Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and Its Mills 0195677404, 9780195677409

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Ripping the Fabric The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills

Darryl D’Monte

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Preface to the Paperback Edition Journalists are only too aware that everything they write —"history in a hurry"—turns into waste paper the very next day. In the preface to the first edition of this book in 2002, 1 had expressed my earlier misgivings that six years of labour would already have been wasted by the turn of events: the mills would have been sold, lock, stock and barrel by the time the book came out As things have turned out, as I write this three years later, the sale of land belonging to cotton mills has become one of the most controversial issues confronting Mumbai and has attracted nation-wide interest. An underlying factor, which has given the redevelopment of mill land a new fillip, is the recent rise in real estate prices, which makes the 600 acres or 280 hectares belonging to the private and nationalized mills extremely valuable. This straddles an area eight times larger than Nariman Point, the controversial reclaimed central business district in south Mumbai. Some still value the mill land at Rs 20,000 crore, which may be an underestimate. This is why the National Textile Corporation (NTC) has decided to dispense with the consultants it appointed to dispose of some of the 24 mills it owns and put some of them on the auction block. Up for the highest bid, Jupiter, occupying 11 acres —which is the average size of many Mumbai mills —in Elphinstone Road in the heart of the mill precinct has changed hands at Rs 276 crore. This is half as much more than what the NTC expected. It was snapped up by India Bulls, a financial services company, in which India's richest multi-billionaire, the London-based steel mogul Laxmi Mittal, owns a small stake.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Hong Kong Karachi Cape Town Dar es Salaam Auckland Mexico City Nairobi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Taipei Toronto New Delhi Shanghai With offices in Chile Czech Republic France Greece Argentina Austria Brazil Portugal Singapore Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Turkey Ukraine Vietnam South Korea Switzerland Thailand Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press o n I / in the UK and in certain other countries „ ' ’V

Published in India By Oxford University Press, New Delhi x © Oxford University Press 2002

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2002 Oxford India Paperbacks 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 13: 978-0-19-567740-9 ISBN 10: 0-19-567740-4 All photographs by Darryl D'Monte Typeset by Innovative Processors, New Delhi 110 002 Printed in India at Paul’s Press, New Delhi 110 020 Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

Preface to the Paperback Edition vii

ing a comprehensive study of mill land on behalf of the state government in 1996. Keshub Mahindra, the industrialist, withdrew from the panel when the media pointed out that there was a conflict of interest, since Mahindras are property developers with the New Great Eastern Mill owners. Such considerations did not deter Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing from serving on the panel. He is in the midst of developing his extensive mill lands, said to occupy totally as much space as Nariman Point; he has sought to explain his presence on the p r e t e x t of representing the Mill Owners' Association. The panel was given just three months to complete its deliberations and asked for more time to untangle the extremely complex and often confusing situation —compounded, no doubt, by venal bureaucrats and politicians who have deliberately obfuscated the issue in order to thwart any scrutiny by the workers and the public. As they did in 1996, the private mill owners have once again refused to allow the panel to enter its mills to conduct an on-theground assessment. Why a panel officially appointed by the state government cannot compel these owners to raise their shutters is a question which it alone can answer. The government. refused to extend the life of the panel on the ground that the very issue was later the subject of a public interest litigation. Incensed by the blatant collusion between owners and the state, several prominent citizens; including Correa and former Municipal Commissioner Jamsheed Kanga, asked the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) to file a petition to halt any further sale of mill l a n d b y both p r i v a t e and n a t i o n a l i z e d mills. I t w a s directed at the BMC, NTC, and MHADA. The petition filed by Shyam Chainani of BEAG expressed concern regarding the 600 acres of mill land, which was 'the last chance to provide parks and recreational ground of 200 acres and public housing of 222 acres for the p o o r and middle c l a s s of B o m b a y ' . I t c i t e d how i n 1 9 8 3 (in the draft DC rules) the Floor Space Index (FSI) for industries, including textile mills, was 0.50. This was increased to 1.33 in the island city and 1 in the suburbs 'both subjected to the specific condition that no part of Textile Mills premises is converted and used for purposes other than Textile Mills Activity'. In 1991, it went on, the higher FSI was retained but without the condition regarding continuation of textile activity. In 1989, BEAG had suggested that the textile mill lands should be divided into three,

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It is for an identical reason that the Kasliwals, who own Shree Ram Mills, has reneged on its agreement in 2004 to sell the land for Rs 105 crore to Kalpataru builders, which has already put up the 39storey Kalpataru Heights on mill land in Mahalaxmi. Although the builders have put down Rs 30 crore, the owners obviously now feel that they can get more for this prime property. I had criticized the 1991 amendment to the Development Control (DC) rules, which entitled a mill owner to sell or redevelop his land provided he parted with one-third of it to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for public amenities like parks or schools and another third for the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Agency (MHADA), leaving the owner the remaining third. This provision did not recognize the right of workers to a share of the property on which many had been employed for succeeding generations —families were known by the mill in which their forefathers worked. The amendment also encouraged the piecemeal redevelopment of land, whereas the city, gasping for open space and facing an abysmal lack of housing, required the 400 acres due to it to be pooled and planned in a holistic manner. Not in one's wildest nightmares, however, could anyone have foreseen the sleight of hand which the Maharashtra government resorted to by amending this law in 2001, requiring owners to part with two-thirds only of vacant land, as opposed to the total area occupied. It omitted the built-up areas and this drastically reduced the land available for public purposes. It took a couple of years for to discover this fraud unions, urban experts, and conservationists perpetrated on the people of Mumbai. While the government sought to camouflage its misdeeds by asserting it had published notices to invite objections in newspapers and passed the amendment in the state assembly, it was obviously done behind the back of the public. Indeed, this only confirms the conviction that successive state governments have been handin-glove with builders, who dictate the state's agenda. The media reported, on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections in May 2004, how the builder's lobby had paid Rs 50 crore into various parties' coffers to influence Mumbai's urban development. In response to the public outcry, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh instituted an enquiry panel under Deepak Parekh, who heads the Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd (HDFC). It included eminent architect Charles Correa who was responsible for conduct-

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

to earmark as much space for the lungs' of the city. Later that month, however, the Court vacated its stay, subject to certain conditions, and reverted the case to the High Court in Mumbai, where it had to be decided by July. However, this may well be too late as far as the 32 private mills are concerned, because 23 of them have already received the initial sanction from the BMC. Of the 24 NTC mills, permission has been approved for seven; the NTC is believed to have offered two of these entirely for public use. What may well prove the unfortunate outcome is that the private mill owners will be allowed to go scot-free, while the. nationalized mills have to comply with the law's provisions, a complete travesty of the law. At any rate, the High Court has opened a Pandora's Box regarding the bona fides of mill owners. They have asked the BMC and NTC to provide details on the size of each mill which is being redeveloped, its location, and the status of its lease. As it happens, this coincided with a startling revelation, courtesy the activist Shailesh Gandhi who, using the new Maharashtra Right to Information Act, asked the BMC and the Collector (representing the state government) to provide details of mill leases. According to the data he had obtained, the average lease rent paid per sq metre was just 3.5 paise per year. At a public meeting on conserving the heritage embodied in Mumbai's mills, organized by the UK-based International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), supported by Prince Charles' trusts, and the Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage (INTACH), Gandhi startled the audience by claiming that the land belonged to the government, not the lease-holders. 'My question is, if this land belongs to us, why are we begging for one-third?', he demanded to know. A document he released shows that there were several mills whose leases have either expired altogether or whose lease rents are pathetically small. Thus the leases of Gokuldas Morarjee for 27,520 sq yd and Kohinoor in Naigaum, occupying 22,205 sq yd, have expired, which is why he categorized them 'illegal occupiers'. In fact, the Mumbai Suburban Collector admitted that there were 25 plots occupied by industries whose lease had expired, making them anadhikrut kabjedar,Marathi for unauthorized occupants. The BMC stated, amazingly, that in the case of Gokuldas Morarjee and Phoenix Mills, the leases were not traceable. Subsequently, a BMC official claimed that both were for 999 years in the 1940s.

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

with a third going for open spaces, a third going for public amenities (hospitals, schools, maternity homes, dispensaries, etc.) and a third going to the mill owners. (Although Chainani claims a patent on this proposal, it has variously been attributed to the former Urban Development Secretary D.T. Joseph and to much-respected Correa himself, much before 1996.) BEAG observed that when the government enacted the Development Control Regulations in 1991, it made a three-way split by which a third was allotted for public housing rather than for public amenities. 'In 2001, Government changed the regulation so that the calculation of 1 / 3 was based only on the current unbuilt open area. That would reduce the open spaces from 165/200 acres to 32 acres and the public housing component from 160/222 acres to 25 acres'. perfidy. At Victoria Some examples highlight the government's Mills in Lower Parel, the developer's share has doubled from 40 per cent to 78 per cent. Kamala is worse, leaving nothing at all for the public. Little wonder, then, that a glossy ad for Trade Towers at 'Kamala City' proclaims that it is 'a futuristic building with such superior amenities, that owning an office here would require raising all other standards. It is located in the lush [sic] Kamala City among neighbours like media houses, travel agencies, banking and telecom firms, food and health stations, and many others'. Phoenix, which occupies 69,400 sq metres, would have parted with some 200,000 sq metres to the BMC under the 1991 rules and an equivalent to MHADA, but has become completely gentrified today under the 2001 amendment. Jupiter, occupying 45,000 sq metres, would have surrendered between 1,33,000 and 1,66,000 sq metres respectively for the two public purposes, but by the new rules, has to sacrifice only 513 and 420 s q metres r e s p e c t i v e l y . According to one media report, the government's largesse as a whole has fetched the builders a bonanza of Rs 12,000 crore, calculated on the basis that they would obtain an extra 300 acres, on which real estate would fetch Rs 6,000 per sq ft. To the surprise of most parties, the High Court granted a temporary stay, which was challenged in the Supreme Court by a battery of legal luminaries, including former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee and constitutional law expert Fali S. Nariman, on behalf of the owners. The Supreme Court reserved its verdict in May, stating that it had to strike a balance between the commercial interests of the mill owners and the public interest —specifically, the need

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Preface to the Paperback Edition xi

had expired and the land was not being used for the purposes assigned, it would revert to the state. This sounds suspiciously like the double-talk that all politicians are adept at. At the INTBAU workshop referred to earlier, British experts cited how two mill clusters in Britain have attained UNESCO World Heritage status. The first were the Derwent Valley Mills —hallowed because it was here that Richard Arkwright first employed water to drive mill machines. His Cromford Mill could be hailed as the harbinger of the industrial revolution. Members of INTBAU —which included The Phoenix Trust, Regeneration Through Heritage, and The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment —stressed how of m i l l s M u m b a i m i l l s were the ' g r a n d c h i l d r e n ' under their care and if anything, Mumbai possessed an even greater heritage, considering how much more had been saved —at the time of writing this that is —from the bulldozer as well as the sheer scale of Indian mills. had not This is something that even Mumbai conservationists grasped in its entirety although —as this book mentions —there have been references to the heritage features of the mills, including by the Correa panel. The British experts were able to demonstrate, as one put it, ttyft 'it was important to look at heritage, but we should not be timid about adaptive re-use for contemporary purposes'. This would put to rest fears about the elitist preoccupations of conservationists who might be seen as making a case for preserving mill structures, irrespective of whether w o r k e r s a n d t h o s e living in the lacked homes and jobs—and open spaces. The imneighbourhood portant corollary, according to these experts, was that such a heritage movement would assist c o m m e r c i a l partnerships in development projects. As a test case, participants at the workshop, who included architecture students from Mumbai and Delhi, surveyed the NTC's large India United No. 1 mill in Lalbaug and suggested a slew of adaptive re-uses. They came up with several options, whereby only structures —like the main mill buildthe more preservation-worthy ing —would be kept intact. It could be alternately made a high-end commercial complex within, since a mill worker occupied 39 sq metres of space on average in any mill and many more could be accommodated within, particularly with mezzanine floors being added. Or it could be turned into a public hospital, with a private hospital coming up on the vacant land alongside to cross-

x Preface to the Paperback Edition

Similarly, Simplex in Mahalakshmi —founded by a group of investors who included Mohammed Ali Jinnah —had a 99-year lease with the Bombay Collector in 1884 which expired in 1983, but the lessees continue to occupy the land. According to the Collector, the lease rent has not been raised for the 7,836 sq metre plot, which remains at Rs 48 per year. This has not deterred Simplex from overseeing the creation of 'Planet Godrej' on the plot, comprising five 40storey towers. Gandhi pointed out to the author that when government land is leased, the owner contracts with a lessor to use the land for a specific purpose. The Khatau Makanji lease in 1916 specifically states that the lessee was entitled to buy it within the first five year of entering into the contract —which clearly specifies that the lease did not confer any ownership rights. There was an express reference to it conducting 'mill business'. This puts a question mark over the legality of 'ownership' of leased mills, even those on a 999-year contract. According to the BMC, only six of 28 private mills surveyed were leased by it. But this was by no means the only complaint: unbelievably, the final deed of Phoenix in the 1940s had still not been finalized. In 2003, Atul Ruia, the owner, paid Rs 60 lakh to the corporation for change of land use. As he put it, 'Mill owners are replacing derelict structures with planned development. How else will one see Mumbai becoming Shanghai?' Others, like the Piramals who own Morarjee, the site of a new office complex and 'super-luxury' tower apartments, are sheltering under the clause of the original lease which permits 'residential use' (as it does in Khatau's case) — obviously meaning for staff and workers, not rank outsiders. G. Pantbalekundri, the former Maharashtra Joint Urban Development Secretary who also served on the Charles Correa committee, believes that BMC should not permit user change on textile lands. 'Mills have been treated favourably in the past, like being excluded from any reservations of public amenities because of their industrial usage', he believes. As we see in the book, while new industries were prohibited from being established or existing ones expanded in the city, cotton mills were exempted because of their enormous employment —2,50,000 workers at the peak. As a result of the public outcry following Gandhi's exposes, the state government announced that it would examine all the lease agreements of mills. Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh even went so far as to assert that if leases

Preface I seem to have made it somewhat of a habit to write a book whenever I resign as an editor of a newspaper, though to be accurate, this is only the second time r o u n d . I n the first instance, two decades ago, I had thought of writing a book on Mumbai, as a prominent journalist friend advised me to do, since I was concerned about several of the city's environmental i s s u e s . However, the focus eluded me at the time: I certainly did not want to write a book which devoted a chapter to each urban problem. The opportunity presented itself when I resigned from the Times of India in 1994. A couple of years later, it occurred to me that the potential sale of land belonging to cotton mills in the city was the window I was looking for. It allowed me to examine the future of a city which was licking its wounds. It was the industrial hub of the country but did not quite know where it was heading in the twentieth century. The illusion, rather than the dream, was to convert Mumbai into a city which specializes in services, particularly as a finance centre. Hong Kong and Singapore loomed large in the imaginations of planners. Looking at the latest episodes in the never-ending saga of redevelopment of mill land in Mumbai, one is struck by the veracity of the French saying: the more things change, the more they remain the same. After completing the first draft of this manuscript in April 2000, 1 was concerned, perhaps excessively, that the thrust of this book would be negated by subsequent developments. Specifically, all the available mill land would have been sold and one would be doing a post-mortem, rather than writing out a prescription. Even as

xii Preface to the Paperback Edition

subsidize this public function. The idea was not to provide a final blueprint but to flag the opportunities that such redevelopment presented. The British experts also emphasized that the local community ought to be in the driver's seat in this process —a far cry from the situation on the ground. In the last five years or so, there has been a tremendous surge in interest— almost more so, one might add, on the part of foreign academics and journalists —in studying Mumbai. The Mumbai Study Group, of which I am a joint convenor, has witnessed a spate of enquiries. The McKinsey report, titled Vision Mumbai, commissioned by the corporate think-tank Bombay First and sought to be taken forward b y a Citizens' Action Group, has furthered such interest. There are many entreaties —including from no one less than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself —to convert Mumbai into Shanghai (Singapore and Hong Kong have been sidelined). The publication of One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices:The millworkers ofGirangaon: an oral history, by Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, has also illuminated a little-researched area of life in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the mass demolition of slums has focused on the explosive questions of human rights and citizenship, all of which make M u m b a i a toxic cocktail for urban experts. The denouement of the sale of mill land is thus sure to figure as a vital chapter in this recent dismal history. May 2005

Darryl

D'Monte

Preface xv

developers in this most populous city in the country. Gayatri Singh and Meena Menon, fellow activists from the Samiti, also made time for me and provided mounds of material on the manipulation by private mill owners of the redevelopment of their land. A.G. Bapat, General Manager of the National Textile Corporation (North), was most unbureaucratic in his readiness to grant me permission to visit several of the mills under his charge. When I visited the crumbling, gargantuan ('dark, Satanic') NTC mills armed with his missives —managers were cooperative, though curious. Sharad Kale, the former head of the Mumbai Port Trust, who figures in his own right in this book as a conservationist of the harbour's heritage, was also most helpful in granting permission to visit dock areas which are normally out-of-bounds to outsiders. V.Y. Tamhane, Secretary General of the Mill Owners' Association, was cooperative and participated in a day-long seminar attended by representatives of mill owners and workers which I organized at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Several academics, architects and others interested in the future of Mumbai read parts of this manuscript and made valuable suggestions. They include P.K. Das, Ritu Dewan, Mariam Dossal, J.B. D'Souza, Pankaj Joshi, Rahul Mehrotra, Indra Munshi, Gunther Nest, Narendra Panjwani, Shirish Patel, Gyan Prakash, Tirthankar Roy, and Gillian Tindall. The usual disclaimers apply. I am indebted to several libraries in Mumbai, beginning with the Centre for Education and Documentation, which is an oasis in the otherwise bleak landscape for all researchers today. It has even kept clippings on industrial sickness, among other subjects, for 11 years — which came to my rescue six years after I had conducted my original research when I was compiling the footnotes. It would be a tragic loss to researchers and students alike if this NGO is allowed to fade away, as it is in imminent danger of happening, given the increasing tendency of institutions to bar access by outsiders to their data and the reluctance of funding agencies to support such a crucial venture as a public documentation centre. I have referred to articles published in leading dailies throughout the book. These are from their Mumbai editions unless otherwise specified. In the British Council Library, Doreen D'Sa was very helpful in locating books and documents on Manchester and its surrounding textile manufacturing towns. She also helped to track material on London's Docklands, which figures prominently in a chapter on the Mumbai port in this book. At the American Centre Library, Asha

xiv Preface

I was writing this preface, the Maharashtra government was trying to hand back on a platter 15 acres of land it had acquired from Mafatlal Industries, for the expansion of the Byculla zoo. Since I completed the first draft of the book, the state government has indeed changed its policy and permitted the sale of mill land under certain conditions. While the private mills have, as in recent the National Textile Coryears, been going about it surreptitiously, poration, which looks after 'sick' mills, has been more transparent and wants to put up 226 acres of land for sale in the city. It has a total of some 1800 acres of such land in the country as a whole, but Mumbai is the prime property market. In the absence of public intervention, market forces alone will decide how Mumbai will grow in the next few decades. Perhaps the surest indication of the shape of things to come is the fact that India's tallest twin skyscrapers, all of 60 storeys high, are coming up in a mill compound in Tardeo in south Mumbai. Meanwhile, mill workers are fighting a rearguard action and are a thoroughly disillusioned and dispirited lot, staring at a bleak fuin midtown Mumbai, which was once their ture in Parel-Lalbaug fiefdom. They are now down to less than 50,000—a fifth of their peak in the late 1970s. This book arrives at the conclusion that while manufacturing industries have indeed declined worldwide, this reduction in employment cannot be compensated for by a surge in jobs in services. This is also the second time in my career that I have to be grateful to the Tata group of industries for supporting my research for two years. This book was made possible through a generous grant from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and I have to thank Rusi M. Lala for shepherding me through the procedure. I was appointed a Visiting Fellow at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai, and its former Director Partha N. Mukherjee speedily removed any bureaucratic obstacles that may have stood in the way of this unconventional appointment. R.N. Sharma, Head of Urban Studies, was always at hand to assist too. As someone who has devoted much of his life to saving Mumbai's mills from imminent extinction, Datta Isvalkar, General Secretary of the Gimi Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, constantly prodded me to complete this book in the hope that it would intervene and arrest this terrible d e n o u e m e n t . I t h a s not saved m o s t of the mills from meeting their untimely end, but will hopefully illuminate some of the options that are still open to planners and

Contents Abbreviations 1. Introduction

xviii 1

2. Reinventing Mumbai

18

3. King Cotton Dethroned

65

4. Land as the Last Resort

106

5. Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold

153

6. Recycling Mill Land

187

7. Mumbai City in the Dock

232

8. Whose Mumbai is it Anyway?

266

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Chatterjee, Asha Rani, Usha Sunil, Parvati V. and their colleagues were always more than willing to help me trace books and CDROMs with material on Lowell, America's former mill town, and other American cities which have waxed and waned with the passage of time. Adil Jussawalla located poems for me, one of which figures as an epigraph in this book. Others who volunteered to help include Jennifer Mirza, who magnanimously went through several back issues of the Economic & Political Weekly and Santosh Verma, who visited mills with me twice and took pictures. V.K. Phatak and his fellow planners in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority generated the maps to illustrate this book. Sudha Seshadri, an e x p e r i e n c e d e d i t o r , p r o o f r e a d the b o o k for m e at very little notice. Herman Rodrigues formatted and printed out my original manuscript, while Nikhil Pereira printed out the revised version. In my family, I have once again relied very heavily on my mother Ena, now in her late eighties, who cut and pasted clippings every day for these past six years and more recently, also helped me proofread and index this book. There can hardly be a more laborious chore for any researcher and only a mother would have shouldered such a thankless burden. I owe her all my gratitude. My brother Brian also checked the manuscript and proofs on his occasional visits home. My son Samir visited some mills and Mumbai's docklands with me and took pictures. He has always extricated me from the arcane intricacies of word-processing and added the finishing touches to the maps. Bernard Kay in London also commented on the first draft of the manuscript. Everyone concerned with the future of Mumbai is by no means agreed as to what it should look like in the next few decades. Even today, planners are disputing whether Mumbai should look outwards internationally or inwards domestically to grow. In the last six years, I have published several articles in newspapers and journals on the redevelopment of mill land, which throws light on this admittedly complex larger issue, one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers. However, a journalist's job is to ask the right questions and I do hope that I have at least succeeded in doing this. Darryl D'Monte

Abbreviations

FIRE FSI GATT GDR GKSS HDFC ICICI ICMF IDBI IDCs IFCI HT ILO IMF INTACH INTUC JICA JNPT LDDC MFA MGKU MHADA MIDC MMR MMRDA MNC MOA MPT MRTP MSTC MTNL NIC

xix

Fire, Insurance and Real Estate Floor Space Index General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Global Depository Receipts Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti Housing Development Finance Corporation Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India Indian Cotton Mills' Federation Industrial Development Bank Industrial Development Certificates Industrial Finance Corporation of India Indian Institute of Technology International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Indian National Trade Union Congress Japanese International Co-operation Agency Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust London Docklands Development Corporation Multifibre Arrangement Maharashtra General Kamgar Union Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Agency Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation Mumbai Metropolitan Region Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority Multinational Companies Mill Owners' Association Mumbai Port Trust Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Maharashtra State Textile Corporation Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited Newly Industrialized Countries

