? The current approach to
Development Plan 2034 would fail to answer those questions.
Credit: Indian Express Explained
(http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/mumbai-development-plan-a-few-firsts-yet-limited-by-what-it-does-not-do-5151836/)
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