Mumbai: As Dharavi,
Asia’s largest shanty town, inches towards a Rs13,000-crore makeover,
its planned transition from a squatter settlement of 55,000 families to
an urban showpiece—with towering apartments in well-planned blocks and
contemporary workplaces—will be overseen by a new chief executive
officer.
Slum makeover: Gautam Chatterjee, head of Dharavi Development
Authority, says the most crucial task is to convince the residents of
Dharavi that redevelopment of the slum is for their own good.
Slum makeover: Gautam Chatterjee, head of Dharavi Development
Authority, says the most crucial task is to convince the residents of
Dharavi that redevelopment of the slum is for their own good.
Gautam Chatterjee, an Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1982
batch, has been handpicked to head the Dharavi Development Authority by
the Maharashtra government to speed up the project after two of his
predecessors quit in the last two years.
Chatterjee was the first director of the Prime Minister’s Grant Project
(PMGP) which spent Rs100 crore for housing projects in Dharavi in the
1980s, and later headed the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) in
Mumbai for three years. Jockin Arputham, head of the National
Slumdwellers Federation and a Magsaysay Award winner, who has been an
activist in Dharavi for 20 years, says Chatterjee’s biggest strength is
his familiarity with each bylane of the area and his concern for its
people.
Over the years, Dharavi, once a fishermen’s settlement, has turned into
a colony of immigrants who live across 535 acres, less than a kilometre
away from the Bandra-Kurla business complex.
Chatterjee, 52, says “Dharavi is a city within a city.” Dharavi has
been the subject of global attention with Dubai-based real estate firm
Limitless, Africa Israel Investments Ltd and Lehman Brothers Inc.
teaming up with Indian developers to bid for redevelopment that would
take seven years to finish.
The makeover buzz has already sent up real estate prices, with a single
bedroom-hall-kitchen now costing more than Rs28 lakh.
In his first interview to the media after being appointed CEO of
Dharavi Development Authority, Chatterjee talks about the various
stumbling blocks in the way of the project. Edited excerpts:
Your predecessors quit abruptly. Is the CEO in a perpetual hot seat,
with huge political pressure?
There is a lot of pressure to execute the project fast. I don’t pay
heed to any other pressure. The project is for the people of Dharavi,
who have, over time, bought slum quarters to solve their housing
problem in Mumbai because they couldn’t afford anything better. They
aren’t encroachers. They too have paid fat amounts to slumlords to get
themselves a 220 sq. ft tenement there. The project’s objective is
their mass economic upliftment by providing better alternatives of
living and business opportunities.
Nineteen consortiums of developers qualified for the bid this January
and nothing has moved since then. There hasn’t even been a pre-bid
meeting. Why?
There are a number of ongoing crucial surveys such as the baseline
socio-economic survey and biometric surveys which will give us exact
figures of the number of slum-dwellers eligible for rehabilitation.
Without the survey results, it would be misleading to go ahead with the
bidding process because we wouldn’t be able to give the required
details to bidders.
Weren’t the surveys supposed to be done before floating global tenders?
Yes, ideally the bidding conditions for any such project are based on
these survey findings. But I am not hurrying the process because the
entire project will shape up according to the figures that come out.
Later a pre-bid meeting will be called with the short-listed teams.
What are the key challenges you face to ensure that the project starts
to roll?
The single most crucial task is to convince and convey the message to
the 55,000 families of Dharavi that the redevelopment is for their good
and that the government is doing it to scale up their economic
abilities.
(Also), we still don’t have answers to what happens to economic
activities that thrive in the area during the redevelopment. How will
they sustain through the construction period when the project is
executed?
We still have to find answers to how certain businesses like pottery,
which is generally done in ground-level homes now, can be continued if
they are relocated on the 10th floor of a tower.
Has there been a gap in communication which has led to protests against
the redevelopment?
People across all the 85 nagars within Dharavi need to be mobilized and
I shall use all resources available, political and apolitical, to put
across the right message. I am talking to the multiple groups that
operate here—politicians, social activists, urban planners, government
and of course, the people of Dharavi—to get this project going.
There are 63 ongoing slum
redevelopment projects in Mumbai. Why is Dharavi special?
Dharavi is a city by itself for its sheer size and (size of) its
economy and the project needs to be addressed in that light. Its
redevelopment is special because it is not restricted to plot
developments like other slum projects, but here we are modifying
development regulations to give rise to a new city.
http://www.livemint.com/2008/08/25234629/We-are-modifying-development-r.html
Copyright © 2007 HT Media.