Abbreviations AA AAIFR AEW API BARC BEAG BEWA BIDP BIER BIR BMC BMR CBD CIDCO cn DC DCM EPA FAR FICCI

Architectural Association Appellate Authority for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction Association of Engineering Works Automobile Product of India Bhabha Atomic Research Centre Bombay Environmental Action Group Ballard Estate Welfare Association Business Improvement District Programme Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction Bombay Industrial Relations Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Bombay Metropolitan Region Central Business District City and Industrial Development Corporation Confederation of Indian Industry Development Control Delhi Cloth Mills Environmental Protection Agency Floor Area Ratio Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry

1

Introduction At a public hearing organized by the Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, a civil liberties organization, at the Mahatma Phule Hall in Chinchpokli, central Mumbai in 1996, Narmada Appa Dhoipade, a 57-year-old worker from Kohinoor Mills, recalled her happy memories of the time when both her parents worked in the same mill. Festivals like Dussehra were celebrated with great gusto. It was an established tradition to be tattooed on one's right hand; she had had a lotus inscribed on her right hand 40 years earlier. 'I worked in the waste department/ she remembered. 'We would sift cotton balls and retrieve the cotton. My father worked in the traction department for 42 years. It required 20 people to start the machines in the past; later only two were required. I worked for five years in the waste department and earned Rs 1750 a month as a permanent hand.' 'My mother and father earned Rs 15-20 a month. I was 30 when I joined the mill. My husband died in 1971. 1 have three girls and two sons. My 31-year-old son is a driver and the other stitches clothes. There are eight people in my house. After the 1982-3 [Mumbai textile] strike I lost my job. I have been unemployed for 14 years. Only 150 people were called back when the National Textile Corporation (NTC) revived the mill, making a show of starting it in order to sell the land. The whole mill is in ruins now; it has been allowed to run to seed. Even the 100 workers going back there are working sporadically.'

xx Abbreviations

NRF

National Renewal Fund

NIC OA ODP OECD

National Textile Corporation Operating Agency Outline Development Proposal Organization for Economic Cooperation Development

ORG P.O.L. PAL

Operations Research Group Petrol, Oil, Lubricants Premier Automobiles Limited

PSUs R&D

Public Sector Units Research and Development

RMMS SBI

Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh State Bank of India

SICA

Sick Industrial

TCI

Transport Corporation

TECS Tens TIFR

Tata Economic Consultancy Services Twenty feet equivalent units Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

UDRI

Urban Development

ULCRA

Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation

Companies

and

Act

of India

Research Institu te Act of 1976

UNCTAD United Nations Council on Trade and Development UNDP United Nations Development Programme VRS

Voluntary Retirement Scheme

Introduction 3

paid leave, casual leave and production bonus. Some of the workers who resigned were paid, but I was not. I'm owed Rs 47,000 according to the mill's own records. There's no struggle now. I am prepared to do anything, but no one will employ me. Khatau was a particularly tough case; other mills do not have it as bad.' Indrakant Jha worked at Phoenix till the strike and lived in a Bandra slum. Things had deteriorated after the 1977 fire. His dues, amounting to some Rs 40,000, were cleared in 1995. 'I didn't know about constitutional rights,' he regretted. 'I just signed a paper and took my cheque. We wanted work, not money. There were some 35 workers left who had refused their dues and were fighting their cases. But it costs Rs 500 to get a copy of a judgment: what's the use of the law? At the same time, we have to see which lock the Constitution can help open. Lawyers, in their black coats, are like shikaris; they hit their target once in a while. I fought a local election; told journalists that I had never read a book in my life . . . ' 'There is now not much production in the mill; only about 1200 workers are left. There is a lot of room there: the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) has been leased office space, there is a Maruti showroom. I think if Samant had succeeded, there would have been a revolution and our children wouldn't have starved. I dream of this. I now do small jobs as a carpenter in buildings. Even when I was in the mill, I had a second part-time job. I can't pay the fees of my three children, who are in a municipal school. If there is an illness, I can't buy medicine. How will the next generation be fed? I think that beasts are better off than us; they may be dumb but at least they are fed.' ★ Datta Isvalkar, the General Secretary of the Gimi Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, is nostalgic when he recalls the days when he joined Modem Mills in 1971 at a gross salary of Rs 290. The first six years of his employment overlapped with his father's, who had worked as a weaver in the same mill from 1945 till he retired in 1977. 'I failed in my Inter Science,' Isvalkar recounts, 'I wasn't very interested in the science subjects; I actually should have done arts. My father said I was iiot suited for studies and told me to work in the mill. Because of my education, I joined as a clerk. There were 400 clerks at the time, out of a total strength of 3300 employees.. Because of such a

2 Ripping the Fabric

She lives in a chawl in the municipal labour camp opposite the mill. 'I was bom there and live there,' she told the author. Subsequently, she earned her living by vending vegetables, fetching milk, 'going here and there, looking for work'. She looks haggard and exhausted and is concerned about getting her son married. She made a living washing utensils at the time I met her. 'No one looks after the workers,' she sighed. 'The mill owner just looks after his own interests; there's only God above for us.' She did not know who owned the mill initially. 'Kohinoor was a number one mill; now it's a rubbish dump. It makes thread, which powerlooms cannot. In those years we could get a whole meal for two rupees in the canteen. You can't even buy a cup of tea with that now. The unions spoiled everything, whether it was Dange and the Lal Bavta (Red Flag), Ambedkar, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS) or Datta Samant.' Pandit Shankar Wagh, 60, had been working since 1955 in the mill and earned around Rs 1000 a month when he was also sacked during the 1982 strike. There were 6000 workers working three shifts before the strike. The mill had exchanged hands four times, the last owner being the Kapadias, who owned National Rayon. 'They bled the mills,' Wagh said bitterly. He has been claiming his wage arrears since the strike because he was illegally sacked. He won his case in court, but the NTC has not yet paid him his dues. His accumulated arrears amount to Rs 2 lakh. Mahadev Hiraji Thukrul, 61, had worked for eighteen years in Kohinoor before joining Khatau Mill in Byculla in 1971. He too lost his job in 1982. He was a first- generation Mumbaikar (as citizens are known in Marathi), having come to the city in 1942, and stayed at a private chawl in Bandra East. He was unemployed and due to financial constraints, sold his chawl for Rs 4 lakh to repay his debts. He was living in a one-room tenement in the same suburb, which he had bought for Rs 2 lakh. Living with him was his wife, son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Three of his daughters were married. 'My son is educated; he has passed Standard XII and has learned to type, but can't find work,' he complained. He was a member of the RMMS at Khatau and had then joined Samant's union. The mill had closed during the strike. 'Later, when the strike failed and the mill re-opened, I was not taken back because I was a group leader,' he said. 'Subsequently, I kept in touch with other workers. We used to get a lot of benefits like bonus,

Introduction 5

to sell part of their land to improve the mills, but the government would not permit them to do so. In 1987, ten mills, including Modem, closed. However, all unions, Samant's being no exception, did nothing to counter this trend. In 1989, some workers formed the Bandh Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti; Isvalkar and Vithal Ghag were elected secretaries. At a huge rally of some 2500 textile workers, including 500 from Kanpur, Ahmedabad and other centres, at Podar College in 1990, the workers drafted an alternative textile policy which would protect the interests of all the three sectors — composite mills, powerlooms and handlooms —eliminating the traditional antagonism between them. There were many morchas and rasta rokos subsequently, with the support of all political parties. Isvalkar worked in the Marathi eveninger, Mahanagar, looking after administration and labour when his mill was closed. This was between 1987 and 1994. His four children, three of whom were daughters, passed through difficult times, reduced to wearing tattered clothes which they mended. 'My father told me, 'you should have a son/ 'he laughs apologetically, explaining away his large family. 'Two of the daughters are married and one attends the SNDT women's college. The youngest, the son, is in Standard X. When the mills closed, everyone —the entire complex where we lived — was in the same plight, so no one could come to the help of anyone else. Normally, there are always survivors who come to the rescue; during this period, there were none.' In 1991, Meena Menon, a left activist and Gayatri Singh, a union lawyer, were leading a struggle of another section of workers who were in the same plight as the textile labour and they decided to help the workers in the closed mills. 'Our movement till then had no leadership,' says Isvalkar. 'We got it with them.' That year, he went on a fast for nine days in front of the New Great Eastern Mills, which was supported by Shiv Sena leader Manohar Joshi, then leader of the opposition. The Chief Minister, Sudhakarrao Naik, intervened to end the agitation. Meanwhile, the process of restarting Modem Mills had begun. Sharad Pawar, after he returned as Chief Minister in 1993, hastened the process. 'He was mindful of protecting the interests of mill owners as well as workers.' After some time, the union changed its name to the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS), both to denote its strength as a rival to the officially sponsored RMMS and to drop the Bandh (Closed) from its title to dispel the sense of doom associated with it.

4 Ripping the Fabric

large number of employees, there were always vacancies because someone or the other was always retiring! My cousin was also in the same mill.' As a clerical worker, he commanded some respect from his fellow employees, many of whom were unlettered and depended on him to write applications asking for leave, and so on. They did not even know how to calculate their pay packets on their own. They called him 'master' in deference to his schooling. His first brush with union activity was a 40-day strike led by Dange in the early 1970s. His own political baptism took place with the old socialist organization, the Rashtra Seva Dal. This explains why he wears khadi shirts even today. During the emergency in the mid-1970s, he was active in various campaigns launched by George Fernandes. The 1982 strike was a turning point. It was sparked off by a dispute over bonus which, traditionally, had always been favourably settled by the intervention of the Chief Minister. That year, this did not happen and there were spontaneous agitations, with workers finally cajoling Datta Samant to lead a massive strike. Isvalkar and fellow activists formed zones. They organized several morchas and jail bharo movements. They used to beat blacklegs —'not too hard, just to deter them!' After six months, the workers were at the end of their tether and began to go back. Samant was obstinate and did not listen to their pleas to settle their strike. When the strike fizzled out 18 months later, Modern Mills resumed functioning by dismissing one-third of the workers; the rest had to sign assurances that they would behave. The entire third shift disappeared. In the years before the strike, Isvalkar remembers, 'Everybody got employment, the literate as well as the illiterate. There was space for everyone, including non-matriculates. After a three-month training period, during which the apprentice received no wages, there was the guarantee that he would be hired. After all, the work was quite simple: for instance, if the thread split, it had to be tied and knotted. Those were the days when even the blind were hired: Vijay Merchant used to employ them in his Thackersey Mill.' This was the era when mill owners would fund cultural troupes to perform for workers and their families during festivals—a paternalism that has vanished into thin air. The new textile policy in 1985 coincided with the rise in land prices and fall in mill profits. Some genuine mill owners wanted

Introduction 7

site at Mulund; the former is now an industrial estate. Parke-Davis has closed at Saki Naka and sold its land to a builder for Rs 49 crore; it was idle for four years. In the engineering industry, which was once the major employer in Mumbai's suburbs, the list continues. Rallis Fan has shut down at Mulund. Samant's MGKU is running its subsidiary, Rallifwolf, with the workers since March 2001. H.R. Johnson, with 350 workers, has offered its workers a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) in Thane (which was one of the fastest-growing areas in Mumbai Metropolitan Region in the 1991 census). Automobile Products of India (API) has shut shop in Bhandup since 1993 after it went to the BIFR for rehabilitation and is sitting on 35 acres of land. Also in Thane, Murphy Radio has closed, while Voltas Switchgear has shifted from Lalbaug (in the cotton mill district of central Mumbai). Except for JK Chemicals with 800 workers, all the rest of this Singhania-owned group have closed. According to Samant, 'Raymond Woollen, the second biggest in Maharashtra, after Telco in Pune makes a Rs 250-crore annual loss.' W.G. Forge closed 15 or 20 years ago, with 3000 workers, some of whom still squat by the factory gates, awaiting their dues. The 25 acres have not been redeveloped. 'The whole Saki Naka to Andheri belt is closed: apart from ParkeDavis, there is Indian Engineering, M.S. Patel, T. Maneklal, Fit Tight Nuts & Bolts, Hindustan Transmission. The Kanjur Marg belt is also closed except for Crompton Greaves. The Lalbaug industrial area is closed too,' Samant repeats mechanically. Voltas, Calico Dyeing —they are all being developed commercially. Parel Tank was one of the city's monuments, but Crown Aluminium paid off its 300 workers after being closed for ten years and the tank has now been filled up. The case of Indian Standard Metal, with 300 workers, is in court; Modistone in Sewri has been locked out for five years; Mahindra Ugine closed five or six years ago. Bombay Metal, on Reay Road, owned by a German, has closed. 'There is hardly a unit where we were not present,' boasts Dada Samant. In 1982, Datta Samant's two unions controlled 400-500 units, well before he entered the cotton mills. There were one million workers in these factories, which included other units in Maharashtra and 75 in Gujarat. He probably had the allegiance of more workers as a union dominated by a single person, with no political party affiliation, than anyone else in the world._The engineering ones were bigger units, with more workers. Samant

6 Ripping the Fabric

'Gangsterism actually began during the 1982 strike/ he recalls’ 'when the government hired hoodlums to break the strike. The Gawli and Naik gangs sprouted up in the mill area, not in the suburbs, and flourished with the rise in land values. Once jobs dried up, all workers were affected; their security and long-standing beliefs disappeared. In the future, all this talk of turning Mumbai into a business centre will not work because the mill owners are in a crisis. Matulya, which has put up high-rise residential apartments on its land, has gone to the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) to wind up. There are no takers for its flats. Similarly, only a quarter of the flats put up on Modem Mill's land (Kalpataru Heights) have been sold. After all, how many businessmen are there in the city who can afford to buy a flat for a crore or two? We are blindly following the market economy, but there is no vision of what the future is going to be like. Unless we also look to the needs of other classes, like those living in chawls, the entire system will collapse.' ★ P.N. ('Dada') Samant is a genial, ageing trade unionist, who has inherited the leadership of two major Mumbai unions —Association of Engineering Workers (AEW) and Maharashtra General Kamgar Union (MGKU)—as well as that of a tiny political party, Kamgar Aghadi, from his brother, Dr Datta Samant, who was allegedly slain by rival unionists in 1997. He presides over a spacious office in the north-eastern suburb of Ghatkopar, with a plaster bust of his brother dominating the room. Asked if he can list some of the factories in which his unions were involved and many of which have now closed, he begins to reel off a litany of names by their location from memory: 'From Ghatkopar to Mulund, there must have been 100 factories, of which only ten are running today/ he says. 'The rest have closed over the last ten years.' There were the silk mills, like Ashok, whose owner has set up big commercial buildings. There were pharmaceutical units like Hoechst, which closed five years ago in Ghatkopar and like is being developed as a commercial complex. Multinationals Rhone-Poulenc and Merind have downed their shutters too, paying as much as Rs 12 lakh as dues to workers with just five years service. Johnson & Johnson has shifted from Bhandup to its other

Introduction 9

Dispirited Workers at Kohinoor Mills, Dadar

Bombay Dyeing, Century, Moraijee are all losing money hand over fist. Some mills like Bombay Dyeing are not viable despite having sold off some of their real estate. In the long run, it is difficult for these mills to survive. You can't compete with mills set up in a backward area. The electricity charges, wages and so on are cheaper. This is a political issue: why is it a single industrial unit with as many as 5000 workers can shut down when we can't? Let's come down to brass tacks. If you give us benefits and subsidies available elsewhere —like the cost of water —it will bring the cost down and make us competitive.' 'The powerloom sector is a major source of competition: powerful people have got involved in this industry because of the "cash money" in it. Spinning mills in the south supply yarn to these powerlooms. They pay cheaper wages and evade excise: no

8 Ripping the Fabric attributes the decline of manufacturing to the escalating real estate prices. 'In the late 1980s, if you invested Rs 5-10 crore, you could earn Rs 100 crore in this market/ he recollects. 'Now there is a recession and builders are facing bankruptcy. Apartments, which earlier fetched Rs 8000 to Rs 10000 a sq ft, are going for a quarter as Rates much. Like in the share market, there was over-speculation. in Bombay were the highest in the world/ Samant takes a peculiarly parochial view of the future of Mumbai. 'Every day, some 3000-4000 workers enter the city from the north —UP and Bihar. These are hopeless fellows; they are prepared to do any odd jobs. The whole of Mumbai's slums are teeming with these household units —with plastic moulding machines, wiring units —any odd thing. Jobs that were being done in the departments of big factories are now being done in some of these huts. In Crompton Greaves, for instance, workers who took VRS have been given machines to do stamping, turning etc with copper wire in their homes. There is no future in this. The future generation will get used to this kind of work; you can forget about salaries of Rs 15,000 a month like some Crompton workers earned. In Bayer in Thane, plant operators earned Rs 20,000 a month: you can say goodbye to all that!' ★ Kanti Kanoria's father, Nandlal, acquired New Great Eastern Mills some forty years ago. The family, originally based in Calcutta, had interests in sugar and tea. He acquired the mill from its Indian owners who had in turn bought it from the well-known managing agency, W.H. Brady and Co. 'At the time of its acquisition, there were 3000 workers/ Kanti Kanoria, now 63 years old, recalled at his office at Churchgate. 'There are now 580. As you keep modernizing, the number of workers keeps getting reduced. No industry can run in the heart of the city: these are the hard facts. The cost of living is high, the price of utilities is high, there is octroi, sales tax etc. You can't compete with upcountry mills, which are closer to the cotton fields or markets. There are mills in places like Indore and Navsari, but even these are beginning to suffer.' 'You just can't dream of having a mill in the heart of a city like for example in London. This decline is a natural phenomenon. This is why the government is doing the same with its own mills.

Introduction 11

generates more employment than there was originally in the mills. We are creating more capital, and this will make Mumbai a cheaper place to live and work in.' ★ The third generation of Kanorias to be involved with mills is Kanti's son, Anurag, who is 30. 'When I was in junior college in the late 1980s, I was trained in the mill/ he remembered. 'I learned the mechanical processes. In 1991-2, 1 went abroad [to the US] to study. Bombay's history is based on the textile mills; it was a great indushad not yet stepped in. try to be involved in. The multinationals We always thought that mills were very, very important and that the future was strong. We never imagined that the decline could set in so fast. We were a mill which depended mainly on exports— to China, Russia, Iran, Germany, UK and Canada. About 95 per cent of our output was exported. Maintaining those quality parameters was not easy.' He also attributes the decline to the 1982 strike. 'Up to the early 1980s, technology had not changed very much. Only the speed of machines had changed. There was no hi-tech then. After the 1980s, in just five to seven years, the technology changed a great deal. Till then, we were very much on par, at least with the Far East; Europe had high labour costs. The Philippines and others were just coming up. Because of the strike, we lost a generation or two of machines. There was a paradigm shift, with new quality standards, bedsheets. We lost out on like the introduction of non-flammable technology as well as markets completely. Once the parameters change, the speed of machines, the labour ratios all change. It was a coincidence, but it was a very big blow all the same. We are now completely left out. Only Reliance has new technology. Units in Baramati (western Maharashtra) came up with new technology too. Their labour costs are much lower.' Citing other reasons for the decline of the cotton mills, the youngest Kanoria said: 'There are too many agencies involved: labour, Municipal Corporation (BMC), the Brihanmumbai management, courts and so on. It's a combination of politics and administrative bottlenecks. The entire operation is very complex, with banks and other creditors. We are always wary of setting precedents. Many mills made their money from other sources. Century, for instance,

1 0 Ripping the Fabric

production is shown, nothing is accounted for, everything is benami. You can simply shut down this industry temporarily when economic conditions are bad, unlike mills. During the 1982-3 strike, there w7as a big switch to these powerlooms. Some mills even allowed powerlooms to use their brand names, while some powerloom units used these names illegally. These are all fly-bynight operators. It has happened in Pakistan and elsewhere: the directly mills are on one side of the road and the powerlooms opposite!' Around 1990, New Great Eastern decided to modernize and rationalize its mill, which is now 126 years old and occupies freehold land. It got permission under the DC (Development Control) rules in 1993 to sell its surplus land, so that the dues could be repaid to financial institutions and banks, as well as bring down the number of labourers. 'We tied up with Mahindra and Mahindra to put up a residential and commercial complex. The plans have not been approved for these seven years—we have been running from pillar to post to obtain this permission. Everyone says they are not coming in our way, but we have to cross every hurdle. The whole problem is that the developers are most upset: prices have fallen by half and they have put in money. The unutilized FSI (floor-space index) amounts to 1,20,000 sq ft, with which we plan to put up a 20-storey structure. It will be a mix of residential and commercial units, depending on the market. Mahindra and Mahindra will develop it and share the profits.' Kanoria maintains that the mill's current wage bill for 580 workers exceeds that of its 3000 workers 40 years ago, who were paid only around Rs 500 a month. Most are now engaged in spinning. Each worker costs the company, he estimates, between Rs 8000 and Rs 10,000 a month, if one adds all their dues. New Great Eastern has enabled many of its workers to opt for the VRS (voluntary retirement scheme). Since it was based on years of service, workers received an average of Rs 3 lakh roughly. 'Workers are not eternal,' he said. 'They retire —there is a process of natural elimination. Some had alternative employment.' He cannot think very far into the future-—at most 15 years, when he believes that mills will fade away altogether. Making a case for his redevelopment scheme on the surplus mill land, he says: 'We have to think of alternatives. When something is built, it creates employment for carpenters, domestic workers. Perhaps it

Introduction 13

of mills and their land. What vision do citizens have of the future of Mumbai? Where would they like it to go? In what ways would they want it to be different from what it now is? There must be few cities in the world —certainly none of its size in terms of population —where opinions on this crucial issue differ so sharply. For more than half its city-dwellers, their main and modest aspiration is to simply haye a roof over their heads. For industrial workers, who once provided the city its sinews, it is the dream of a job in a factory and all the security that goes with it. For the middle class, law and order, speedy transport and cleanliness appear to be the major preoccupation. For the elite, the vision is to make Mumbai a hi-tech, global city, since —as a city on the sea —it has always been the most modem, Westernized and cosmopolitan of Indian metropolises. This may be so because there appears to be little consensus on which way the city should progress, since the city is pulling in so many different directions. Snide remarks about 'Mumbai or Slumbai', envious comparisons with Singapore and Hong Kong, wistful reveries about the elegant Bombay that was, abound in the media. Politicians, planners, businessmen, trade unions, academics, slum dwellers' organizations, development and human rights activists, all have their own concept of the shape of Mumbai to come. They rarely speak to each other. In the 1980s, a major issue was the right —or 'wrong' —of slum and pavement dwellers to occupy open spaces in the city. After a raging legal (and ethical) dispute which went up to the Supreme Court, pavement dwellers were denied the right to squat wherever they wanted. Slum dwellers and their ilk are still treated by the well-to-do as the scum of the city, the singular reason why outsiders who have no stake in it are throttling its progress. The debate has by no means ended, particularly if one remembers that these wretched of the city form the majority of Mumbai's population. In the 1990s, another controversy surfaced: the re-use of land rendered derelict by Mumbai's historic cotton mills. It does not evoke the same passions as the slums did, because the shanties are everywhere, even in the most prosperous residential localities. By contrast, the mills occupy the grimy precincts of central Mumbai, where the middle class does not live; a t best, they traverse Girangaon, literally the 'Mill Village', as it is known in popular parlance, by road and rail on their way to work in south Mumbai. And yet, the issue throws up many pointers to the future direction

12 Ripping the Fabric

is part of, the Birlas and textiles are only a small part of their empire/ 'Ideally, I would like to see a larger plan for the redevelopment of mill land, which retained the spirit of the old and retained some of the machinery, like in Manchester or Boston. History is not practical here because of economics. Who will visit a textile museum a month after it opens? 'Our family's involvement actually began with my great grandfather Bhagirath, who owned jute mills in Bengal, some of which were lost to East Pakistan. My father feels a tremendous sense of loss today. He entered the mills when he was just 21 years old. We had three mills in Mumbai then: apart from New Great Eastern, both of which were part there was New City and Madhusudhan, of 13 mills which were nationalized. Even today, the mills pay for important festivals in which the workers participate.' .On the future, Anurag is quite clear: 'It's only a question of time. Change is inevitable. The situation is worse in Ahmedabad. Here at least the land can be redeveloped and new industries are coming up on them. Now, even mills in south India are getting affected. With the opening up of the country to foreign textiles, we will be hit badly. Things will be very difficult. I visited a shop in Moscow where Chinese jeans are sold for just one dollar. Here, a pair of jeans costs at least Rs 100. With our markets opening up to multinationals, we will never be able to compete.' ★ The decline of cotton mills in Mumbai, the industrial, commercial of and financial capital of India, and the potential redevelopment the land they occupy in the heart of the city, has become a major urban policy issue. It raises vital questions about the future growth of this metropolis. This does not merely apply to the island city, which was the original commercial and industrial centre, but —as Dada Samant's tale of countless closures shows —is only the worst case scenario of a malaise that has a vice-like grip over all of Mumbai. In that sense, it also affects other major manufacturing centres elsewhere in India and the rest of the world and is a recurring theme in the impact of globalization on world cities. The key players in Mumbai have widely divergent views about its direction. But it throws up questions which go far beyond the specifics

Introduction 15

powerlooms and, according to mill owners, labour costs. They also cite the government's textile policies, including reservation for handlooms. The book assumes that composite cotton mills —which the three functions of spinning, weaving and proaccommodate cessing under one roof —are no longer a viable proposition. This is by no means self-evident, considering that India is one of the few textile producers which also grows its own cotton, has a long history of manufacturing textiles and has a huge internal market, which is waiting to be adequately clothed. The book singles out the only remaining asset as the land. It traces government policies regarding the use of industrial land and the earlier attempts to freeze industrial growth on environmental practice in the in accordance with international considerations, 1960s. The textile mills, however, were always exempted from this restriction specifically on the grounds that they provided mass employment in the city. In the 1930s, around two out of every three industrial workers were engaged in a cotton mill, and workers had migrated to the city at considerable hardship to themselves. of industries —Americans use It leads up to the restructuring the term 're-engineering' —and 'exit' policies for workers after 1991. It cites national policies regarding sick industries and the use of their land, before turning specifically to the unused land belongappointed the welling to mills. The Maharashtra government known architect, Charles Correa, to head a study group on the of this land. It details the findings of the report at redevelopment some length, along with alternatives to it. With Mumbai's real estate prices going through the roof, it was only a matter of time before mill owners and builders found ways and means of disposing of mill land. The most controversial case was that of Khatau Mills, one of the oldest in the city, where the owner inducted gangsters into the union to browbeat workers into agreeing to the sale of land in Byculla. A rival ganglord took the law into his own hands and had Sunit Khatau shot in cold blood in May 1994, leading to an official freeze on sale of all mill land. Not long after, the owner-builder of Raghuvanshi Mills was also shot dead. Datta Samant, the controversial union leader who led the 18-month-long abortive textile strike in the city in 1982-3, was also murdered, apparently over union rivalry. It recounts in considerable detail three case studies of mills which had applied for sale of land under the amended Development Control (DC) rules, after applying for the rehabilitation of their units to

14 Ripping the Fabric

of the city. The mills made Mumbai what it is —a modern, industrialized metropolis, just as the port enabled it to emerge as a trading centre earlier. By the 1930s, nearly three-quarters of the city's labour force was employed in these mills. In a heavily congested and populated metropolis, with some of the world's most expensive real estate, the availability of large tracts of mill land presents a tremendous opportunity for re-use which the city cannot afford to turn down. ★ This book begins by looking at the chequered growth of Mumbai, from a port to an industrial hub. The cotton mills occupied pride of place in this saga till the late 1970s, when they began to decline and with this, the working class lost its major source of employof the economy, which began in 1991, ment. The liberalization hastened this process. While cotton mills have declined in other cities elsewhere in the world too, they had some security nets to fall back on, unlike in Mumbai. Many planners and others believe that the burgeoning service sector—and financial services in particular —can absorb those rendered jobless in manufacturing, as it has to an extent in western cities. This is not possible for two reasons. The first is the runaway rise in real estate prices, fuelled by speculation, which makes such a transformation difficult because it distorts the market and deters investors. The second, and more basic, reason is that the bulk of its citizens are mired in poverty, as indicated by the overwhelming homelessness in this huge metropolis. The service sector simply cannot accommodate numbers of this magnitude: these are citizens who are outside the market and are unable to participate in it. The second chapter deals with the textile industry which is still the major employer and foreign exchange earner in the country. Indeed, the entire industrialization of the country once pivoted around textiles, just as Britain prospered with this industry in Manchester more than two centuries ago. In the first country in the world to stage an industrial revolution, textiles were the launching pad for the take-off of the British economy. Mumbai's mills, like Manchester's before them, began to decline, though it remains India's single most important industry. Several factors were responsible: technological backwardness, leading to the take-over of sick mills by the state; competition from

Introduction 17

The failure to recognize these basic facts can only lead to major social conflagrations, such as the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992-3. The author was the Resident Editor of the Times of India in Mumbai when the riots broke out in the city in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and January the following year. No one could have foretold the savagery of those riots, which demolished the belief that Mumbai was a modem, cosmopolitan city, where such barbaric deeds had not been witnessed before. The reason was obviously the frustration of youth from both communities: they did not see themselves finding jobs in the future, unlike their fathers before them, and took out their insensate rage on members of the other community. Instead of finding fault with the system, which had turned a blind eye to increasing joblessness, young men rioted with an unprecedented fury and took a heavy toll of life and property. This fire down below was a warning to all those who run Mumbai: ignore the interests of the underprivileged and the city can erupt in flames yet again. This is by no means an isolated phenomenon. According to the Dutch sociologist, Jan Breman, who has studied workers in Gujarat for several years, the closure of mills in Ahmedabad after 1985 had a direct bearing on the communalization of the city. By 1995, Muslims were seen as the new untouchables. This went hand in hand — as in Mumbai —with the criminalization of politics. "The social fabric of the city was tom apart due to the decline of the mills/ Breman observed. It is even less well known that the closures in Ahmedabad coincided with the emergence of the dalit mill workers who had for the first time ever begun to send their children to school, which deprived them of the most significant stepping stone to ending the discrimination against the community. The 1985 riots in the city were sparked off when dalits were granted seats in medical and law schools, which led to the removal of the Congress government from Gujarat. As an ironical footnote to history, it is worth remembering that the very first strike in mills in Ahmedabad, once nicknamed like Kanpur 'the Manchester of India', took place in 1878 when dalit workers started tea stalls. In today's context, there is no doubt that the demise of the mills and other factories throughout the country has accentuated commurfal tensions.

16 Ripping the Fabric the BIFR. They make it clear that neither the letter nor the spirit of the laws is observed in the process. Applications are made for 'vacant' land on a mill site when structures still exist; subsequently, these are demolished to create vacant land. Furthermore, difficult though it may be to believe, there is no official monitoring of the process. Once a mill is given permission to sell on condition that the proceeds are ploughed back into renovating the mill, no agency oversees the deal to make sure that this happens. This is a shocking example of dereliction of duty on the part of the authorities. The book goes on to examine proposals to redevelop land belonging to the mills. The Charles Correa committee's recommendations on recycling mill land are spelt out, as are those made by conservation architects who did the groundwork by surveying the nationalized mills belonging to the NTC. It mentions Mumbai's fledgling heritage movement before looking at Britain's experience in conserving its industrial architecture. This has specifically taken place in Manchester, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Yorkshire and Lancashire also have old textile towns where mills have gone in for renovation and reuse. In the US, Lowell, the major textile centre near Boston, is a symbol of industrial renewal. However, it is doubtful whether any of these attempts have much relevance to the Indian situation. More often than not, they amount to gentrification. What is more, they seldom, if ever, look to the needs of those workers who lost their jobs in the deindustrialization process. The book concludes by reiterating that the dream of turning Mumbai into a Singapore or Hong Kong just cannot be realized. What alternative vision can one have? It is only by reconciling the that the city can forge interests of all the different stakeholders ahead. Even if manufacturing no longer employs the majority of the population, the workers and their children have to be accommodated in the new dispensation. In the Indian context, as much as anywhere else in the world, a city is made up of different classes, each of which contribute to it in their distinctive way. There is no way that the needs of industrial or port workers in Mumbai can be ignored when major economic and social changes are taking place in a new liberalized regime. At the very least, they have to be for losing their jobs. The experience of adequately compensated other cities —New York in particular —shows that the service sector cannot absorb all those rendered jobless in manufacturing.

Reinventing Mumbai 19

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Reinventing Mumbai I carried a tiffin-box To the mill since childhood I was cast the way A smith forges a hammer* —Narayan Surve India's decision to liberalize its economy in the wake of the foreign exchange reserves crisis in 1991 will have a profound impact on Mumbai, the industrial, commercial and financial capital of the country. The city is seen as the harbinger of a brave new India, where the fetters of the past will be unshackled and the forces of change swept in. Mumbai has always been more susceptible to global trends than the old capital, Calcutta, which lost its premier status in 1911 and has declined even more precipitously since the 1960s. By contrast, New Delhi appears a stuffy, bureaucratic capital, not suited to adapt to change in a hurry. Mumbai has aptly been described as a metaphor for modern India. The future of Mumbai, India's most populous city, is of concern because of its very size, among other factors. This alone may qualify it to shape the growth of cities in other developing countries. India itself is poised to become the country with the biggest urban population in the world in a few decades. By 2025, according to the Asian Development Bank, 20 of the world's megacities —with An extract from Maze Vidyapeeth, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1975.

Reinventing Mumbai 21

100 sq km island city, which incorporates the 20 sq km central business district (CBD) at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, still accounted for 55 per cent of the jobs at that juncture. Between 1980 and 1990, 1,05,000 jobs were added in the CBD, which forms only 5 per cent of the area of the city. Very slightly more than this number were added in the suburbs, which comprise 84 per cent of the area.3 Thus, although there has been a marked spatial shift in population and employment northwards towards the suburbs —a trend which is even more pronounced in manufacturing — the importance of the island city has not diminished. On the contrary, one might well argue that with the moves over the last decade towards globalization and the emergence of the service sector as a major source of employment, the importance of the CBD has grown. By its very nature, much of the economic activity in this tertiary sector is highly concentrated, which is a global phenomenon. What is evident is that with the decline in manufacturing, land belonging to industries is being rapidly converted into commercial space, and this is most marked in the island city with Mumbai's erstwhile premier industry —cotton mills. One of the four CBD wards has a day-time density of 1,10,000 people per sq km —five times greater than that of the city as a whole. Despite an attempt in the late 1970s to restrict the growth of the office sector, 1,70,000 white collar jobs were added in the island city in the decade of the 1980s, more than compensating for the 1,10,000 people who moved into the suburbs during that period. Thus the island city still retains its significance, which is reflected in the very high prices of real estate (at one time, the highest in the world) there. It is important to recall that the sole reference point till Independence was the island city, and industries were concentrated in this area at the time. Indeed, it was the Fort precinct where trade and commercial activity gave the city its first economic thrust. When 3

Arvind Adarkar, 'Emerging Office Sector & Globalisation', paper presented at SNDT College seminar on Globalisation and the Environment, Feb 2001; K. Sita and M. Ray, 'Bombay's Aspirations to be a Global City — Its Implications for Working and Living in the City', paper presented at workshop on Working and Living in Cities, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, Nov 1994.

20 Ripping the Fabric populations exceeding 10 million —will be in Asia, twice as many as at present. Clearly, Asia is setting the pace for future urban growth. In the brave new liberalized world, economically advanced cities are seen as an essential ingredient in a country's success in the global economy, linking it in to flows of finance capital, trade, technologies and ideas. City planners promote prestigious urban development projects to coax a city to emerge as one of a network of successful world cities, which are key nodal points in the global economy. It is not widely known that UN estimates put the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) the second most populous in the world by 2015, with a staggering 27.4 million people. 1 In fact, the Population Institute projects the MMR as the Washington-based world's most populous by 2020, with 28.5 million. 2 If these projections are correct —and some Mumbai demographers think they are not—Tokyo will come second with 27.3 million people by then. The much larger MMR sprawls over 4355 sq km, as distinct from the city proper, known as Greater Mumbai, which only occupies 466 sq km. The MMR incorporates the adjoining townships of Kalyan and Thane which, the 1991 census shows, have been growing far faster than Greater Mumbai. The resident population of the island city—which was formed with the reclamation of the original seven islands —has gone down, though the number of commuters from the northern suburbs haven't. The population of Calcutta, the former commercial capital, whose name conjures up an urban nightmare, has been surpassed. In this book, the 'city' refers to the whole of Greater Mumbai. It is about 12 km wide at its broadest point and some 40 km long. The provisional estimate of the 2001 census puts its population at 11.9 million. The role of the island city in generating wealth is gradually decreasing, a trend which the 2001 census is bound to show as accelerating. The bulk of the population —two-thirds —now lives in the suburbs, which comprises 366 sq km, an exact reversal of the proportion in 1961, when only a third lived there. Further, the proportion of industrial and commercial establishments also increased to a little over half in the suburbs by 1991. However, the 1

UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), Nairobi, 1998. 'Mumbai Set for Dubious Honour as World's Most Crowded City', Indian Express,30 Dec 2000. 2

Reinventing Mumbai 23

It has 15 per cent of India's work force and an equal proportion of its factories. It leads in the consumption of electricity and in income from the registered manufacturing sector. A Marg-Business World magazine survey in September 1995 ranked Maharashtra the top state on 14 counts. It has the largest number of total collaboration agreements. It has witnessed foreign investment in electronics, engineering, electrical equipment, textiles, chemicals and transportation, as well as newer sectors like power generation, food processing and oil refining. Out of Rs 1,29,100 crore in foreign direct investment in India between 1991 and 1997, Maharashtra attracted Rs 15,600 crore, or 12 per cent of the total. 7 It is home to 52 of the top 100 Indian companies. All these strengths are very heavily dependent on the dominance of Mumbai. Maharashtra's wage bill is the country's highest, and so is labour productivity. Even so, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy in March 1996 showed that India's third largest state was beginning to lag in some respects. In August 1995, Maharashtra had investments worth Rs 91,813 crore, the highest in the country, but a year later, fresh proposals had increased by only 15 per cent to Rs 1,05,609 crore. By contrast, Gujarat attracted Rs 1,11,851 crore, Karnataka Rs 1,10,840 crore and even lowly Orissa, a mineral-rich state, Rs 1,05,685 crore. Suresh Prabhu, the Shiv Sena MP who was a former Industries Minister in the central government, subsequently in charge of Environment and still later of Chemicals, explained that 'Maharashtra with its inherent advantages had a headstart. 'But like technology, which can be duplicated, now other states are catching up.'8 The potential loss of industrial pre-eminence sparked off chauvinistic fears, with former Chief Minister Manohar Joshi compelled to dispel the criticism by Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, his 'remote control', that Maharashtra was losing out to more dynamic states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. 9 The erstwhile ruling Shiv Sena-BJP coalition sent the wrong message to investors by renaming Bombay as Mumbai in 1995. When the state government once insisted that a prominent American business 7

Asian Age, 19 July 1999. 'Trying for a Comeback', Business Standard, 25 Sep 1996. 9 'Thackeray Has Got His Facts Wrong, Says CM', Indian Express,9 Sep 1998. 8

22 Ripping the Fabric

the cotton mills were, set up in the middle of the nineteenth century, they were deliberately located in the midtown belt of Parel, which was some distance away from the Fort. It was because the area was underpopulated that the mills were built there (although the Governor's palatial residence was also in Parel, perhaps for the same reason!). This area is now smack in the middle of the island city and occupies a strategic location. The re-use of this derelict industrial land is the central focus of this book and serves as a leitmotif for examining the future growth of the city.

Mumbai's Role in the Global Economy The Draft Regional Plan for the Mumbai MetropoEtan Region, 19962011, which was submitted in August 1998, began with this clarion call: 'Greater Mumbai has a very significant role to play not only in contributing to the national economy, but also in facilitating integration of the country's economy with the rest of the world. With its premier position as the country's financial capital, its leadership in the country's international trade, its strategic location with respect to the global market centres, and its ability to provide a wide range of technical, professional and business services, Greater Mumbai has the potential to emerge as an international city, fostering growth of financial and business services and hi-tech export-oriented industries.' 4 By most indices, Maharashtra state (which is the most urbanized in the country, with over a third of the population living in towns and cities) and, by inference its capital, Mumbai, dominates the country's industrial scene. The high level of industrialization is reflected in its per capita income, which was Rs 17,295 in 1999, against an all-India average of Rs 10, 771. 5 Delhi's was the highest among metros, but this is explained by the burgeoning employment in the bureaucracy, not due to factory jobs. 6 With less than a tenth of the nation's population, the state accounts for 21 per cent of India's gross value of output and a quarter of the value added in the organized industrial sector, the highest in the country. The per capita value added in industries is 2.5 times the all-India average. 4

Draft Regional Plan for Bombay Metropolitan Region: 1996-2011, Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), October 1995 (henceforth MMRDA 1995). 5 'The Economic Powerhouse of India', Asian Age, 19 July 1999. 6 'Better Living Attracts People to Delhi', Economic Times, 4 July 1999.

13

Reinventing Mumbai 25

anywhere else . . . Maharashtra's government and, certainly its bureaucracy, is highly esteemed for its efficiency and pro-business orientation. The state's finances are sounder than almost any other Indian state . . . Maharashtra remains top of most investors' lists and particularly foreign investors. British, American and German trade attaches all say that "The state is the first for most incomers, it is still number one and will continue to be number one because it's got the goods: the infrastructure, the power, the roads, all the facilities." /13 With the removal of controls in 1991 on the licensing of industries and foreign investment, including that in Indian portfolios, it was perhaps only a matter of time before many Mumbaikars contemplated the possibility of converting Mumbai into an international finance centre. This writer himself was caught up in the initial euphoria and commented in an editorial page article titled 'Bombay as Finance Capital: "Perestroika" in Land Use' in the Times of India in 1993: However uneven the pace of liberalization, there is widespread expectation that its advent in full measure will reduce the all-pervading power of Delhi's mandarins to shape public life, even as decision-making devolves to other metropolitan cities, of which Bombay is by far the most important. As if already scenting a future scenario where Bombay lays claim to being the country's 'real' capital, planners are already busy demarcating where its new financial centre will be . . . .It is not commonly appreciated that, as far as time zones are concerned, this country is ideally placed between the exchange, stock and commodity markets of the West and East. In other words, the difference of nine hours-a working day-between London or the rest of Europe and Tokyo or Singapore gives operators here an edge.14

The article went on to cite how the planners had designated a 370-hectare complex in Bandra-Kurla, just outside the island city, as the financial centre. This would provide some 1,25,000 jobs and act as an alternative to financial institutions in congested south Bombay. According to one estimate, the sale of land in BandraKurla could fetch over Rs 15,000 crore. It quoted experts as stating that all non-productive land being occupied in the island city should b e vacated to make room for hi-tech industries or financial services. This included mill land. For that matter, some 730 hectares 13

'Maharashtra Survey', Financial Times, London, 11 July 1996. Darryl D'Monte, 'Bombay as Finance Capital: "Perestroika" in Land Use', Times of India, 8 Oct 1993. 14

24 Ripping the Fabric school which wanted to start a unit in Mumbai hire a complement it decided to relocate in Hyderabad instead. In of Maharashtrians, August 1999, the state had lost out to Delhi as the favoured destination for foreign direct investment: $2.7 billion versus $2.3 billion. High real estate costs in Mumbai were also to blame, which is why Coca-Cola, for instance, shifted its base to the capital. 10 A year later, Maharashtra continued to be upstaged, this time by Tamil Nadu. 11 Even more emphatically, Mumbai straddles India's commerce and business. Three quarters of the country's stock exchange transactions are processed in Dalal Street and, more recently, by the National Stock Exchange in the midtown cotton mill belt of Parel. It is home to premier financial institutions like the Reserve Bank of India, the Industrial Development Bank of India, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, Unit Trust of India, Life Insurance Corporation of India and General Insurance Corporation of India. The Securities and Exchange Board of India, OTC Exchange of India and head offices of most Indian and foreign banks are located there, as are the head offices of merchant banking, leasing, hire purchase, investment and public and private sector housing finance companies. A Mumbaikar has 16 times higher bank deposits than the all-India average. In the 1990s, Mumbai's share of the value of all cheque clearances in the country rose to over half.12 As many as 130 foreign institutional investors are based in the city, including J.R Morgan, Jardine Fleming, Merrill Lynch and Salomon Brothers. It processes half the country's imports and exports, accounts for half the corporate taxes and 40 per cent of the Centre's revenue through income tax and excise duties. Two out of every three foreign tourists pass through Sahar airport. A Maharashtra Survey in the Financial Times of London in 1996 remains essentially immune from pointed out how 'Maharashtra the power cuts crippling output elsewhere in India; the state boasts two big container ports and better telecom services than almost 10

'Maharashtra Loses No 1 Spot to Delhi as FDI Investment', Economic Times, 24 Aug 1999. 11 'Maharashtra Dethroned by TN in the Investment Stakes', Economic Times,8 Aug 2000. 12 Annapurna Shaw, 'Emerging Patterns of Urban Growth in India', Economic & Political Weekly,17-24 April 1999.

Reinventing Mumbai 27

zoning and non-agricultural (N.A.) conversion regulations, complex construction and building approval restrictions, poor quality and accessibility of market information, and involvement of multiple agencies in the purchase /selling /set-up process. The availability of affordable, high-quality commercial and residential space in and around Bombay is of particular concern —unless the prevailing regulations and procedures are changed to allow market forces to adjust supply-demand, rents and prices, Bombay's ability to act as magnet for attracting (and retaining) business into Maharashtra will cease.' Taking its cue from the McKinsey report, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry set up a think-tank called 'Bombay First' in 1995, on the lines of the 'London First' initiative. Prime movers of the concept were two former Municipal Commissioners, B.G. Deshmukh and Jamsheed Kanga, who now heads the Tata Housing Development Corporation. As a British Council official put it, 'Mumbai is crucial for the success of liberalization in India. If we want it to grow to its full potential as a financial and commercial centre, we have to provide its citizens with not just basic amenities like telecommunications and transport but also culture —the quality of life has to be good.' Girija Pande, who chaired the economic committee of the Bombay Chamber and was General Manager of the ANZ Grindlays Bank, added: 'Our purpose is not to usurp the role of the government but to act as an advocacy group, a sort of ginger group, for promoting the interests of Bombay. The city has been an important manufacturing centre in the past; in the current environment, it needs to be focused towards being a regional financial and service centre.' 16 London First, founded in 1992, is a partnership of business enterprises which wants to project London as one of the world's leading cities. The Square Mile or 274 ha (677 acres) which make up the financial district known as the City of London is worldrenowned as a centre from where business deals are transacted all over the world. Indeed, London forms a troika with New York and Tokyo as global cities, as the Columbia University Professor of Urban Planning, Saskia Sassen, who has visited Mumbai too, characterizes them. 17 The Corporation of London, a kind of local authority which supervises the financial district, emphasizes that 16

'Bombay First: A Pacemaker for the City', Sunday Observer,8 Jan 1995. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, 1993. 17

26 Ripping the Fabric

owned by the Bombay Port Trust, the city's biggest landlord, another 150 hectares by the railways and even the southernmost tip which is occupied by the defence services could all be put to much better use. With the new port on the mainland, the old had lost its significance and the port no longer plays a cardinal role in Bombay's growth as it did years ago. In 1993, the international consultancy firm, McKinsey published a report titled 'Positioning Maharashtra for Economic Leadership in tire Liberalisation Era', which cited the 1992 World Competitiveness Report as rating India's infrastructure last among the Countries (NICs) of the world. Compared Newly Industrialized with other developing countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico and Brazil, Maharashtra state fared poorly. However, it made a strong case for Mumbai as a finance centre, pointing to its unique strengths: 'the international port and airport with well-established domestic links, proximity to the Middle East and Africa, access to large consumer markets of western India, availability of skilled and unskilled labour, installed headquarters of leading domestic and MNC corporations and finance institutions, access to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), and home of the Hindi movie industry.' 15 Mumbai could prove the financial gateway to India, though it would have to compete, regionally, with Singapore and Hong Kong. The city needed to project itself as the 'Head Quarter (HQ) location of choice' for companies, competing with Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi. It could also prove a global Research and Development (R&D) centre, a regional media and entertainment capital, thanks to the existence of Bollywood —one of the world's largest film industries —and a free trade zone. On the other hand, the lack of reasonably priced commercial and residential real estate, quality of infrastructure and capacity to meet expanded demand, the poor quality of life and shortage of funds required to improve infrastructure and civic activities, all militated against its emergence as a services capital. McKinsey called for improving the overall business environment b y easing the restrictions on land acquisition and l a b o u r management, among other sectors. 'Availability of land is emerging as a key barrier due to lack of ownership laws and records, complex 15

McKinsey, Positioning Maharashtra for Economic Leadership in the Liberalisation Era, SIICOM, April 1993.

Reinventing Mumbai 29

the relaxation of exchange controls and integration with global markets since 1991. These would call for major changes in existing physical, legal and regulatory infrastructure. India's continentalsized economy required at least one full-fledged financial centre to interface with global financial markets as a facilitator to channelize increasing foreign investments. It was expected that direct foreign investment would increase to $10 billion by 2000, which has turned out to be exaggerated, along with inflows of foreign portfolio and Global Depository Receipts (GDR) investments. It was also expected that external trade would grow at 18 per cent per year and net invisible inflows would globalize the Indian economy in the last few years of the twentieth century. The study argued that if Bombay did not provide the financial infrastructure required for this quantum leap, users of external funds would be compelled to look to alternatives for meeting their massive and complex requirements of finance in other off-shore centres. Instead of net growth in employment and income from financial services, there would be a steady decline. 'The loser will not only b e India, but more importantly, Bombay itself —no substitute for decline of manufacturing.' It compared the advances China was making in developing an exclusive financial zone at Pudong across the river in Shanghai, not to mention the inheritance of Hong Kong. Bangkok too had ambitions of becoming a regional financial centre with deregulation of exchange controls, improved capital markets and access to foreign institutional investors for domestic capital and foreign exchange markets. Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Colombo were also potential contenders. A chart showed a large triangle which could contain the restructured financial services which Mumbai needed. There was tip of the island city at Fort the existing CBD at the southernmost and Nariman Point. There was the new Bandra-Kurla complex in Greater Mumbai, immediately north of the island city, which the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), the city's premier planning body, had designated as the focus of a new financial centre, with new banks, insurance companies and the like. On the eastern angle of the triangle there was a proposed financial support centre at the Belapur CBD in New Mumbai, on the mainland across the harbour. This would have depository and custodian services, the back-offices of banks, insurance companies and stock exchange brokers, the administrative offices of financial institutions, research and credit departments, equity research firms,

28 Ripping the Fabric

'The City' is already an established brand name across the world. To sustain the City's position as one of the world's three leading financial centres, the Corporation joined forces with the Bank of England to launch a campaign to raise the awareness of the value of the City worldwide in general and in Europe in particular. A joint venture was being planned with the London Docklands Development Corporation and Westminster City Council to create an inward investment centre. In 1999, London was said to possess a 'fresher, more assertive identity'. It processed $300 billion in foreign exchange every day, as much as New York and Tokyo together; it did half the world's shipbroking, half the world's company mergers and acquisitions. It outstripped any other European city as a source of bank lending and fund management and made more international calls than any other city in the world. 18 One of the first studies commissioned by Bombay First was on developing the city as a regional financial centre, as distinct from an international one. Girija Pande conducted it. 'With the Indian economy now on a long-term growth path,' it began, 'Mumbai has the potential to become one of the premier financial and services capitals of the region.' The services included finance, info-tech and software, media and communication, shipping and transportation. The city's strengths were the availability of its trained white collar work force—indeed, Mumbai can be said to be the only city in the country with a strong middle class, thanks to the number of banks, insurance companies and other offices based there. It also possessed legal and regulatory systems, including long-established financial markets, which potential rival Shanghai, for instance, dpes not. Yet another advantage is the widespread use of English and a flourishing financial media. Mumbai's legendary work ethic, which compels people to commute to work in the most trying of circumstances, and its cosmopolitan outlook were also cited. 19 'Labelling Bombay as a future international financial centre brings visions of Hong Kong and Singapore, which is generally unacceptable and may create resistance to the concept of change,' the study pointed out. 'Bombay will need to create its own model, for restructuring.' The existing domestic financial markets needed to be re-engineered extensively to bring them in line with the continuing financial sector deregulation since the mid-1980s and 18

Granta issue on London, #65, 1999, quoted in Hindu, 4 Apr 1999. G.P. Pande, 'Bombay as a Regional Finance Centre', Bombay First, Mumbai, May 1999. 19

Reinventing Mumbai '31

In August 2000, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) proposal to convert Mumbai into an renewed its three-year-old offshore financial centre, which would offer tax-efficient and less regulated jurisdiction for structuring investments into the country or abroad. Banking and financial activities would be exempt from local fiscal and exchange controls. There are 70 such centres around the globe and they route investments in excess of $5 trillion. Their image has changed from tax havens for illegal funds to highly sophisticated and competitive international finance centres. The CII lauded the example of Mauritius which has attracted Rs 20,000 crore in five years. China is developing Shanghai as an exclusive financial zone. 21 The dream of turning Mumbai into a Hong Kong or Singapore — presumably, as Asian Tigers, these serve as ready points of reference —is a recurring theme among the city's planners, corporate firms and sundry agencies. As a prelude t o an Advantage Maharashtra jamboree that the state government held for foreign investors in 1997, an 18-member trade and industry delegation from the state toured Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. On its return, the leader, Suresh Jain, Maharashtra's Trade and Housing Minister, bragged that Rs 50,000 crore could come to Mumbai and its twin city if conducive conditions were created. Many Mumbaikars laboured under the delusion that the city's emergence as Asia's financial centre was assured once the sun set on the last colony in the British empire, Hong Kong, in June that year. 'We can easily create a counter magnet to Hong Kong,' Jain said. 22 (If anything, Hong Kong's integration with China has only accentuated the importance of Shanghai as a second hub.) Foreign property developers in Mumbai were equally enthused. According to Marcus Wraight, Director of Chesterton Meghraj, which has also conducted a study of Mumbai as a potential global city and financial centre, 'Almost all great world cities have a core business district. Mumbai desperately needs new office buildings, with design and standards that match the world's best. Many of the world's best companies are already here and many more are on their way, given favourable conditions.' 21

'Will the Government Make Mumbai an OFC?', Times of India,-10 Aug 2000. 22 'Mumbai Can Replace Hong Kong as Asia's Financial Centre', Times of India, 8 Feb 1997.

30 Ripping the Fabric

info-tech companies and computer support. Very significantly, at the centre of the triangle there was an area marked 'mill land', which was stated to be available by 1996-7: it would connect both the old and the new financial districts of Greater Mumbai as well as the Belapur CBD. Some urban experts point out, however, that with the decline in manufacturing, the need for large expanses of land in major cities no longer exists. Employment is mainly being created in information-related services, especially the high-paying jobs. The information age has more focused needs for urban land. Rather than encourage urban sprawl, the info-city needs intensive areas where people meet to share their expertise, to plan their projects. As Prof Peter Hall says: 'The new world will largely depend, as the old world did, on creativity; and creativity flourishes where people come together face-to-face.' Global cities in the information age favour places that were historically built for personal contact: central and inner areas. Somewhat provocatively, the Bombay First study asked whether in future, cities would house actual offices of large companies or only their headquarters. A quarter of a century ago, General Foods, IBM, General Electric and others had moved out of Manhattan and into the suburbs. 'At that time, we did not know that we could move information/ the study noted, borrowing the concept from Peter Drucker's book, Managing For The Future. 'Thus, to free office workers from the need to commute, companies isolated top management people and professionals and imposed on them constant travelling into the city for business meetings. Big companies tomorrow are almost certain to keep their management people— at least their senior ones —where other senior management people are: in the city. And so will government agencies and other large organizations. But this means that the big city will also house purveyors of specialized skills and knowledge —the lawyer, the accounting firm, the architect, the consultant,, the advertising agency, the investment banker, the financial analyst, and so on. But even these people will have their office work done outside the city.' A follow-up study in 2000, 'Mumbai as an International Finance Centre: A Roadmap', by the Export-Import Bank of India, located the city in the time zones between Singapore and Bahrain. 20 20

'Mumbai as an International Finance Centre: A Roadmap', Occasional Paper No 80, Export-Import Bank of India, Dec 2000.

Reinventing Mumbai 33

In the early 1970s, the MMRDA's Regional Plan had diagnosed that industrial development in terms of value added and growth in employment would continue to contribute towards urban growth, as well as immigration into the city. Offices and commercial activity would also remain concentrated in the CBD of south Mumbai, which would make the provision of infrastructure, especially transport for commuters, costly. 'The private ownership of land and speculation in the land market would restrict access to land of the poor and prevent land value gains being recouped for infrastructure investment/ the plan observed. 'There would be urban sprawl with hotchpotch development invading good agricultural land, leading to infrastructure demands, which will be expensive to meet.' It is important to recall that in its earliest years, the MMRDA was concerned that private interests would subvert the use of urban land for social purposes. Industrial employment, however, declined in the 1980s due, among other factors, to the restriction on expansion and modernization of industries (see Fig. 2.1). In addition, there was widespread sickness in some industries, particularly cotton textiles, and this was in keeping with the nationwide decline in industrial jobs. In the 1996-2011 draft plan, the MMRDA warned that this process 'would be detrimental to Mumbai's role as the engine of economic growth and deprive the nation of its vital contribution. It would also give rise to a host of problems at the local level. Since industrial jobs constitute as.much as 35 per cent of the city's total jobs, the persistent decline could lead to a significant rise in unemployment.' A study conducted by Ritu Dewan of the Department of Economics of Bombay University in 2000 titled 'A Century of Work and Workers in Bombay' confirmed this trend: 'It is indeed quite amazing that the occupational category showing the maximum decline in the industrial centre of Mumbai is manufacturing, its share falling from 40 per cent in 1901 to 37 per cent of total workers today. It still remains the single most important economic activity, but at much lower levels . . . This trend is expected to gain momentum in the 1990s, with the closure of most textile mills and other industries, along with the initiation of the process of subcontracting production outside the city.' 24 24

Ritu Dewan, 'A Century of Work and Workers in Bombay', Department of Economics, University of Mumbai, Dec 2000. Report under publication, Planning Commission, New Delhi.

32 Ripping the Fabric

Decline of Manufacturing Historically, while the port gave Mumbai its strength in the nineteenth century, manufacturing provided the boost for most of the succeeding decades. Textiles were by far the leading sector, as we shall see in the next chapter. Over the years, engineering in the metropolis. Chemicals soon industries were established followed and in the mid-1960s oil refineries were set up in Trombay, on the east coast. This provided the impetus for petrochemicals. belts. By Thane-Belapur is one of India's leading petrochemical 1961, manufacturing accounted for 41 per cent of Mumbai's employment and half its income. Indeed, Mumbai contributed by pioneering the development greatly to India's industrialization of key industries —textiles, chemicals, engineering and electronics. In 1986, 7.2 per cent of the country's factory jobs were situated in the city and nearly 11 per cent of the value was added by manufacture. The service sector also flourished with it. Being the nation's premier port, it encouraged the establishment of ancillary activities. Mumbai also had the busiest airport in the country. Trading, banking, insurance and financial services, publishing and advertising, tourism and so on led to its emergence as a business centre. In an editorial page article titled 'Bombay Losing Its Glitter? The Making of a Modem Metropolis' in the Times of India in 1992, the author asked: How does the 'City of Gold', as Bombay has been christened, retain its position as the industrial and commercial capital of the country?. . . Following the removal of many curbs on industrial licensing in this country in April last year, Bombay's planners have been trying to prevent factory jobs from shrinking. The state government has . . . accepted in principle their proposals to allow industries in the island city and suburbs to modernise, even expand marginally, provided these aren't polluting or exert pressure on civic services like water, power and transport . . . There is a strong case for encouraging the growth of 'sunrise' industries , which fall almost entirely within the service sector. Bombay's position as a financial and trading centre can be enhanced by creating the facilities for such growth. In the US economy today, some six out of every ten jobs are in processing information and there is no reason why Bombay, with its trained citizenry, can't take the lead in this field too. In the seventies, its non-factory employment grew by 14 per cent per year. 23 23 Darryl D'Monte, 'Bombay Losing Its Glitter? The Making of a Modem Metropolis', Times of India, 20 Oct 1992.

Reinventing Mumbai 35 to one-third. One consequence of the decline in industrial jobs was the rise in what is euphemistically termed the informal sector. According to economists Sudha and Lalit Deshpande, the proportion of informal employment went up from 49 per cent in 1961 to 63 per cent in 1981. 25 The Central Ministry of Urban Affairs and Employment put it at 68 per cent in 1993 —higher than Delhi and Madras. 26 . By the late 1990s, it was becoming apparent that the decline of industrial growth was by no means confined to the island city, as is , commonly perceived, but the cancer had spread to the eastern and western suburbs as well (see Table 2.2). As we have seen in the introduction, union leaders like Dada Samant could reel off a neverending list of closures of factories in Greater Mumbai. Some observers have argued that this does not amount to deindustrialization so much as spatial reorganization or restructuring — implying that the industries moved from the island city to elsewhere in Greater Mumbai. But the overwhelming evidence appears to contradict this. In April 2001, for instance, Tata Steel decided to close its subsidiary, Tata SSL, in the north-western suburb of Borivili, which employed 1100 people. 27 Even the outlying township of Thane, which falls within the MMR and was one of the fastest growing areas in the 1991 census, has suffered this affliction. According to the Thane-Belapur Industries Association, there were a total of 400 industries which had closed by 1998. Three-quarters of these were Chemical and engineering units and around one-tenth were electrical. It estimated that the number would have risen by 10 per cent by 2001. Interestingly enough, it cited economic liberalization as the main cause of the closures, followed by financial mismanagement and union rivalry. The office of the Deputy Commissioner of Labour in Thane similarly reported that 25 medium-scale industries, with 4664 workers, 25

Sudha Deshpande and Lalit Deshpande, 'Problems of Urbanisation and Growth of Large Cities in Developing Countries: A Case Study of Bombay', Working Paper No 177, Population and Labour Policies Programme, ILO, Geneva, 1991, p. 6. 26 India National Report,1991, Ministry of Urban Affairs & Employment for Habitat II Conference, Istanbul, 1996. 27 'Tata SSL to Phase Out Borivili Plant', Financial Express,18 Apr 2001.

34 Ripping the Fabric

The MMRDA showed that between 1980 and 1990, total employment in the organized sector, both blue and white collar, decreased by 7 per cent, from 12.61 lakh to 11.8 lakh. While public sector employment had grown in this period, private sector jobs had declined precipitously from 6.22 lakh to 4.69 lakh. "The decline in employment in traditional cotton textile and near-stagnation in the chemical industry is clearly emerging/ the report noted. "Other industries are not compensating for the decline in employment in the traditional sector and therefore, the total manufacturing sector employment of 5.81 lakh in 1980-1 has reduced to 4.21 lakh in 1990-1." What is more, the share of Mumbai in the state's total employment also declined. Till 1971, the city accounted for half of all the jobs in Maharashtra; by 1991, the proportion had come down Table 2.1 Decline in Factory Employment in Greater Mumbai Year >

1961-71 1971-81 1981-91

Number of jobs (lakh) (in the initial year) Annual compounded growth rate (over the ten-year period)

5.05

5.93

6.04

1.62

0.18

-2.97

Source: MMRDA 1995, p. 173.

— Greater Bombay ------- BMR

Fig. 2.2 Industrial Employment in Bombay and BMR Source: MMRDA 1995, p. 109.

1991 4.47

Reinventing Mumbai 37 Table 2.2 Spatial Distribution of Workers in Greater Mumbai Year

CBD

Rest of Island City %

Suburbs

Total %

%

(no.)

4.29

28

15.28

100

8.00

36

22.09

100

44

24.25

100

(no. in lakhs)

%

(no.)

(no.)

1971

5.15

34

5.83

38

1980

7.07

32

6.92

32

1990

7.16

30

6.33

26

10.76

Note: Percentages rounded off. Source: MMRDA 1995, p. 13.

The clinching proof that much of Greater Mumbai was experiencing deindustrialization since the 1990s has been provided by Arvind Adarkar, the architect and activist. In a paper titled 'Emerging Office Sector and Globalization' presented at an SNDT University seminar on Globalization and the Environment in 2001, he cited statistics collected from the state government's Development Plan department to show that since 1990, as much as 44,66,935 sq m of land have been removed from the industrial zone. Out of this total, 29,76,924 sq m have been allotted for residential use and 14,90,911 sq m for commercial use. Since almost 70 per cent of this area was diverted to apartments, it would have led to an overall loss of jobs. He has estimated that the average industrial worker occupied 20 sq m of space in the workplace (as against 38 sq m in a cotton mill). This meant that around 2,25,000 jobs in the industrial sector had been lost in the city. 32 He goes on to state that white collar jobs are also under threat. These comprise public administration and defence services, banking and allied activities, provident fund and insurance sectors, which together constitute 55 per cent of the employment in offices. While this segment had recorded a growth of 78 per cent between 1980 and 1990 —from 3.52 lakh to 6.28 lakh —the government's policy of offering VRS to employees, accompanied by the rapid automation and computerization of many of these activities was bound to bring down the growth rate by 2001. 32

Adarkar, Nov 1994.

36 Ripping the Fabric

had closed since 1998 and 40 per cent comprised engineering units. Even small-scale industries, which were thought to be flourishing at the expense of big factories, have not been spared. According to the Thane Small Scale Industries Association, 400 industries had closed as of 1995, the latest figures available. These constituted nearly 12 per cent of the total and another 3 per cent were sick. The Association's Directory of that year stated in its foreword: 'With the economic liberalization unleashed by the government, the entire industrial environment has changed almost overnight. It has become global, dynamic and highly competitive . . .' 28 The media has also reported the widespread closure of industries in the onceb o o m i n g township of Taloja in the MMR, leading to the retrenchment of some 30,000 workers. Once again, the industrialists blame liberalization as the cause of their ills: they simply cannot compete with cheaper products from countries like China and South Korea. 29 By December 2000, the Maharashtra government revealed that despite growing at nearly 10 per cent per annum in the postliberalization phase, the employment potential of the state as a whole was rapidly declining. The total number employed in both the public and private sector declined from 37 lakh in 1992 to 34 lakh in 1997. The bulk of the jobs lost were in the private sector. The state had grown by 9.41 per cent per year in this period, but employment had declined by 7 per cent. There were as many as 43 lakh persons registered in the employment exchanges, of whom only 0.39 per cent could ever hope to land a job. 30 Mumbai has also reflected this decline: it constituted 38 per cent of the state's population in 1971 but by 1991, this had dropped to 33 per cent. 31

28

M.R. Khambete, 'Foreword', in Directory, Thane Small Scale Industries Association, 1995. 29 'Brick and Metal Corpses Line Taloja Landscape', Times of India, 21 Apr 2001. 30 'Economic Growth Fails to Create Jobs in Maharashtra', Business Standard, 29 Dec 2000. 31 Dewan, Dec 2000.

35

Reinventing Mumbai 39 New Bombay, which was said to be the brainchild of two architects and a structural engineer —Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel—in the 1960s, was conceived to act as a counter-magnet and attract spill-over office growth. (To set the record straight, Foster King, in his Presidential address to the Indian Institute of Architects in 1945, suggested that the territory to the east of the city be urbanized as an alternative to continual northward expansion and asked: "Would it not be wiser to boldly strike out laterally in an eastward direction across the harbour to the inviting mainland?' 34 ) The twin city would be independent and selfsupporting, with the objective of decongesting south Mumbai. According to the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO, a state government-sponsored autonomous company) in charge of New Bombay, 'the relocation of economic activities will provide the opportunity to relieve the island of Bombay with its present acute pressures of demand for land and ensure steady supply of land for future growth.' It would also siphon off 'industrial growth to the mainland, specially in those branches which have proven to be advantageous in New Bombay, including port-based industries, service industries and industries based on the associated gas of Bombay High (offshore field)...The concept of planning, which is combining jobs, residence and social amenities in carefully selected points will to a great extent dispense with long distance commutation. . .Likewise, planning of New Bombay will provide an opportunity to have a more pragmatic view of housing standards and specifications associated with acceptable living environments . /35 . What is known as the Ajit Kerkar Committee, appointed by controversial Chief Minister A.R. Antulay in 1981 to solve the problems of slums and dilapidated buildings —incredibly, Kerkar's chief claim to fame was that he headed the Tatas' Taj group of hotels —examined why, despite the high costs, 'the city still attracts more investment than the rest of India. The fact is that Bombay offers the attractions of and functions as efficiently as cities of developed countries and both public and private investment find 34

Cited by Achyut Kantawala, 'A Cultural Centre: Reinventing the Wheel', thesis proposal at Harvard University, May 1999. 35 Multi-Sector Urban Development Projects for New Bombay,CIDCO, Mumbai, Mar 1981.

38 Ripping the Fabric Table 2.3 Occupational Structure of Greater Mumbai, 1991 Activity Manufacturing Trade Transport Services Finance Others TT

Employment

Percentage

6,90,621 7,05,127 1,31,472 5,78,945 2,48,541 71,145 24,25,881

29 29 5 24 10 3 100

Note: Percentages rounded off. Source: K. Sita and Kamla Gupta, 'Spatial and Structural Changes in Employment in Mumbai 1931-1991', based on Economic Census of Greater Mumbai 1991. Paper for Seminar on Work and Workers in Mumbai—1930s to 90s, Mumbai, 27-29 Nov 1997.

Calling a Halt to Growth It was an article of faith, in the earlier days, for planners to advocate a halt to industrial and commercial growth in Greater Mumbai and the dispersal of industries to reduce the pressure on it. As far back as in 1945, a committee headed by Meyer and Modak looked at the post-war development of the city. It believed that space was a major constraint to the city's growth and that the suburbs ought to be that heavy industries included in the city limits. It recommended be exiled beyond the Thane creek.(Between 1950 and 1957, the island city expanded to incorporate the suburbs and extended suburbs to form Greater Mumbai.) In 1958, the S.G. Barve committee advocated a ban on all industrial units in the island city except those that processed imported raw materials or exported finished goods. Small industrial firms could be permitted provided they remained within the confines of industrial estates and zones. The Gadgil committee in 1965 led to the setting up of the Bombay Metropolitan Regional Planning Board two years later. The plan it prepared stressed the creation of a new city across the harbour. 33 33

K. Sita, 'Mumbai: A Global City in Making', in Million Cities of India, vol I, R.P. Misra and Kamlesh Misra (eds.), Sustainable Development Foundation, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 110-11 .

Reinventing Mumbai 41

only after a protracted protest from public-minded citizens, and a legal suit filed by the MP Pilloo Mody and others, that the sordid Backbay scheme was called off. that manuIndeed, a study by CIDCO in 1973 recommended facturing employment in Greater Mumbai should be frozen at its 1969 level, while jobs in the petrochemical complexes should not be increased by more than 2000 till 1980. The restraints on setting belt, coupled up industries in the Greater Mumbai-Thane-Kalyan with incentives for establishing industries in backward areas, did succeed in dispersing industries to new growth centres like Nasik, Nagpur and Aurangabad in the state. Till 1977, cotton textiles were the major employer, absorbing 28 per cent of the work force. It had begun to decline after that and by 1981, had dropped to 17 per cent. Between 1981 and 1987, manufacturing employment in Mumbai decreased at the rate of 3.89 per cent per year, as against a national average of 0.96 per cent. By 1987, chemicals were the city's leading industry, adding a quarter of the total value and most of the capital invested. At the beginning of the 1990s, rubber, plastics and chemicals as a category accounted for most of Mumbai's jobs (a fifth), followed by cotton textiles (13 per cent).38

Relaxing Curbs on Industries Twenty years later, however, the planners reconsidered their strategy of halting any expansion in Mumbai. They noted that the absolute decline in employment since 1980 could not be solely attributed to the policy of dispersing industries and offices. and expansion, labour laws and 'Restrictions on modernization general obsolescence, particularly in the textile industry, have been major causes,' the draft Plan stated. The new economic policies being pursued since 1991 would have an impact on urban growth. Under these new industrial policies, no licence was required for setting , up a new industry (except for 18 specified categories). Existing plants would be allowed to produce new goods, without any additional investment. No clearance was required to set up new industries in the existing designated zones. This restriction, industries such as however, would not apply to non-polluting electronics, software and printing —which will crop up later in this book. The policy would be flexible in respect of old, obsolete industries which required regeneration. 38

MMRDA 1995, pp. 175-6.

Accession

Nirmlwr

40 Ripping the Fabric

the price worth paying.' It also advocated decongestion as an outward movement of both employment and people. The earlier Regional Plan stated in 1973: The role that the metropolis should play in future depends upon which of the growth forces can be dispersed without affecting the total prosperity and dynamism of the metropolis. What is more important is to find out the extent to which a particular function is rooted to the soil and therefore immobile; and the extent to which a function is the mainstay of the metropolitan economy and therefore undesirable to move . . . Emphasis in shifting industries should be on large-scale labourintensive industries. There should be no element of compulsion in shifting industries. The role of the metropolis as the financial capital should continue without any disturbance whatsoever. The emphasis should be on incentives and inducement.36

The Kerkar committee, and many planners and architects before and after it, strongly recommended that clerical jobs, including some Mantralaya departments, ought to shift to the virgin territory of New Mumbai. The bulk acquisition of land, such as was possible there and later, to a limited extent in the new commercial centre of Bandra-Kurla, was considered the only way to combat the curse of land speculation. Within Greater Mumbai, and particularly in the island city, the two well-organized urban environmental organizations, the Save Bombay Committee and B o m b a y Environmental Action Group (BEAG), fought for dispersal of industries and jobs. Shyam Chainani of BEAG pointed out in 1983 that the island city accounted for 80 per cent of all employment in tip, had nearly half the city; 'A' ward alone, at the southernmost also resisted any attempt to the office jobs. 37 The environmentalists raise the floor-space index (FSI)—the area of built-up floor space in relation to the area of the plot it occupies, known elsewhere as the floor-area ratio (EAR)—or further reclamation of land from the sea. The most notorious example in the early 1970s was the Backbay reclamation, in which a venal state government favoured builders land, by leasing them plots of reclaimed and yet-to-be-reclaimed tip of the city. It was totalling 81 ha (200 acres), at the southernmost 36 Regional Plan for Bombay Metropolitan Region (1970-1991), Bombay Metropolitan Region Planning Board, Mumbai, 1973. 37 Shyam Chainani, 'Note on Job Location Policy for Bombay', paper for workshop on Development Plan for Greater Bombay (1981-2001), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, 1983.

Reinventing Mumbai 43 revenue to the local authorities. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher's new government reversed its 30-year-old policy of diverting growth from London and the South East. Her goal was economic recovery, to be achieved by encouraging private investment and removing the obstacles to private enterprise. The IDC system was first suspended and later abolished in 1982. The government introduced New Enterprise Zones with minimal planning controls and incentives such as tax holidays. It refurbished old industrial premises and constructed new estates to attract hi-tech industries. To protect existing jobs, it provided financial subsidies on capital, labour and rent. It set up an Urban Development Corporation to channel private investment into redevelopment of derelict industrial sites. The most visible impact of this planning volte face was the Docklands redevelopment towards the late 1980s, which we shall analyse in Chapter 7. It also manifested itself in the establishment of new industries, warehousing and shopping centres in London. That other great global city, New York, has also suffered from acute deindustrialization. According to Saskia Sassen, while manufacturing accounted for one million jobs in New York City in 1950, the number dropped to 800,000 in 1970, 500,000 in 1980 and 387,000 in 1987. 40 She admits that manufacturing was never as central to New York's economy as it was to London's. In the US as a whole, the total number of workers in manufacturing fell from 19.4 million in 1970 to 18.1 million in 1993. 41 But New York was hit more badly: it fell from 800,000 to 286,000. Even within New York state, the Big Apple's blight was worse: the state lost some 750,000 manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 1993 —equal to the entire population of Baltimore —but two-thirds of these were in the city itself. Elsewhere in the US, there are two jobs for every three people; in New York, there is now only a job for every two people. The third global city is Tokyo, where manufacturing began to decline in 1965. Jobs in this sector had risen from 834,000 in 1950 to 1.7 million in 1960, touching 42 per cent of all employment in the city. By 1970, these had fallen to 1.57 million and by 1981 to 1.3 million, due to a reduction in heavy industry and chemical factories 42 Many 40

Saskia Sassen, 1993, p. 200. Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York,Verso, London and New York,1993, p. 23. 42 Saskia Sassen, 1993, p. 211. 41

42 Ripping the Fabric

A World Bank consultant in the late 1970s had also warned against Mumbai going too far in dispersing economic activity: The propulsive sectors of the metropolitan economy—manufacturing, the complex of services, and economic activities supporting the port, the large scale banking and finance establishments and Central and State Government— look outwards to the national economy and to international markets rather than inwards to the metropolitan economy itself and its hinterland. The implication of this viewpoint is that the economic base of the metropolis should be protected. Strategies, policies and projects to promote other goals, such as decentralization or income redistribution should be designed in forms that do not impede the efficiency of the metropolitan economy. Bombay's economy has demonstrated its resilience by diversifying out of the stagnating textile industry [emphasis added] and by continuing to perform vigorously in the face of national and state policies that have frequently b e e n inimical to urban-industrial development. It is important that the decentralization strategy should be conceived and implemented so as to improve the efficiency of the metropolis rather than to undermine it. This presents the challenge to the urban policymakers in Bombay.39

The planners had taken their cue from their former colonial masters, Great Britain, which vigorously pursued an industrial dispersal policy to coax factories and offices to relocate outside London. The South East region as a whole was flourishing, in sharp contrast to the depressed North. The rapid growth of manufacturing in and around London in the 1930s and 1940s prompted the regulation of new factory jobs through the issue of Industrial Development Certificates (IDCs) for setting up new projects over a certain size. Planners also established a green belt around London to halt its further growth. The development of new towns —includ'garden cities' —beyond tlie greenbelt ing today's much-maligned further arrested the capital's growth and led to its subsequent decline. In the 1950s London lost 165,000 jobs and 500,000 during the following decade. The job losses continued through the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1961 and 1983, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped from 1.4 million to 583,000. Mumbai's planners noted that these job losses had led to inner city blight, a general degradation of the environment and loss of 39

Harry W. Richardson, Bombay City Study, World Bank, Feb 1980, cited in Report of the High Power Steering Group for Slums and Dilapidated Houses, Chaired by Ajit Kerkar, Government of Maharashtra, Aug 1981.

Reinventing Mumbai 45

The Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry added: 'Developers who have been waiting on the sidelines for such a policy will now take an interest in expediting major commercial projects in the city. This will be good for the city because it will not only new office stock in the island city, but provide the much-needed also call a halt to illegal office operations there. Many offices are operating illegally —in the mill area, for instance.' In March 2000, the BMC was also intending to permit industrial zones to be converted into commercial, which would prove a big bonanza for mill owners. It based this decision on an earlier recommendation by a study group headed by the former Urban Development Secretary, D.T. Joseph. It specifically wanted to exempt info-tech industries from restrictions and double their FSI to 2.44 Shyam Chainani of BEAG, which has always opposed relaxations on office location, was most critical. 'The government may believe that its decision will turn Mumbai into a world class city, but it is only paving the path for the creation of a slum-class city,' he stressed. will only result in more physical and 'Greater commercialization traffic congestion and infrastructural breakdowns.' It was an open secret that the government's move was also prompted by the failure of its much-vaunted 'free housing scheme' for 4 million slum dwellers. The Shiv Sena-Bharatiya J a n a t a party coalition government, whose leader, Bal Thackeray, had made this an election promise, could not persuade builders to participate in the scheme by providing a 225 sq ft tenement for each slum family free of cost and selling the site's remaining FSI on the market to make a profit. The social dynamics of getting the dispossessed of the city to trust builders —and the government itself —intervened in this process. Interestingly enough, the new industrial policy for the national capital in early 1999 advocated the decongestion of New Delhi, to make it less attractive for unskilled labour, and promote hi-tech industries instead. It called for a 'complete ban on setting up of hazardous, noxious and large industries'. However, the administration decided to take a pragmatic view on relocating nonconforming industries to conforming areas. This is with reference to the controversial Supreme Court ruling in 1996, on a petition filed by the environmental lawyer, M.C. Mehta, that polluting industries should be shifted outside the city. In all, some 97,000 44

2000.

'DC Rules Weave Plan to Plunder Mill Land', Indian Express,8 Mar

44 Ripping the Fabric

urban experts, therefore, see deindustrialization as a natural, inexorable process which every modem city has to experience some time or the other. Mumbai's planners also looked at other Asian and European cities. South Korea introduced an Industrial Location Policy in 1964 to restrict the expansion of Seoul, then growing at 7 per cent annually, to redress the regional imbalances in the country. It succeeded in reducing manufacturing employment from 49,000 (nearly 18 per cent of the capital's jobs) to 30,400 (around 6 per cent) in 1978. Even so, Seoul continued to grow, forcing the government to order the compulsory relocation of industries. However, the 1980 political unrest, accompanied by a slowdown in the economy and complaints from industrial and business interests (the chaebol) regarding the deteriorating environment in Seoul led to the abandoning of the plan to build a new capital city and relaxed the restrictions on industrial location. The new government in the post-1980 period has liberalized the economy. Similarly, Spain failed to develop small growth centres in depressed areas of the country. Its modified strategy to develop industries around metropolitan centres and 17 other cities also did not work. Italy, however, has succeeded in its comprehensive regional development strategy, which has come to the aid of the depressed South. By early 1999, the Maharashtra government had also modified its restrictions on setting up offices in the city and permitted industrial and residential zones to be converted into commercial space. It was in keeping with the draft plan's view that there was a serious artificial shortage of office accommodation. This policy change was hailed as a progressive step by mill owners and builders, who believed that this policy would help project Mumbai as an international business centre, while housing and environmental activists condemned it for leading to the further deterioration of the city. Secretary General of the Mill Owners' Association, V.Y. Tamhane exulted: 'The government has taken the right step by making provisions for the growth of the financial services sector because in today's economic climate, this is the only sector that can thrive in a metropolitan city. We hope the government will simultaneously take a decision on the redevelopment of surplus mill lands.' 43 43

Gunvanthi Balaram, 'Housing Activists Condemn Office Location Policy, Builders Hail It', Times of India, 24 Dec 1998.

Reinventing Mumbai 47 Mumbai will have to respond to the changing circumstances to achieve its own economic recovery and exploit the trend [sic] for the city's benefit. With the liberalization of the Indian economy, Mumbai's role as the financial capital is bound to be accentuated. Furthermore, Mumbai can also act as the focal point in the process of the globalization of the Indian economy. For this purpose, positive efforts need to be made to develop Mumbai into a finance and business node for international level of operations.47

With many sections of the state government, bureaucracy and business interests calling for a boost to financial services in the city, the question arose as to where the new centre or centres should be. which it had developed as a MMRDA pressed for Bandra-Kurla, 370-hectare complex just outside the island city to rival Nariman Point. It was located near the international and national airports and planned as a 'modern, sophisticated "city within a city", complete with technical and infrastructural facilities that compare with the best in the world.' 48 It was meant to employ 1.5 lakh people. It would house financial institutions, business and industrial houses, database and computer software services, a convention centre, hotels and entertainment services and prestigious residential blocks. A Diamond Bourse was being built by the well-known architect, Balkrishna Doshi. When real estate prices were at their highest in 1994, the Ambanis, a leading textile and diversified industrial house, bought 75,000 sq ft of office space in the complex at Rs 2800 per sq ft for Rs 21 crore. Another alternative was to locate the new centre in New Mumbai, around the CBD-of Belapur, where more land would be available. Shirish Patel, the structural engineer who was one of the original advocates of the twin city, however, argued that it would make more sense to let the new centre remain in south Mumbai, to take advantage of the existing concentration of services there. It would take an hour or more to commute from the southern tip to which ruled it out. For the very same reason, New Bandra-Kurla, Mumbai was altogether impractical. 'Are we not needlessly inflicting costs and inefficiencies on financial activity in the city, both immediately and forever into the future?' he asked. 'Should not all financial activity be focused on one centre which, given that 47

MMRDA 1995, p. 226. MMRDA, International Finance and Business Centre: Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai, Jan 1984. 48

46 Ripping the Fabric

factories were supposed to move out. If major industries were shifted, the administration stressed, it would mean a wholesale relocation of the working p o p u l a t i o n a s well, which was impracticable. In all, 2 million workers —unofficial estimates put it at twice this figure would have to move out. 45 An objective of the industrial policy was to permit industrial activities in the household category in residential areas. Industrialists and officials ridiculed the notion of shifting hazardous units to neighbouring states, because it would imply that life there was less precious. 46

A New Central Business District Mumbai's planners, businessmen and sundry other experts have been very much influenced by global trends and it has, in any case, always been characterized as India's most Westernised and modem city. Economic liberalization, it was argued, would boost economic growth by ensuring the efficient use of available resources through Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of profit. Specifically , Mumbai would have to play a major role in international trade if it wanted to be in the vanguard of India's attempt to globalize. Since there was a concerted effort to attract foreign investment, Mumbai would have to provide financial services, backed by modem teleand data processing. As part of this process, the communication private sector was allowed to enter infrastructure and financial services, including banking and (possibly) insurance. According to the MMRDA regional plan: Many of the constraints on corporate financing, foreign capital flows for trade and investments, imports and foreign exchange transactions have been removed. Exports are being facilitated through positive policy interventions. Foreign financial institutions are being encouraged to invest in stock markets. Increased foreign and private sector activity in various sectors, particularly finance, is expected to give rise to substantial new office-oriented activities. New types of private sector financial institutions are already coming into existence. Inflow of foreign capital has increased manifold. Increased volume of import and export would require supporting services.

45

'Delhi: The Blueprint of Chaos', Outlook, 4 Dec 2000. 'Delhi Draft Policy to Streamline Industrialisation, Promote IT', Financial Express,12 Feb 1999. 46

53

Reinventing Mumbai- 49 proponents—to a sky-rocketing of land and housing prices in the years immediately following 1991; from which the wealthy and other vested interests profited heavily but where the poor sections were further straitjacketed, and where the poor sections were even further driven into so-called 'illegality' and the dirty economy. Since housing and land are key factors in the dirty economy several steps have been taken as part of liberalization to allow dirty marketeers to launder their money . . . and have thereby served only to legitimise the dirty economy and illegal wealth . . . All this has contributed to a deepening of divisions in society —the now super-wealthy have been encouraged to build and to move ever deeply into enclaves. The very fabric of our cities is being ripped apart and reshaped in this process. Liberalization is widely reinforcing the 'ugliness' that social marginalization and the dirty economy are responsible for.51

at the height of the price boom in the mid-1990s, Astonishingly Mumbai was the most expensive city in the entire world for office space. It achieved this dubious distinction in 1995, when rents in the most-coveted areas like Nariman Point could go up to Rs 400 a sq ft per month. As an illustration, the French bank, Societe Generale paid Rs 38,000 per sq ft to purchase space in Maker Chambers IV in Nariman Point, a total of Rs 57 crore. 52 According to the World Rentals Survey in January 1997 by C.B. Richard Ellis, the property consultancy firm, the total yearly occupation cost per sq metre of office space in Mumbai was $1689—30 per cent more than its nearest rival, Hong Kong. This survey is conducted twice yearly and Mumbai remained the highest in the world despite a 10 per cent fall in rentals in the latter half of 1996. This decline, according to Richard Ellis, indicated a possible cooling-off in the Indian economy. 53 The survey covered 70 cities: a third in Europe, a quarter in Asia and a quarter in the Americas. Occupation costs included service charges and property taxes. Of the 70 centres, 26 saw prime office space rents rise and 15 registered declines. Asian cities occupied the top three places, with Mumbai and Hong Kong followed by Tokyo-inner central. Hong Kong annual rentals were $1291 per sq m and Tokyo's $1215. Indeed, Asian cities occupied 10 of the top 51

Jai Sen, 'Where Does Beauty and Ugliness Lie?', Hindu Folio, Aug

1999. 52

'Corporate Bombay Heads Uptown', Business World, 8 Feb 1995. 'Mumbai Remains Most Expensive for Office Space', Reuters news agency from Singapore, Asian Age, 26 Feb 1997. 53

48 Ripping the Fabric it is already so heavily concentrated in south Mumbai, cannot be anywhere else?' He suggested that government offices from the existing CBD could be shifted elsewhere to accommodate the new financial services. 49 The difficulties presented by two separate CBDs were reiterated by Judith Mayhew, who chairs the Policy & Resources Committee of the Corporation of London and was in Mumbai in early 1999 to examine possibilities of cooperation between the two cities. Without a fast public transport system between Mumbai's two centres, she asserted, it would not be feasible. 50 However, there were also those who believed, as we have seen, that the potentially vacant cotton textile mill land in Parel-Lalbaug could be developed as a midtown commercial centre, which would act as a link between the old CBD in south Mumbai and the new Bandra-Kurla centre in the northern suburbs. When an eight-lane road bridge across the harbour is built from Sewri —which lies cheek by jowl with the mill district —and the new port at Nhava-Sheva on the mainland, this would accentuate the need to recycle derelict industrial land to house offices for the new service sector. While the state government has not yet decided on such a policy for the area, such a pattern of development is already taking place to some extent through the operation of market forces, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Mumbai's Sky-high Real Estate Prices Those who conjure up images of Mumbai becoming an Asian financial centre; however, appear to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. There are two major reasons why this cannot happen for some years to come. The first, as planners ought to have known, was the runaway growth in real estate prices, which has upset all calculations. According to Jai Sen, an architect and urban activist: The compulsions of liberalization have contributed heavily to the deregulation of the urban land market, including more recently the lifting of the Urban Land Ceiling Act as one culmination of this drive, and consequently —and quite jcontrarily to the declared aims of the 49

Shirish B. Patel, 'A Second Financial Centre for Bombay: Where Should It Be?', Economic & Political Weekly,7 August 1993. 50 'Mumbai Will Become a Strong Financial Centre', interview with Judith Mayhew, Times of India,8 Feb 1999.

Reinventing Mumbai 51

slipped to eighth place —with New York, San Francisco, Frankfurt or Singapore being cheaper addresses. 59 In a 1994 survey by Fortune of 'The World's Best Cities for Business', Hong Kong topped the list, followed in order by Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Atlanta, Miami and New York.60 But the magazine noted: 'It's quite likely that Fortune's Best Cities will change quickly in the next few years. In the global environment, capital, both monetary and intellectual, is flowing at light speed towards its best return. American cities will compete less and less with each other and more and more with places they never dreamed of: Beijing or Bombay.' Listing the virtues of Mumbai as a destination for international business, it cited its openness to other cultures and that: 'A flood of multinationals seeking prime real estate has pushed up prices more than 200 per cent since 1992. Bombay is also abuzz with talk of salary escalation by US firms Morgan Stanley and McKinsey.' Speaking to the Network of South Asian Professionals in Washington in 1997, US Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Summers hoped that in 25 years, India's creative energies would be unleashed by the reforms which began in the early 1990s. He speculated that the American magazine Vanity Fair would be declaring Bombay, not London, 'the world's coolest city', and devoting entire issues to India's trendsetting fashion and jewellery designers and most modern software companies. Elsewhere in Asia, he added, there would be gripes about 'Bollywoodization' of the domestic movie industry, and the flood of Indian soaps filling the domestic TV screens . . . 61 Some property analysts and developers saw the astronomical rise in real estate values as a sure sign that Mumbai had arrived as a world class city. According to Geoff Marsh, the Managing Director of London Property Research, who has joined hands with two firms, Chesterton and Meghraj, to float India Property Research, Mumbai was suffering the birth pangs experienced by every world city: New York, Paris and London. The new areas coming up for development in those cities, he stressed, were Battery Park in New York, La Defense in Paris, Canary Wharf in London's Docklands —and, in 59

'Mumbai is 8th Most Expensive City in the World', Economic Times, 25 Feb 2001. 60 Bill Saporito, 'The World's Best Cities for Business', Fortune,14 Nov 1994. 61 USIS official text, 19 Aug 1997

50 Ripping the Fabric

18 places for office rents. 'This reflects both the explosion in demand for space in developed markets, such as Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong, which results from their significance in world and regional contest.' London was the world's fourth most expensive, at $1135 yearly. In the next survey, reported in August 1997, Mumbai retained its pride of place. According to Richard Ellis's Executive Director, 'The world office market underscores the economic growth of Asia.' 54 By January 1999, Mumbai's rentals had slipped to third position, behind Tokyo and London, with $1053 per sq m per year or Rs 190 per sq ft per month. Surprisingly, New Delhi had joined this list, earning itself the dubious distinction of seventh place, after Hong increased in Kong, Paris and Moscow. Supply of accommodation Mumbai's CBD, with large Indian firms like the Mafatlal group and Voltas, in which Tatas have a major stake, putting their properties on the market. The differential between the CBD and prime suburban real estate, however, narrowed, with CBD average rentals declining to Rs 90 a sq ft. According to the Association of Real Estate Agents of India, the average purchase price at Nariman Point was Rs 9000 a sq ft, while it was Rs 7000 at Bandra-Kurla. 55 'The sole exception was Ballard Estate, where values have stayed pegged at Rs 12,000 per sq ft since the beginning of the year,' the report stated. Nariman Point's biggest transactions were the acquisition of 15,645 sq ft of space at the Mafatlal Centre by Bank Agricole Indo Suez and Chase Manhattan Bank taking space in the same building. 56 With prices in the CBD a major deterrent, MNCs migrated to the suburbs in search of premises. In 1996, Star TV paid Rs 43 crore for a 5575 sq metre office on the Andheri-Kurla Road, while Motorola bought 562 sq metres for Rs 10.9 crore in the Bandra-Kurla complex. 57 For 1999, Richard Ellis still put Mumbai as having the third highest office rentals at $819 per sq metre, despite a 22 per cent fall during the previous year. 58 By 2000, Mumbai had 54 55

'Bombay Offices Most Expensive', Times of India, 6 Sep 1995. 'Real Estate Market Shows Signs of Buoyancy', Times of India,10 Feb

1999. 56

Gurbir Singh, 'Rents in India Buck the Recession', Economic Times, 9 Feb 1999. 57 'Prime Properties', supplement in Business Standard,11 Feb 1997. 58 'Mumbai Third in Commercial Space Cost', Business Standard, 28 Feb 2000.

Reinventing Mumbai 53

supported him. 64 The earliest instance of such misadventure was the speculation during the American Civil War in the 1860s, when 1500 acres were sought to be reclaimed along the stretch from Malabar Hill to Colaba. However, the financiers, the Asiatic Banking Corporation, went bankrupt. Only a strip that could accommodate a street and railway line were completed. Not that this deterred Mumbaikars from wanting to reclaim land a whole century later. In the late 1990s, Mumbai's most flamboyant architect, Hafeez Contractor, tried to convince the Maharashtra government to reclaim an 18-km-long stretch along the western coastline of the island city. In recent years, the dizzy real estate spiral has had adverse consequences for Mumbai's growth as a commercial and business centre. A survey conducted by the Financial Services Committee of Bombay First early in 1998 showed that out of 42 foreign firms which had set up new offices in India during the previous five years, only four had opted for Mumbai. As many as 36 had chosen other states, while two had located elsewhere in Maharashtra. According to the Indian Market Research Bureau, which had done the survey, the majority of the 16 firms which planned to set up a new office in the country by 2003 preferred other cities. What deterred firms was high cost of real estate, apart from the builderthe overwhelmingly government nexus which was keeping the cost of housing high. Besides, firms cited the fact that the city's infrastructure was under severe pressure, particularly transport, and there was pollution and congestion. 65 Jon Thorn of the Indian Smaller Companies Fund, who preferred to be based in London because of the unaffordable and transport bedevilled rents, emphasized how communication the conduct of business in Mumbai. Chesterton Meghraj was more forthright in its India Property Research report: If Mumbai is to become an influential city on the world stage, it will have to accommodate the wishes a n d operating practices of foreign corporations. Multinationals are an unforgiving breed. If they can't achieve certain standards, they will go elsewhere. Like it or not, Mumbai will 64 Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within, India Book House, Mumbai, 1995, pp. 186-90. 65 'City May Lose Prima Donna Business Status', Times of India,19 Feb 1998.

52 Ripping the Fabric

the very same breath Bandra-Kurla in Mumbai. Marcus Wraight, Director of Chesterton Meghraj, explained: 'Almost all great cities have a core business district. And the experience of London to decentralize the City did not quite work out. Mumbai, too, should go in for the City concept because it would make business that much simpler for Western companies setting up shop in India.' 62 For his India report, Marsh won the best property research prize in the UK in 1997. also followed suit, with Prices of residential accommodation those in Cuffe Parade in Backbay reclamation, contiguous with Nariman Point, setting peak levels for apartments, which declined as the city grew northwards to the suburbs. Possibly the highest price for luxury flats was paid at the time in a controversial block belonging to the National Centre for Performing Arts, sponsored by the Tata group of companies, in Nariman Point —the only residential space available in the entire reclaimed office complex. Its apartments were rumoured to have changed hands for Rs 30,000 a sq ft in the early 1990s, which worked out to around $1000 at prevailing exchange rates. Malabar Hill, where the wealthy live side by side with the state's ministers, was only a little less expensive. In early 1999, an all-time high for the price of a single flat was recorded in a high-rise complex called Woodlands on Peddar Road, in which the Reliance group of industries bought a 5200 sq ft flat for a staggering Rs 10.6 crore. 63 Even flats in the wellappointed suburbs of Bandra and Andheri were going for mindboggling sums. In south Mumbai, rates were well above those in London and New York and one had to be a dollar millionaire to afford a large, high-rise apartment. Foreign diplomats and businessmen were often forced to live in five-star hotels because they could not put down the price of a flat there. Nariman Point was reclaimed from the sea in the 1970s over 47 hectares, with 6,32,00 sq m of office space. Ironically, it is named after the very nationalist, K.F. Nariman, who exposed a Backbay reclamation scandal masterminded by the Governor, Sir George Lloyd, and British officials in the 1920s. Nariman was sued for defamation for his stem criticism before the enquiry committee, but people from all walks of life, including mill owners and merchants, 62

'Mumbai Must Go in for City Concept, a la London', Economic Times, 24 Mar 1997. 63 Gurbir Singh, 'Reliance Group Company in Record, Rs 10 crore Apartment Deal', Economic.Times, 12 Feb 1999.

Reinventing Mumbai 55 economic activity that one must presume that the returns are unusually high to compensate for this/ he observed. 'Only the apparently limitless patience of the citizens allows the city to operate at all.' 68 A top European banker, Juergen Fitschen, on the divisional board of Deutsche Bank, who has worked in Asia for a decade, told India Abroad News Service in Singapore in 1997 that Mumbai, which had the potential to be a major financial hub in Asia, had missed out because India had been unable to capitalize on its strengths to build its economy rapidly. 'India is deep inside a pretty stable country. Unfortunately, it has not used this stability based on its institutions to build a degree of efficiency to take the benefits from that/ he asserted. 'No government has been strong enough to use the opportunity to build the country over a long period.' Asia's growth markets depended on three factors—the markets per se, the private sector's dynamism and political leadership. 'It is not a coincidence that the subcontinent is not doing so well. They have some very well-educated, intelligent entrepreneurs but they have not been able to turn their knowledge into commercial success, as has happened in other places . . . We have seen in Singapore that political leadership can do a great deal to develop places. All other elements do not count so much. Raw material is increasingly unimportant as a factor of success.' If the frenzied rise in real estate prices disoriented Mumbai's planners and property developers, the decline since the middle of 1995 caught them totally off-guard. The news magazine India Today characterized the sudden turn of events as 'The Crash of '97'.69 It cited how a corporate house, flush with funds, was looking around for a short-term investment opportunity in 1994 and the booming real estate sector seemed the right choice. It bought some land near Mumbai's Film City, near the Aarey Milk Colony and Borivili National Park, for Rs 27 crore. Since 1996, the company had been trying to find a buyer even at a 40 per cent discount, but without any luck. 'Its temporary quest for high returns has become a permanent problem/ the magazine reported. 'For the country's over Rs 1,00,000 crore real estate business —one-twelfth the size of the 68 Sucheta Dalal, 'Pushing for Mumbai as a Financial Centre', Times of India,18 Aug 1997. 69 V. Shankar Aiyar, 'The Crash of "97"', India Today, 4 Aug 1997.

54 Ripping the Fabric have to conform [original emphasis], and that process will have a profound effect on real estate markets. Developers who understand international standards will flourish, the rest will languish. One of the principal difficulties all companies in Mumbai face when seeking to acquire or dispose of property is the almost complete lack of reliable information on prices, trends, lease structures and market practices. In short, commercial and residential markets in Mumbai lack transparency.66

The real estate consulting firm noted that firms which had recently s e t up shop in India, particularly in hi-tech and manufacturing, as also in financial services, including Lehman Brothers and Banque Paribas, 'are heading more readily for newly emerging markets in central and north Mumbai, or bypassing Mumbai altogether and locating in New Delhi. Nariman Point was losing its commercial charisma/ It went on to state: For any office market to remain competitive and attractive to international occupiers, it needs a steady supply of new buildings to meet the operational needs of the world's leading edge companies. Nariman Point is slipping back, and that is not a formula for long-term success. It is also something which the city of Mumbai should not view with equanimity. To create an office quarter with an occupier profile to match the best in the world, as Nariman Point has done, is a supreme economic achievement. To allow that critical mass of corporate excellence to be diluted is short-sighted and risky. For example, the City of London, with its hundreds of years of history as a world class financial and business centre, is now using all its resources to protect its business status against competing centres in London and indeed throughout the UK and Europe. Excellence must never be compromised or risked, and Nariman Point may be falling into that trap, following the heady years of 1991-1995 . . . Mumbai property prices are of worldwide interest.

The Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry published a paper by Prof Nigel Harris, head of the Development Planning Unit who of University College, London, a long-time Mumbai-watcher has written a book 6 ' on its planning and of late is an unabashed advocate of liberalization. A regular visitor to the city since the late 1970s and an advisor in recent months to Bombay First, he has studied the role of Mumbai in a global economy: Tn sum, the infrastructure of Mumbai appears to impose such heavy costs on 66

'Raise High the Roofbeam, Contractors', Business Standard, Mumbai, 16 July 1997. 67 Nigel Harris, Economic Development,Cities and Planning: The Case of Bombay,Oxford University Press, Mumbai, 1978.

Reinventing Mumbai 57

overextended themselves and withdrew money to settle their dues, leading to a further constriction of the property market. The surest sign that the high levels of the mid-1990s were due to speculation is the fact that loans disbursed to individuals in Mumbai by the HDFC have shot up dramatically from Rs 91 crore in 1994 to Rs 485 crore in 2001. The average individual loan has also increased from Rs 1,40,000 to Rs 4,56,000 in this period.70 These are genuine buyers, as distinct from investors. 'Supply and demand are relative in this market/ Singh observes. While it may be true that there was an over-supply of accommodation in the high-income category, in which there was the most speculation, there was certainly a shortage of property at the lower end. Mumbai builds some 20,000 residential units a year, whereas there is a need for at least three times as many. When property prices started falling, people started postponing their purchases, and this accentuated the crisis. Prices have never recovered to their dizzy levels of the mid-1990s and analysts believe they never will. The bubble has probably burst forever. It is thus quite evident that the volatile nature of an unregulated real estate market does not sit well with any attempt to project Mumbai as a global city, which provides opportunities for foreign investors.

The 'Invisible' Poor There is a much more compelling second factor impeding any such denouement. In the blinkered frenzy to project Mumbai as a world class city, planners completely forgot that it is, by any reckoning, one of the poorest in the world. The study by Dewan shows a sharp rise in the category of the absolute poor in the city. These are listed as beggars and vagrants'. The number rose from 10,769 in 1971 (1981 figures were not available) to 1,90,530 in 1991 —a rise of 861 per cent. Concludes Dewan: 'The trend of an astoundingly high increase in the category of beggars and vagrants reveals the sharp economic and societal deterioration in the present pattern of urbanization. It also implies the emergence of lumpenization, particularly amongst men, and the interrelated process of the increasing manifestation of the desperation of urban poverty in the largest mega-city in the country.' 71 70 71

Personal communication Dewan, Dec 2000.

from HDFC.

56 Ripping the Fabric

GDP —it has been a crash without precedent. Between mid-1995, when the real estate boom peaked, and mid-1997, prices have fallen a bruising 40 per cent. The biggest jolt has, in fact, come over the last year. Says Michael Thompson, former CEO of real estate consultants Colliers Jardine: "The last 12 months itself have seen a drop of 25 per cent."' Deepak Parekh, Chairman of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC), who is an acute analyst of the real estate market, believed that if the laws of economics prevailed, prices would fall further because there was an oversupply of property and poor demand. When prices of flats and offices were reaching for the sky, everyone believed that this uncontrolled inflation was the outcome of greedy speculation on the part of builders, brokers and buyers. When prices began to fall, much to everybody's scepticism at the outset, this still did not lead to what ought to have been the logical correction in the property market. If an office or flat was almost half the price it had been a couple of years previously, where was Where were all those the pent-up demand for accommodation? potential purchasers who had foregone concluding deals because they could not afford the earlier prices? All Mumbaikars had their own stories to recount of how someone had been forced to migrate to another city because they could not pay the astronomical rent or price of a flat—or had never come to the city in the first place. The only conclusion is that both the upward and downward spiral in the property market were fuelled not by genuine buyers and sellers but by builders, speculators and investors. The buyers did not ever intend to live in the flats they purchased, but only wanted to make a quick buck on the deal. Real estate was considered a better buy than gold or shares as an investment. Indeed, till the 1990s, it was considered as safe as houses. This congenital defect in the market thwarted any potential of Mumbai growing into a regional finance centre. If at all there was any over-supply of housing, it was at the upper end of the real estate market. According to Gurbir Singh, an and people's housing rights activist Economic Times correspondent who is frequently cited, in this book as a keen observer of Mumbai's real estate market, there was a 'double whammy'. With relentless speculation, prices put many flats and offices out of the reach of purchasers. When this realization dawned cumulatively, it had a spiralling effect and buyers postponed decisions. This trend coincided with a stock market crash, where investors had

74

Reinventing Mumbai 59

1680 pockets. Five years later, in 1981, the government estimated that the population living in the same slums were 3.8 million. Authoritative researchers like Lalit and Sudha Deshpande have assumed that the slum population grew as fast in the decade 198191 as it did between 1976 and 1981. On this basis, they estimate the city's slum dwellers at 6.76 million in 1991. This works out to a staggering 68 per cent of Mumbai's total population in 1991. However, the rate of growth could be exaggerated since the net migration into the city declined substantially in the 1980s. 73 At any rate, the Kerkar committee found that the spread of slums and today (1981) 70 per 'coincided with the city's industrialization cent of the slum dwellers have now been resident for ten years or more. z74 The Deshpandes also refer to the 1991 census, which shows that 40 per cent of the population lived in recognized slums and another 15 per cent in unrecognized slums, providing a composite 55 per cent, or more than the majority of citizens. 75 At the same time, the 1991 census is known to b e an undercount and the missing dwellings are mostly slum tenements. This gives the actual proportion of the slum population lower than 68 per cent but above the official 55 per cent. Even the state government-appointed Afzalpurkar committee estimates the slum population at 4 million in 1990 (over 40 per cent) and around 5 million in 1995. For most analysis of public policy, slum dwellers are assumed to be just above the majority of the city's population. According to the state government's slum census in 1976, 40 per cent of these households were below the poverty line, as against 19 per cent for all of Greater Mumbai. This exceeds the official estimate at the time for the country as a whole. A survey conducted soon after by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences of 2000 slum and homeless households and another by ORG a decade later confirmed from the Indira Gandhi this proportion. Madhura Swaminathan Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, who has made detailed surveys of specific slum pockets, stresses that the basic living conditions of slum dwellers is so abysmal that a small 73

YUVA, Mumbai:Global Island or Local Gateway? Report for UN Institute for Research in Social Development, Social Science Centre, St Xavier's College, 1997, pp. 26-7. 74 Kerkar Committee Report (1981), p. 51. 75 L. Deshpande and S. Deshpande, 'Memorandum to Finance Commission', submitted by BMC, 1993.

58 Ripping the Fabric

The poor are both omnipresent as well as invisible: they eke out an existence in the most affluent localities, including Backbay and Malabar Hill, but are also metaphorically out of sight in denser colonies in the distant suburbs. In the draft plan for 2011, the MMRDA and Operations Research Group (ORG) projected what households— as distinct from those living in slums —in the MMR would earn, by projecting 1989 figures. These planners came up with the astounding finding that 'with the increase in per capita income, the income distribution is becoming more equitable'. They calculated that in the 1980-90 decade, per capita income in Maharashtra went up at a compound rate of 3.79 per cent per year. Based on this analysis, they assumed that per capita incomes in Mumbai would rise by 3 per cent annually in future, leading to a decline in proportion of poor households by 1 point every year.72 By such sleight of hand, they found that if one assumes that those families earning less than Rs 1290 a month at 1991 prices (or Rs 250 per head per month) were living below the poverty line, only 23 per cent of the population of Greater Mumbai was so unfortunately placed. This was to drop to just 2.8 per cent in 2011 there would be none. By the same and by 2021, miraculously, projections of household incomes in slums and old buildings, using the identical garibi rekha (poverty line), there were 45 per cent of families who were poor in 1989. It would fall to 23 per cent in 2011 and a manageable 14 per cent in 2021. Thus the graph that these crystal-gazers have concocted of the proportion of households below the poverty line depicts precipitously declining lines for Greater Mumbai and the MMR. In fact, the plan is extremely coy about detailing the problems posed by slums and resorts to jargon about 'shelter strategy' and 'supply scenarios'. The surest index of poverty is the sheer proliferation of slums. This form of deprivation far surpasses conventional indices of poverty. Since an increasing proportion of work is being farmed out to men and women in their homes —with the precipitous decline of big manufacturing industries —the necessity of possessing a home in order to earn a livelihood becomes even more compelling. Outsourcing and the decentralization and disaggregation of production are the order of the day. The first and last census ever conducted of Mumbai's slums by the Maharashtra government was in 1976. It showed that there were 2.88 million slum dwellers in 72

MMRDA 1995, p p . 118, 242.

Reinventing Mumbai 61

Supreme Court. Some lawyers argued that the pavement dwellers had a fundamental right to reside on the pavements because they were pushed out of their rural homes since they could not sustain themselves, not because they were drawn to the bright lights of Mumbai. In other words, it was the 'push' rather than the 'pull' factor responsible for their plight. The apex court ruled that they had no right to reside on the pavements, which were meant for pedestrians, but could only be evicted under certain conditions. With Victorian censoriousness, the judges intoned: 'They cook and sleep where they please. Their daughters come of age, bathe under the nosy gaze of passers-by, unmindful of the feminine sense of bashfulness. The cooking and washing over, women pick lice from each other's hair. The boys beg. Menfolk without occupation snatch chains with the connivance of the defenders of law and order.' 79 Although the verdict was construed as unsympathetic to their cause, it served to restrain the authorities from carrying out harsh evictions in future. The number of homeless were put at 1,56,000 in the 1971 census and 2,41,000 in 1981, which is considered an underestimate. Madhura Swaminathan has done a detailed analysis of 26 pavement households on Dimtimkar Road in central Mumbai. She has shown that an increase in their income does not necessarily lead to an improvement in living conditions. If higher family earnings do not lead to a betterment of its housing conditions, there is little improvement in living standards. She describes the predicament of a pavement dweller: On Dimtimkar Road, a pavement dwelling is typically a small space enclosed on two sides by gunny sacks or old saris and covered on top by sack-cloth, old sheets of plastic or, occasionally tarpaulin and held by a few wooden rods. The walls of the building adjoining the pavement provide a third wall to the pavement dwelling. The space available, around four or five feet, is just enough to seat the four or five members of the household. The front of the dwelling, or a part of it, is open, unprotected and faces the gutter. 80 79

cited in Jeremy Seabrook, Life & Labour in a Bombay Slum, Quartet Books, London, 1987, p. 85. 80 Madhura Swaminathan, 'Reports of Urban Poverty in Bombay', Environment & Urbanisation,17(1), 1995.

60 Ripping the Fabric

improvement in their income is barely going to make a dent in their state of deprivation. 76 The ORG finding that only 45 per cent of slum dwellers lived below the poverty line in 1989 is more of an economic calculation, based on prevailing prices of essentials. Anyone familiar with Mumbai's slums —particularly areas like Dharavi, on marshy land, said to be the world's single largest shanty conglomeration with between 3 lakh and 6 lakh residents —knows that by any realistic standards, virtually all slum dwellers are by definition very badly off.77 As Nani Palkhivala, a former top Tata executive and constitutional law expert, puts it, Mumbai is the most expensive slum in the world. Researchers have shown that the deprivation of those living in what is for all practical purposes another, parallel city, albeit unintended, goes much beyond poverty levels. The dwellings themselves provide little or no protection from the elements — especially the torrential monsoon. There are also workplaces within the slums: Dharavi, for instance, accommodates some 400 tanneries, which are a major source of pollution. Water is acutely short : a survey in 1981 found an average 203 users for every municipal tap; in certain settlements, the number went up to 8600. The lack of sanitation and toilets is an even worse hazard. A survey of 619 notified slums, undertaken by the 1981 census, found that there were no toilets in 174 settlements. There were nearly a hundred people per toilet. In Santosh Nagar, in the western suburbs, only 1.5 per cent of the households had their own toilets and 30 per cent used open spaces, squatting wherever they could. It is amply clear that although Mumbai slum household incomes are well above the poverty line, their actual existence is sub-human. 78 There are, in addition, the homeless, whose lot is even worse than that of slum dwellers. These are mainly pavement dwellers — who were the subject of a protracted legal suit in the 1980s. After Chief Minister A.R. Antulay demolished dwellings along the western express highway during the monsoons in 1981, journalists and lawyers obtained an injunction in the High Court. The legality of their tenure was an issue which eventually went up to the 76

YUVA, Mumbai, 1997, pp. 31-2. Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's Largest Slum, Penguin Books India, 2000, p . 173. 77

78

YUVA, 1997, pp. 29-34.

Reinventing Mumbai 63

empirical standards does not hold good. Poverty is inevitably and invariably relative: if absolute standards were all that mattered, there would b e no poor at all in the US and other industrial countries. Certainly, there are none in these countries who meet the World Bank's rough criterion of an income of one dollar a day as being the standard. However, it is widely accepted that by comparative standards, there are some 33 million in the US who live below the poverty line as measured in that country —about one in every eight Americans, as we shall see in the concluding chapter. What is more, a common yardstick for coming to this conclusion is the condition of their housing: areas like Harlem in New York, for instance, are defined by abysmal living standards. ★ It does not need much prescience to come to the conclusion that all talk of turning Mumbai into a regional financial centre— let alone a world class city —is so much pie in the sky when planners are unable or unwilling to tackle the ground realities of the related problems of joblessness, homelessness and poverty. A survey conducted by Asiaweeek magazine of the quality of life in major Asian cities in 1998, using 24 indicators such as economic opportunity, quality of education, environment and sanitation, health care, transport, personal security, housing cost and leisure, ranked Mumbai 37th out of 40 cities, at the very bottom of the pile. Three Japanese cities topped the list. 83 As the document prepared by some academics and activists observes, the city is being slowly deindustrialized, partly as a result of the pursuit of a conscious policy. 84 It is manifest in the rise of the so-called informal sector, which now accounts for 70 per cent of Mumbai's employment. Slums are a logical consequence of such a policy. Since a substantial proportion of the city's workers live in slums and household production in these colonies contributes to the total output of goods, it is necessary to point out that such a housing amounts to an implicit subsidy to the formal economy. In the organized sector, a major part of a worker's income is spent on housing, which is saved in slums. 83 84

'Mumbai: Global Island or Local Gateway?', Asiazueek,14 Dec 1998. YUVA,1997, p. 2.

62 Ripping the Fabric

Members of the Kerkar committee visited slums in areas like Colaba, Dharavi and Kurla and found that: By and large, the conditions in the slums are appalling—even where improvements had been carried out; in cases, the conditions defy description. Hutments have been divided, sub-divided and sub-subdivided. Drainage and sanitation are so poor that it is amazing how major epidemics have not broken out. Passages and areas near lavatories are filthy, mainly because there are too few for too many. Passages between hutments are as narrow as 21 inches and it is amazing that two recent fires which broke out in Dharavi were extinguished before they spread.81

Better off, but also an integral part of Mumbai's urban blight, are those who live in old, dilapidated tenements. There are some 20,000 such buildings in the island city. On average, there are 20 tenements in each, which works out to a total of 4 lakh tenements. Assuming an occupation of six people per tenement, this gives a population of 2.4 million in these 'cessed' buildings for municipal purposes. One can often see them propped up by poles to prevent them from collapsing. Despite such precautions, they periodically capsize, especially during the monsoons. For the occupants, whose rents have been frozen at 1947 levels, living in such rickety houses is a perennial hazard. By no stretch of imagination is Mumbai better off them the rest of urban India, which has now touched 330 million people. A Western academic, Prof Samuel Aroni, is quoted by the Kerkar committee, referred to earlier, on the distinction between 'the true taking place in urbanization of the West and the overurbanization developing countries. The present urban growth is pathological. These are "the cities that came too soon". Unlike the nineteenth century European experience, when the growth of industry and the need for manpower preceded the migration into cities, the situation in the developing world is reversed. These growing cities are ahead of their industrial economic base...The urbanization policy has forces are so strong that, in general, no governmental s u c c e e d e d to control or prevent either the growth or the deterioration of the conditions of their urban centres.' 82 The argument that in economic terms, even the unhoused Mumbaikars are better off than their rural counterparts in droughtprone regions of the country and cannot be termed poor by these 81 82

Kerkar Committee Report (1981), pp. 61-2. ibid, p. 46.

3

King Cotton Dethroned They possess likewise a kind of plant which instead of fruit, produces wool of a finer and better quality than that of sheep; of this the Indians make their clothes. —Herodotus, circa 445 bc Most Indian cotton mills are thus museums or, worse, graveyards of machinery.* —Praful Bidwai The liberalization of the economy, which began in 1991, triggered off a series of changes, the reverberations of which have still not died down. As far as industrial growth was concerned, it marked a departure from the protectionist policies of the past. Workers were no longer secure in their jobs and entire production units began to trim their operations or close. As a major industrial producer, India was unsettled by these far-reaching changes and Mumbai, as the industrial capital, was particularly jolted. Reformers urged the government to go beyond the conventional measures, which eliminated licensing and other barriers to entry in industrial investment. One of the most cogent articulations of this turn-around in state policy was the Omkar Goswami committee *An extract from "Hard Times', The 10th Month: Bombay's Historic Textile Strike, Factsheet, Centre for Education and Documentation, Mumbai, 1982.

64 Ripping the Fabric

It would be incorrect to say that the process of liberalization of the economy has solely led to this situation because, as we have seen, the decline in formal employment was set in motion in the late 1970s. However, the changes in industrial policies and the market-friendly approach towards land use and related areas has accentuated this trend. This is why the document asks: 'Will Mumbai take the path of becoming a global gateway for the local poor or a global island, excluding the vast majority of the urban poor from its prosperity?' This is the issue we will examine in the ensuing chapters through the redevelopment of land belonging to cotton mills.

King Cotton Dethroned 67

accounted for 9 per cent of all advances to industries. Labour in sick industries swallowed up a fifth of the total cost of production. 2 Three states—Maharashtra, West Bengal and Gujarat—were the worst afflicted by this sickness, of which Maharashtra was most badly off, thanks to the presence of textile mills and engineering firms. Gujarat's fate was also determined by the poor health of the textile industry. In the 1980s as a whole, the NTC, the public sector agency which took over loss-making textile plants, headed the list of sick public sector enterprises, with accumulated losses of Rs 1481 crore. Other public sector 'loss leaders' were the Fertiliser Corporation of India with Rs 1385 crore, the Hindustan Fertiliser Corporation with Rs 1181 crore and Heavy Engineering Corporation with Rs 289 crore. 3 Rajiv Gandhi's regime introduced the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act (SICA) in 1985, commonly known by its acronym, SICA. It was framed to allow 'timely detection of sick and potentially sick companies' expeditiously to provide 'preventive, ameliorative, remedial and other measures', and to enforce such measures. Till then, the restructuring of sick units was a tedious and time-consuming affair, with lengthy court and administrative procedures. In the late 1980s, according to the Economic Survey of 1990-1, there were some 2.4 lakh sick units in the public and private sector, big and small, and the value of their plant and machinery was Rs 25,000 crore. 4 In 1987, the government constituted the quasi-judicial Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). It was visualized as 'a fast facilitation agency, with a single point of reference and rapid disposal'. It started functioning in 1992 and within a year, had received 1673 applications, including 57 from central and state public sector units. The BIFR has to scrutinize a proposal and sanction a rehabilitation scheme under the provisions of SICA. Alternatively, it could on its own appoint an operating agency — usually a financial institution like the Industrial Development Bank (IDBI) or Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) —if it was in public interest to get a company back on its 2

'National Renewal Fund —I: A Hard Option', Business Standard, 31 Nov 1992. 3 'Table of Sick PSUs', Hindu, 14 Sep 1992. 4 'Exit Policy Need Not Hurt Bank Labour', Business & Political Observer, 22 Nov 1991.

66 Ripping the Fabric report on Industrial Sickness and Corporate Restructuring in July 1993. It wanted potential entrepreneurs —not least the Japanese and other MNCs— to receive favourable signals regarding what it euphemistically termed 'operational flexibility' in the choice of output, markets and in the use of labour and capital. 'Industrial restructuring involves commercially reorganising ailing but economically viable firms, facilitating the withdrawal of unviable ones, and re-utilising the land and labour thus freed in the best possible manner,' it stressed. 'It is here that India needs to show marked success —to prove that we can liberate ourselves from the fetters of rigid dogma, and chart out areas of future growth and more meaningful employment.' 1 The committee was unanimous in its view that various barriers to industrial and corporate restructuring served no useful purpose. at an appropriate time, the barriers By preventing reorganization and fostered an uncompetitive prevented growth opportunities environment which led to gross and pervasive sickness. 'For exactly the same reasons,' the report went on, 'these barriers are anti-labour: although the restraints seek to protect labour in the short run, they actually harm long and medium term employment by eliminating growth possibilities . . . They result in a systematic drain of scarce public funds, foster a climate of budgetary support and eventually justify high tariffs, quotas, sectoral and product reservations to sustain inefficient firms. Indeed, barriers to restructuring have only one over-riding purpose: they maintain an army of inefficient promoters and managers in the public and private sector, who justify their incompetent existence on the ground that their firms "protect" employment.' The Indian industry was in dire need of doctoring, since it was chronically sick. Between 1982 and 1989, the credit locked up in units which were no longer viable had shot up from Rs 2585 crore to Rs 9353 crore—almost by 19 per cent per year. Textiles were by far the most sickly at the end of that period, accounting for a full third of the units which were steeped in debt. Engineering followed with 22 per cent. According to a study by Goswami and two other economists in 1991, bank credit locked up in sick textile mills 1

Report of the Committee on Industrial Sickness and Corporate Restructuring, chaired by Omkar Goswami, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, New Delhi, July 1993, p. 1.

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labour arising as a result of modernization and technological upgradation and also provide a social safety net to workers affected by industrial restructuring.' 9 Originally, the NRF was endowed with Rs 2200 crore with three schemes. The first was an employment generation fund to finance new industries and restructure the old; the second was a national renewal grant fund to help industries modernize and bear the cost of retraining retrenched workers and the last was an insurance fund to provide social security for the future. Since these moves coincided with a diminution in the powers of trade unions, they considerably destabilized the working class and rendered them vulnerable to market forces in ways that they had never anticipated.

Textiles as the Cradle of Industrialization The world over, the textile industry is one of the very oldest. Fibres, yam, fabrics and clothing are among the most widely dispersed and extensively, traded commodities in the world. According to Tirthankar Roy from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, who is a long-time observer of the cotton textile industry, nearly every country, rich or poor, has some edge over others in some textile-related activity. 10 India is believed to be the country where cotton originated: fragments of woven cotton material have been found in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro (3300-2700 bc), as Uzramma, a Hyderabad activist who campaigns for the rights of traditional weavers, points out. It came into use for all classes early in history and this could only have been possible through the participation of large numbers of people in the spinning and weaving stages, with simple tools made of local materials. The cultivation, harvesting, ginning, carding, spinning, post-yarn preparation, dyeing, weaving and post-weaving treatment of cloth were the occupation of the majority of the population. Uzramma notes: 'The output of this vast beehive of activity not only clothed the inhabitants of this country but supplied all the cotton used in the rest of the world, earning for India vast reserves of gold and silver, draining Rome of her gold, according to Pliny.' 11 9 S.B. Sarkar, 'National Renewal Fund-Provision is Far Below Need', Business Standard, Kolkata, 5 June 1992. 10 Tirthankar Roy, 'Textiles & Industrialization', book review, Economic & Political Weekly, 7 Dec 1996. 11 Uzramma, 'Cotton: An Introduction', Textiles Working Group Newsletter, no. 8, PPST Foundation, Chennai, Dec 1995.

68 Ripping the Fabric

feet again. (In early 2001, a group of central ministers set the ball rolling for the repeal of SICA itself.)5 The proponents of liberalization believed that to cure such chronic sickness, such medicine was long overdue. The stiff dose was administered in tandem with the controversial disinvestment policy in public sector companies, which was also part of the privatization of the economy. In 1991, the Union Finance Minister promised to close 47 public sector units (PSUs) as a condition for the release of $2.08 billion, laid down by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). By the following year, the government sold shares in 31 profitable PSUs for Rs 3058 crore. In a speech to the Bank of England in London, the high priest of liberalization, the Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh, pledged that he would totally phase out budgetary support to PSUs. 6 Labour took a quite different view. The President of the National Confederation of Officers 7 Associations, which consists of central public sector units, was convinced that 'the decision to go to the BIFR is a decision to de-industrialize the country. It took us years to build a capital base and expertise. And it is a tragedy that the BIFR, in a couple of sittings, will decide irrevocably if we will be worth the bother/ 7 A Mumbai-based radical left journal, Voice of the People Awakening, referred to the BIFR as a slaughter house. 8 Other measures which were part of the new approach towards labour were the exit policy, which made it easier to get rid of surplus workers, and the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS). The remarkable feature of this last policy was that it was hardly voluntary. In the same speech, however, Manmohan Singh stressed that he would approach the exit policy with caution because of the social and political risks. By January 2001, the Maharashtra government was even thinking of offering its own employees VRS to trim its wage bill as part of its economic reforms. The 1991-2 union budget established the National Renewal Fund (NRF) to help industries modernize and make them competitive as well as rehabilitate certain units. More to the point, it was to 'provide assistance to cover the costs of retrenchment or redeployment of 5

'GoM Okays Repeals of SICA with Minor Changes', Business Standard, 23 Jan 2001. 6 'Manmohan Says Budget Support to PSUs to Go', Economic Times, 18 Sep 1992. 7 Sunday, New Delhi, 16 Aug 1992. 8 Tn the Slaughterhouse of BIFR',Voice of the People Awakening, Mumbai, 16 Feb 1997.

King Cotton Dethroned 71

Mills were Located in the Nineteenth

Century

near Water Bodies

copies of Manchester, and other towns and cities are queuing to take their place/ 13 The belief that textiles were the backbone of Indian industry persists. Jawaharlal Nehru summed it up thus: 'The history of cotton and of textiles is not only the history of the growth of modem industry in India, but in a sense it might be considered the history of India/ Mumbai, which was acquired by the British as part of Charles Il's dowry on his marriage with Catherine of Braganza in 1661, did not initially seem a likely focal point for this industry. At the end of the seventeenth century, it was believed unlikely that 'Bombay from its situation could ever become a place of trade 13

John Singleton, The World Textile Industry,Routledge, London, 1997, p. 20.

70 Ripping the Fabric

Cotton is today the world's main non-food crop, providing half of all the textiles. India is one of the six biggest growers of cotton, along with the US, former Soviet Union, China, Brazil and Pakistan. Many economists see cotton textiles as the basis of industrialization. Eric Hobsbawm declared: 'Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton'. W-W. Rostow, who popularized the 'take-off' theory of economic growth, believes that it is the leading sector in the early because a mechanized textile industry stages of industrialization in requires relatively smaller capital investments. Entrepreneurs developing countries are attracted to it because they are short of capital and there is a ready market for the products. The 'comparative advantage' in this industry is highly dispersed. and urbanization In nineteenth century Britain, industrialization went hand in hand. At the beginning of the century, Manchester was already the centre of a regional network of textile towns within a ten-mile radius of the city. In 1800, there were at least 52 spinning mills —about as many as in Mumbai today —many housed in fourstorey buildings. Textile and metal-manufacturing towns in northern and midland England dominated the first urbanization phase, up to the 1820s. Cotton textile industries were concentrated in specific locations, with steam power. The commercial application of powerloom weaving after 1820 led to the evolution of the factorybased system in Lancashire. The second phase of urbanization was associated with Manchester becoming a finishing centre for textiles. In 1871, nearly 60 per cent of Manchester's manufacturing employment was in textiles and clothing. 12 According to Rostow, who postulated several stages of growth, the rapid expansion of this industry generates demand for the output of other industries —engineering, coal, transport and construction, stimulating in turn their development. He regards it as the catalyst in the take-off of the UK, US, Japan and Taiwan. More recently, authors like John Singleton believe that this is an exaggerated view: during the early stages of industrialization, textiles gave rise to strong regional clusters rather than proving to be the engines for the entire economy. As he puts it, 'Lowell (near Boston), Bombay, Osaka and Hong Kong were, in various ways, 12

Gareth Shaw, 'Industrialization, Urban Growth and the City Economy', in The Rise and Fall of Great Cities,Richard Lawton (ed), Belhaven Press, London and NY,1989, pp. 56-73.

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avenues, particularly trade in raw cotton, and there was rapid accumulation of capital. The cotton was paid for in bullion and the inflow of capital created new avenues for speculation in construction projects and the Backbay reclamation project, referred to in Chapter 2. The Oriental Mills, also at Tardeo, had Mumbai's foremost merchant princes on its board, including Parsi magnates and the Baghdadi Jew, Elias David Sassoon. The Sassoons were known as the Rothschilds of the East. As their biographer notes, 'Silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and cotton, wool and wheat — whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.' Eventually, the family went on 'to control the largest spinning and weaving power in the country'. 18 The Sassoon Spinning & Weaving Co was established on land bought from the Frere Land Reclamation Co for half a crown per sq yard. It trebled in value in 20 years. Jacob Sassoon was the first millowner to install a conveyor belt, beating Jamshedji N. Tata (who turned to iron and steel) to it. From six mills at the turn of the century, the family controlled ,12 in the 1920s. Some idea of the family's wealth can be gauged from the fact that Victor Sassoon spent 110,000 pounds sterling on a private racecourse, prompting the Times of India to condemn it as 'preposterous and deplorable . . . indulging in idle vanities and luxurious and extravagant tastes'. 19 The family name is deeply imprinted in Mumbai's heritage by way of docks, a public library and, not least, six cotton mills which are now named India United and are under the NTC. Tata entered textiles in a small way in 1868 by promoting the Central India Spinning & Weaving Company. The Morarji Mills, promoted by Morarji Gokuldas, followed two years later. 20 In 1870, there were ten mills, employing 8103 workers. 21 Thackersey Mooljee floated the Hindustan Spinning & Weaving Mills in 1873 and Khatau Makanji in 1875. The industry soon consisted of 'a small cluster of pioneer factories at the foot of Cumballa Hill and about a 18

ibid, p. 244. Stanley Jackson, The Sassoons, Heinemann, London, 1968. 20 'Textile Industry in India', Industry Profile Series, Maniben Kara Institute, Mumbai, p. 3. 21 Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, 'Cotton Mill Workers in Bombay, 18751918: Conditions of Work and Life', Economic & Political Weekly, 28 July 1990. 19

72 Ripping the Fabric

the great attention paid to it by the government/ 14 notwithstanding A century later, Mumbai replaced Surat as the largest trading port and major commercial centre of the region. In the early 1800s, its commercial growth rested upon the export of cotton (and, later, opium to China). As Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, a historian at Cambridge University who has written a book on the rise of the cotton industry in the city, points out, 'Bombay's growing commercial and political importance combined to facilitate its tightening grip on an expanding hinterland/ 15 According to S.R.B. Leadbeater, who has published a book on the Indian cotton textile mills and the legacy of the swadeshi movement, the manufacture of cotton textiles in factories was introduced by the British in the 1820s —some 30 years before Indian entrepreneurs developed an interest in investing in this industry. Till the first half of the nineteenth century, India classically was a supplier of raw materials to Britain and a market for its manufactures. 16 In the latter half, Chandavarkar observes that: 'Cotton textiles, India's most important industry, underpinned the social relations and economy of Bombay City. It was Bombay's staple industry and its only large-scale employer of labour. It was also the foundation of the city's prosperity and growth from the late nineteenth century onwards, and the basis of its claim to be a major industrial metropolis of Asia. Its development influenced the nature of the local market, the patterns and rhythms of rural migration and the relain the city's mill tionship between workplace and neighbourhood districts.' 17 Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar, who It was a Parsi businessman, set up the first mill, with British backing, in Mumbai called the Bombay Spinning & Weaving Company, in 1854. It went into operation in Tardeo two years later. Within a couple of years, the second mill started and attracted many more investors. During the American civil war, the cotton boom diverted funds to other 14

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay,1900-1940 , Cambridge University Press, UK, 1994; Indian edition by Foundation Books, New Delhi, p. 21. 15 ibid., p. 22. 16 S.R.B. Leadbeater, The Politics of Textiles:The Indian Cotton Mill Industry and the Legacy of Swadeshi,Sage, New Delhi, 1993, p. 13. 17 Chandavarkar 1994, p. 239.

King Cotton Dethroned 75 Although the rise of Bombay can be dated to the dying years of the 18 th century, its growth was accelerated in the second quarter of the 19 th century and only reached really massive proportions between 1840 and 1900. That its urban and economic growth outstripped the sophistication of its infrastructure has been an old and recurring theme in the city's history. 26

The living and working conditions of workers were quite abominable. During the cotton boom of the 1860s, people migrated to Mumbai, living wherever they could. One could see 'the wretched rows of cadjan (thatch) huts occupied by human beings, but only raised a few inches above the fetid mud of the flats'. (Things have not really changed all that much, judging by today's slums in Dharavi and other marshy areas...) When the boom ended, the workers were rendered jobless and many returned to their villages. The city's population fell from 8.1 lakh in 1864 to 6.4 lakh in 1872 — b y a fifth. However, it picked up soon afterwards with the establishment of cotton mills. Besides, there were the dockyards, railways, construction and other services. The population moved northwards and the eight areas which later formed the mill districts were Byculla, Tadwadi, Mazagaon, Parel, Sewri, Sion, Mahim and Worli. 27 Early in the twentieth century, some millworkers were living in chawls— the peculiarly Mumbai single-room dwelling which has given the city much of its proletarian character. These were built either by the Improvement Trust or mill owners or private enterprise. However, neither the government nor owners paid much attention to housing the workers. Even by 1929, only a fifth of the city's 64,000 millworkers were in chawls. In Dadar, for instance, it was recorded that these were 'dark, unwholesome dens, into which the light of day never penetrates, and which must of necessity breed disease and pestilence'. The Times of India, otherwise a solid pillar of the establishment, noted that 'our city has quite another side —a side reeking of poverty and filth, of misery, squalor and disease.' Human excreta choked the open drains and the homes of workers were squalid; they were already weakened by their hot, illventilated mills. 28 At the turn of the century, a little over a third of the entire population lived in rooms occupied by six to twenty or more persons. In 26 27 28

ibid, p. 35. Upadhyay 1990. ibid.

74 Ripping the Fabric dozen more that were scattered over the Parel district/ according to an early chronicler. 22 By 1875, Mumbai had 27 textile mills and over 80 by the end of the century. The Mill Owners' Association (MOA) was established the same year to combat the hostility of Lancashire mills to the infant Indian industry. Indian mills concentrated on spinning but when the industry was exposed to competition from Japan and China —at one stage, China imported nearly half India's yarn output —they started weaving cloth as well. In 1883, the Mumbai mills sold more yam to China than to the Lancashire mills for the first time. Interestingly enough, the fate of Mumbai's incipient cotton textile industry was in those fading years of the nineteenth century inextricably tied to the economies of Hong Kong and Shanghai, which faced alternate bouts of booms and slumps —the very cities which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, Mumbai may have to compete with as a regional finance centre early in the twenty-first century. By 1900, Mumbai had become the country's leading port for exports and imports. It also accounted for a little more than half the country's looms and spindles in cotton textiles. 23 H. van Wersch, a Dutch scholar who has written the history of Mumbai's 18-month-old textile strike in the early 1980s, cites how when Lokmanya Tilak launched the swadeshi movement in 1905, mill owners welcomed the campaign even if they differed with the objectives of the movement because it coincided with their interests. 24 Chandavarkar observes that 'in 1914, Bombay received over 87 per cent of the total value of Indian capital investment while Indian capital accounted for nearly half the total value of private industrial investment centred in the city. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bombay remained the bastion of Indian capital.' 25 The dramatic transformation of Bombay from a fishing hamlet and penurious trading settlement into a modem industrial metropolis occurred in a matter of generations. Far more impressive than the rate of change was its extent. Industrial cities have often grown more rapidly, but few have developed from such a modest economic and infrastructural base. 22

M.C. Rutnagur (1927), quoted in Chandarvarkar 1994, p. 26. Leadbeater 1993, p. 38. 24 H. van Wersch, The Bombay Textile Strike:1982-83,Oxford University Press, Mumbai, 1992, pp. 11-13. 25 Chandavarkar 1994, p. 26. 23

King Cotton Dethroned 77

well as large parts of the hinterland. The cotton trade determined employment levels in the docks and on the railways. The cotton and cloth markets, the most important in the city, hinged on the industry. Many engineering workshops and factories grew in response to the demand from textiles. Chemicals, dyes and a host of smaller ancillary industries and trades flourished with it. In 1921, the cotton textile industry employed 16 per cent of the male population and nearly one-tenth of the female. Wrote the Census Commissioner in 1931: 'Save for its textile manufacture, Bombay really has little claim to be called an industrial city. It is textile manufacturing alone that puts it into the industrial class.' 32 However, after the post-war boom which lasted till the 1920s, the fortunes of the industry waned as it was exposed to the full force of competition from China and Japan. Mill owners had relied on a ready foreign market for yam, but now they needed to switch to piecegoods. Even here, Japanese imports threatened the market. There were impressive textile strikes in the 1920s and labour unrest in the 1930s in Mumbai. Owners tried to discontinue the bonus payments they had introduced in boom periods, but succeeded only after a month-long stoppage of work in 1924. They attempted to cut wages by 11.5 per cent, which was the additional cost of excise duty, but this provoked a general strike which lasted three months. The mill owners only withdrew the wage cut when the government abolished the excise duty the following year.. The Mumbai textile industry had to turn its attention to meeting the domestic demand for goods, for which it was not prepared. The year 1928 saw a general strike and over the next few years, the Mumbai mills continued to lose their market share to other cities, from which it never recovered fully. This general strike marked the rise of the Gimi Kamgar Union, led by the (undivided) Communist Party. When the worldwide depression occurred in 1929, the textile industry would have been badly affected except for the swadeshi campaign to boycott foreign cloth, which boosted the demand for Indian products. The MOA reported in 1930: 'It is doubtful whether, but for the intense Swadeshi movement which prevailed during the period, several Bombay mills could have continued their operations during the year.' However, they did realize that such political mobilization was a double-edged sword and could be used against them. After twists and turns in the fortunes of the industry during the 1930s, the Second World War came to its rescue. Imports 32

Chandavarkar 1994, pp. 76-77.

76 Ripping the Fabric

mill areas, nearly half the residents lived in such trying circumstances between 1901 and 1911, which shows that they were worse off than the general populace. The workers also suffered from occupational diseases like byssinosis, contracted by inhaling cotton particles. The typical migrant worker, historians note, was confronted by the sight of the 'vast, dim, cavernous places, with their bewildering vistas of rotating wheels and belts and shaftings'. No wonder that he, along with his fellows, were found 'dragging themselves to work again before the sun is above the horizon, their countenances set and hopeless, bodies only half-rested from the previous day's labour, a gait that denotes unutterable lassitude in every mechanical movement'. 29 The Indian textile industry gained from the outbreak of the First World War, because imports of cloth and yam from Britain were reduced, while profit margins reached unprecedented levels. By 1918, there were 1,24,200 workers. This boom continued till 1922, when Japanese competition made inroads. Van Wersch records: Meanwhile the textile industry had rapidly become the most important employer in the city, giving employment to lakhs of people in the mills and related industries. The average daily employment in the mills more than doubled between 1900 and 1925, when 153,000 workers were employed. It is safe to assume that a great many more were economically dependent on the mills if the effect on trade, transport, energy, food and clothing were taken into account. On the basis of this consideration, Kooiman [an earlier Dutch scholar] estimates that in 1931 half the population in the city must have been economically dependent on the textile industry. 30

According to contemporary Mumbai scholars, however, two out of every three workers were employed in textiles at that census and the proportion would rise even further if badli workers were included. 31 Indeed, the cotton textile industry was not only the mainstay of Mumbai's economy but also shaped the growth of many other activities. Its vitality affected the city as a whole as 29

ibid. D. Kooiman, Koppelbazen, Kommunisten en Ekonomische Krisis: Arbeidersorganisatie in de Textlieindustrie van Bombay 1917-1937, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1978, p. 6; cited in van Wersch 1992, p. 14. 31 K. Sita and Kamla Gupta, 'Spatial and Structural Changes in Employment in Mumbai 1931-91', paper presented at seminar organized by Sujata Patel, Alice Thorner and Darryl D'Monte on Work and Workers in Mumbai: 1930s to 1990s, Nov 1997. 30

King Cotton Dethroned 79

Exports have always played a critical role in the health or otherwise of the cotton textile industry. With the devaluation of the rupee in 1949 and the Korean war boom, exports rose sharply and India became the world's largest exporter of cotton fabrics. However, as this severely diminished supplies for the local market, the government imposed restrictions. During the 1950s, India's exports of cotton fabrics stagnated at Rs 60 crore. The second FiveYear Plan leaned on heavy industries, neglecting exports. The cotton textile industry faced an accumulation of stocks of yam and fabrics. The third Plan did introduce some export promotion measures to meet foreign exchange requirements. The currency devaluation after the Indo-Pakistan war did not help the industry much since substantial import entitlements had been granted to cotton fabric exporters earlier. Exports did pick up rapidly in the first half of the 1970s. The overall performance of the industry was indifferent in the decades that followed. 36 By the 1961 census, nearly 15 per cent of the manufacturing labour force was in cotton textiles. 37 Two authors, Heather and Vijay Joshi, who had studied the migration of labour into Mumbai from 1961 to 1971, corroborate the steady downward trend in cotton mills: 'India's cotton industry as a whole began losing ground in world markets from the 1960s onwards. The growth of employment was much faster in newer industries like chemicals. Pharmaceuticals more than doubled. Other branches of manufacturing expanded employment at a rate comparable with other sectors of production. It should be pointed out that the skill-intensity of expanding industries such as petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and electronics is probably significantly higher than that of the older, stagnating textile industry.' 38 Sudha and Lalit Deshpande, the two Mumbai economists cited in the second chapter, have shown in their 1993 study that textiles accounted for 28 per cent of the value added by manufacture in 1975-7. But this share declined to 16 per cent in 1981-3, though by 1989-90 it had again risen to 18 per-cent, thanks to exports of clothing. The share of chemicals also declined. As a study by the 36

Shuji Uchikawa, Indian Textile Industry: State.Policy, Liberalization & Growth, Manohar, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 15-19. 37 Sita and Gupta 1997. 38 Heather Joshi and Vijay Joshi, Surplus Labour and the City: A Case Study of Bombay,Oxford University Press, Mumbai, 1976, pp. 64- 5.

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were curtailed and the military required huge amounts of coarse cloth. The end of the war marked the imminent departure of the British Raj and saw intense labour unrest as trade unions sought to win representative status under the new Bombay Industrial Relations (BIR) Act of 1946 (which replaced the Bombay Industrial Disputes Act of 1938). The BIR Act, as it is commonly abbreviated, was a major cause of labour discontent later, and still remains one. By 1950, S.D. Mehta, the official historian of the Mumbai industry, could report that 'the textile mills have substantially returned to normal conditions.' 33

Post-Independence According to Leadbeater, 'The textile industry appears to have gone through three principal crises, one in the mid-1960s, another beginning in 1974, and a third, in 1983-4. The 1950s witnessed a period of fairly healthy growth and the textile industry felt optimistic about future prospects. In the 1960s began a progressive downward trend in the profitability of the organized sector, an early sign of the onset of sickness, which began to plague mill owners in the oncoming decades. From 1974, the price of yam and cloth began to fall, heralding the mid-1970s crisis. Over and above the cyclic depressions, the cause of "sickness" has repeatedly been said to be that of outdated machinery and overmanning.' 34 The Five-Year Plans, which began in 1951, imposed a series of restrictions on the mill industry. The second Plan has to be read in the context of the 1948 industrial policy which was revised in 1956: The adoption of the socialist pattern of society as the national objective, as well as the need for planned and rapid development, require that all industries of basic and strategic importance, or in the nature of public utility services, should be in the public sector . . . The Government of India . . . stress the role of cottage and village and small-scale industries in the development of the national economy . . . They provide immediate large-scale employment; they offer a method of ensuring a more equitable distribution of the national income . . . Some of the problems that unplanned urbanization tends to create will be avoided by the establishment of small centres of industrial production all over the country. 35 33 34 35

ibid, pp. 251-71. Leadbeater 1993, p. 228. ibid, p. 177.

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the quantum of bonus announced by the MOA. The CPI-affiliated Mumbai Gimi Kamgar Union threatened an indefinite strike on the issue. Agitated workers from Standard Mill marched to the Ghatkopar residence of the veteran union leader, Datta Samant, who had achieved considerable fame for his militant tactics in winning sizeable wage increases and other benefits, mainly in the city's engineering units. Samant was initially reluctant to don the mantle of leadership because textiles were governed by the notorious BIR Act. The workers staged a dhama outside his home, at which he consented to lead a movement not only for higher bonus but for a hike in wages and the regularization of badli workers. The next few months were spent in fruitless negotiations between the state government, MOA and various unions in an effort to avert a prolonged strike. Samant formed his Maharashtra Gimi Kamgar Union and on 18 January 1982, the indefinite strike of 2.5 lakh textile workers began. The early militancy, however, began to fade as the months wore on. Samant's attempts to win legal representation for his union — he undoubtedly had the support of the majority of the workers — were thwarted by the combined might of the government, MOA and RMMS. He thought he would win a war of attrition against the owners, but that was a tactical error. Although the strike was never officially called off, this 'unholy trinity' collectively decided that it came to an end on 2 August 1983. According to the state government's Manohar Kotwal committee, which enquired into the strike, the number of workers dismissed was some 51,000. Van Wersch points out that the committee's findings that a little over 1 lakh workers were affected (including those who resigned, retired or expired) has been construed by the press to mean that they were fired, when that was not the case. However, there were also thousands of other workers who were neither discharged nor dismissed; they were simply not taken back. Some 5.6 crore mandays of work were lost, Rs 90 crore in wages and the total loss in production was put at Rs 985 crore. Despite what might seem as his defeat, concludes van Wersch, 'Samant did not meet his "Waterloo" in the textile strike . . . he is still a force to reckon with and he can still muster considerable strength. The very attitude which caused so much suffering to the workers, namely his refusal to call off the strike, has helped him retain his image as an incorruptible leader. His popularity is visible today in the sympathy that tens of thousands of textile workers feel for him

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NGO, Yuva, notes, "From the predominance of the textile industry, the decade of the 1960s marked the beginning of its decline and a growth in manufacturing output. The latter half of the decade of the 1980s marks the virtual collapse of the textile industry, and a beginning in the decline in manufacturing output also/ 39 The British economist Nigel Harris, in a chapter on 'Bombay in a Global Economy', cites the Deshpandes' earlier study in 1991 that the share of manufacturing in the city's output had dropped from 41 per cent in the 1970s to 37 per cent a decade later. Bombay established its industrial pre-eminence through the textile industry, and it is surprising that the performance of the industry has been poor for so long. Although the composition of Bombay's industry has been changing —by the 1960s, lower value production had moved out of the city, and the city's mills were more capital-intensive and large-scale than average . . . protection for long inhibited the movement of the industry in the high-growth sector of world industry, ready-made garments . . . By contrast, it was the swift movement of the Hong Kong industry into this sector which created the basis for rapid industrialization. Since the Indian industry has been focused on the slow growing domestic market, both its employment potential and its role in spreading industrialization have been frustrated. The 'sick' 1 industry policy has only exaggerated the lack of dynamism.40

The 1982-3 Textile Strike The period of reckoning for the Mumbai cotton textile industry was the 18-month-long strike in 1982-3, probably the longest ever in world history for a workforce of this magnitude. Van Wersch, who painstakingly has traced the course of this momentous event, holds that it was 'the outcome of pent-up frustrations over a number of years'. The RMMS, being the sole representative body of textile workers under the BIR Act, had forfeited the loyalty of most workers, because it was the stooge of the ruling Congress party. In September 1981, some mills went on spontaneous protest against 39

'Global Transition, Local Democracy: The Case of Mumbai, India: A Case Study of Citizens' Participation in Urban Governance, Paper for Project Volunteer Action, Local Democracy —Partnerships for a Better Urban Future, Supported by LTNRISD. YUVA, Mumbai, July 1998. 40 Nigel Harris, 'Bombay in the Global Economy' in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India,Sujata Patel and Alice Thomer (eds), Oxford University Press, Mumbai, 1995, p. 50.

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In 1987, the chemical industry was the city's leading employer, with a quarter of the value added and nearly a third of the share of cumulative capital invested. Cotton textiles came second in 1977, with a 17 per cent share of the value added. 'After reaching its peak in 1978-9, the industry began to decline rapidly and reached its lowest level in 1982-3/ the report observes. 'Although the industry recovered partially thereafter, the widespread obsolescence and sickness affected its performance and in 1986-7, its share of MMR's value added was reduced from 17 per cent (in 1976-7) to 10 per cent. During this period, however, the wool and synthetic textile industry made good progress and improved its share of MMR's value added. . .partially compensating for the decline in the cotton textile industry' 44 (see Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2

Employment in Major Industries in MMR

Source: MMRDA 1995, p. 176. Today, when it is widely believed that the time of this industry has passed, it is important to remember that textiles as a whole is India's single largest industry, comprising both the organized and sectors, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total decentralized industrial production. After agriculture, it is die largest employer, providing jobs for 21 million people if one adds those engaged in related industries like textile machinery, manufacture of dyes and chemicals, marketing and transport, not to mention the millions of 44

ibid. pp. 177-8.

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in spite of the collapse of the strike.' 41 Tragically, Samant had to pay for militancy with his death, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Decline of Textiles Thus, the deindustrialization of Mumbai began with the decline of the textile industry. The MMRDA Draft Regional Plan, 1996-2011 pointed out that 'the decline in employment in traditional cotton textile and near-stagnation in the chemical industry is clearly emerging'. 42 The report goes on to point out that between 1981 and 1987, 'the manufacturing [factory] employment in MMR decreased at the rate of 3.89 per cent per annum as against India's decline of only 0.96 per cent . . .In 1990-1, rubber, plastic and chemical industries had the largest share (21 per cent) of the employment, followed by cotton textiles (13 per cent)' (Fig. 3.1). While these first three industries improved their share of employment between 1981 and 1991, cotton textiles had lost their leading position of 1976-7 with its share dropping from 28 per cent to 17 per cent in 1981 and 13 per cent a decade later. This was because of the loss of about 1.33 lakh jobs in the cotton textile industry between 1977 and 1991. 43

Fig. 3.1 Employment Share of Major Industries in MMR 1990-1 Source: MMRDA 1995, p . 176. 41

van Wersch 1992, pp. 234-41, 257. MMRDA, Draft Regional Plan for Bombay Metropolitan Region, 19962011, Oct 1995, p. 109. 43 ibid, pp. 175-6. 42

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for textiles from a population which has crossed 1 billion. Besides, with a revival in the world market for high-value cotton apparel, there is no reason why the mills should not remain in business.

Technological Backwardness On the other hand, there are several long-term factors which are responsible for the sickness of the industry. To begin with, it is common knowledge that it has failed to modernize itself over the years and is now technologically obsolete to a large extent. Van Wersch observes that this backwardness is by no means new and can be explained by the integrated nature of production: spinning and weaving are closely linked and there is no point switching to high speed looms if there is no corresponding modernization of the preceding spinning process to step up production. As far as the second half of the twentieth century is concerned, the Maniben Kara Institute, which conducts research on labour issues in Mumbai, traces the apathy of the mill owners to modernization during the boom through the Second World War: During the war, mill cloth was in demand in the domestic as well as foreign market. So the mill machinery was exploited to the maximum extent and the mills made huge profits. Even then, instead of building adequate reserves to rehabilitate, or renovate or modernise the worn-out mill machinery, huge dividends to the shareholders were disbursed, with the result that there were no funds left for modernization. The mills did not attempt to become internally strong to be able to withstand the onslaught of external factors on their profitability. Before independence, there was a tendency to appeal to the British ruler for favours. This attitude was not changed after independence, with the result that mills were working with technically obsolete and rundown machinery and hence neither quality nor quantity was turning out from such machines. Sickness started creeping in with a substantial number of mills. 47

In 1951, according to C.P. Chandrasekhar, a Delhi-based economist who has studied the textile industry, more than 43 per cent of all machinery in every department was over 40 years old and another 27 per cent older than 25 years. A full quarter of a century later, the situation was quite similar when a sample survey was conducted in 47 mills in 1976. 48 'Sickness is neither peripheral 47

Maniben Kara Institute, op cit, pp. 20-1. C.P. Chandrasekhar, 'Growth and Technical Change in Indian Cotton Mill Industry', Economic & Political Weekly, 19 (4), 28 Jan 1984. 48

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cotton growers. At the end of the 1970s, when the industry was at its peak, textile mills accounted for 15 per cent of the jobs in the nation's organized sector, only slightly less than the share of food products. The cotton textile industry, which was by far the biggest component, was also ranked second in terms of value added by industry— 10 per cent —after chemicals. It also fetches one-third of the total export earnings, valued at $9 billion in the mid-1990s, and is also the highest net foreign exchange earner because of its limited import intensity. India has 2.4 per cent of the world trade in textiles, as against just 0.6 per cent of global trade in all commodities. 45 In Maharashtra, the industry employed some 3 lakh workers in the late 1970s, including those in the silk industry and synthetics. rapidly between 1961 and Maharashtra's economy industrialized 1981, when the number of factories doubled from 8233 to 16,594, in the organized sector rose from 8 lakh to 12 and employment lakh. Productive capital and industrial output, however, rose even industries. faster, indicating a shift in favour of capital-intensive The output per worker in the chemical industry, for instance, was Rs 3 lakh as against only Rs 46,000 in cotton textiles. Similarly, a chemical worker earned an average of Rs 14,367 a year, in sharp contrast to Rs 7120 in mills. The last figure was even lower than that of the all-India wage average. 46 Union activists from Mumbai's cotton textile mill industry— whether from the officially recognized and corrupt RMMS or the militant rival GKSS—question the assumption that its days are over. India has everything in its favour for the continuing prosperity of this industry, they argue. Unlike other manufacturers of cotton textiles, notably in South-east Asia, India grows its own cotton, is along with China and Pakistan. Admittedly, the productivity much lower than in other countries, but that does not detract from the fact that the country has the largest area under cotton in the world —a quarter of the total, a long history of growing cotton and has progressively graduated from handlooms to modem mills. The industry is 150 years old; there is excess capacity; a vast reserve of trained manpower; and India also manufactures much of its own textile machinery. What is more, along with China, India has a vast internal market for its cotton textiles. The average Indian has only 26 sq m of cloth of all kinds available to him today to wear and use, which should indicate that there is a tremendous pent-up demand 45 46

'Thriving Textiles', Financial Express, Mumbai, 16 Feb 1997. van Wersch 1992, p. 19.

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Anubhai, who was the President of the Ahmedabad Textile Mills Association, of the 52 closed mills in the country, 25 were in Gujarat and nine in Maharashtra. He classifies the causes of the nationwide sickness a s environmental, structural and locational. His environmental factors encapsulate a long history of restrictions on mills. After 1947, right up to the new policy in 1985, there was a freeze on looms in composite mills. The total number installed in 1939 has remained static at around 2 lakh. Even when looms were replaced, their width was not allowed to be increased till 1978 to sector. There were also restrictions on protect the decentralized installation of automatic looms, which was only allowed against export obligations. Yam could not be freely exported and there were curbs on mills using their idle capacity for outside job processing. 51 There was a high incidence of indirect taxes which, according to Anubhai, worked out to a staggering Rs 4000 crore per year. This amounted to a tax burden of 23 per cent on an item of mass consumption, which depressed the demand for fabrics. Excise duty, in particular, was the unkindest cut. What is more, the cost of the raw material —cotton —fluctuated with the crop. Other input costs, like energy, were also high. Wages, he believes, amounted to 15 to 25 per cent of the output price. Demand for textiles had remained stagnant for 40 years and there was excess capacity in the industry. With 200,000 looms in the composite mills and some 1.1 million powerlooms, the total combined capacity was of the order of 30,000 million metres of cloth, against which production was 13,000 million metres. There was 'a virtual ban on closing down of units and some units which eventually close down through sheer attrition are again pressed into production by absorbing them into the state sector'. Whether the take-over of chronically sick mills by the central NTC is viewed as a curse or blessing by the mill government's owners is a moot point. In his maiden speech as the Union Commerce and Industry Minister in 1951, Morarji Desai, who subsequently became the Prime Minister in the mid-1970s, said: I have to refer to closure notices and actual closure of units creating all sorts of problems. I hope you will agree that in all these cases, impediments to production are not due to unavoidable causes. One important and major factor which has driven many of these units to the desperate acts of closing down is, perhaps, the continued neglect and to a large extent, though not 51

Prafull Anubhai, 'Sickness in Indian Textile Industry: Causes and Remedies', Economic & Political Weekly, 26 Nov 1988.

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nor transitory to India's textile mills/ wrote journalist Praful Bidwai in 1984. 'It is the very essence of their existence. Everyone concerned has known this for years. The mill owners have even waxed lyrical over the fact in the latest annual report of the Indian Cotton Mills' Federation (ICMF), the representative body of the private companies which both spin yam and weave cloth. To quote: "It is in sickness that we most feel the need for that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent upon one another, for our comfort and even necessities. Thus, disease ...is an indirect blessing." ' 49 At that stage, it was estimated that Rs 2500 crore was required to modernize the country's mills, which would bring them at best on par with the level of mills in the industrialized West around 1970. In a factsheet produced in 1983 by the Centre for Education and Documentation in Mumbai on the tenth month of the historic textile strike, Bidwai castigated the failure of the industry to overcome what were, by international standards, 'technological dinosaurs'. Only some 52,000 of the 2.1 lakh looms in the country were automatic, which meant that India was four times more backward than China and way behind other producers like Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and even Thailand and Indonesia. There had actually been a fall in output per spindle in cotton mills from 61 kg in 1963 to 50 kg a decade later. A World Bank study referred to the abysmally low performance of machines in a state of disrepair, bad housekeeping and appalling operating conditions and the 'failure of the management to provide and maintain good working conditions and operative (worker) amenities . . .The majority of the mills with old equipment can only be described as industrial slums.' To which Bidwai adds: 'Most Indian cotton mills are thus museums or, worse, graveyards of machinery.' 50 The new Textile Policy Statement, issued by Rajiv Gandhi's government in June 1985, recognized that: 'The present crisis in the industry is neither cyclical nor temporary. There appears to be a deeper structural weakness.' It largely affected the organised sector and the older textile centres. In 1988, according to Prafull 49

Praful Bidwai, 'From Riches to Rags: Textile Mills Down Skid Row — I', Times of India, 19 Mar 1984. 50 Praful Bidwai, 'Hard Times: The Imperatives of Modernization', in Factsheet 1: The 10th Month— Bombay's Historic Textile Strike, Centre for Education and Documentation, Mumbai, 1983.

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the prize unit because of the mill land, said: 'The joke in the company is that if ever a museum of textile machinery was to be set up, they would find every model and every make there!' 55 There are now some 124 such mills in the country, under nine subsidiaries of this public sector company. The majority, 109, were nationalized while 15 were managed or taken over. There are a total of 1,70,000 workers in these mills, which together constitute 17 per cent of the country's spinning capacity and 29 per cent of the weaving. Only six mills —in Coimbatore and Pondicherry —show a profit.56 In 1991, the central government cleared a Rs 450 crore plan to retrench 50,000 NTC workers. 57 The NTC's cumulative losses at the time were Rs 2400 crore. The New Textile Policy of 1985 had the closure of unviable nationalized mills. It was recommended proposed to close 14 and amalgamate 49 into 21 units. 58 In 1992, the government approved a Rs 1250 crore package for these mills — Rs 550 crore for modernization and Rs 700 crore for rehabilitation 59 There was talk that year of the largest retrenchment effort in corporate history, where 70,000 workers —nearly half —were to be retired. 60 Nearly 40,000 workers opted for a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS). After seven of the NTC's nine subsidiaries were referred to the BIFR, but failed to come up with a solution, the Union Textile Minister, G. Venkat Swamy, put forward a revised turnaround strategy, under which he would raise Rs 2006 crore from the sale of mill land. The Secretary General of the Indian Cotton Mills Federation, M.P. Gajaria, described the bail-out of the NTC 'a scam', alleging that 85 brand new mills could have been set up with Rs 2000 crore, the amount the corporation was in debt. According to Omkar Goswami, who was the Chairman of the Finance Ministry's Committee on Industrial Sickness, the NTC's sales would have to rise by 75 per cent, to Rs 740 crore per year, if the revival scheme was to take off. He believed this was 'something that is only in the realm of fantasy'. The NTC spent a whole third of its turnover on wages, as against 5.7 per cent for the country's top 20 mills and 6.8 55

'NTC In Tatters', Business India, 31 Aug 1992. 'A Question Looming Large', Telegraph, Kolkata, 24 March 1994. 57 'National Renewal Fund—Provision is Far Below the Need', Business Standard, 5 June 1991. 58 Editorial in Economic Times, 24 June 1991. 59 'Rs 1250 Crore Package for NTC, BIC', Economic Times, 11 Aug 1992. 60'ntc Begins Retrenchment', Business Standard,12 Aug 1992. 56

88 Ripping the Fabric always deliberate, definite inefficiency and short-sightedness on the part of the management in not ploughing back surplus resources, when they were available, for the much-needed rehabilitation and rejuvenation of the mills. The profits and earnings were just frittered away.52 The NTC was formed in 1968 when Dinesh Singh was Commerce Minister. To him, textiles were 'a sector wholly left to private endeavour and the Government would not have stepped in if those who were in charge had given it a fair treatment. There had been tremendous expansion instead of modernization . . . There had been diversification of resources by those who owned but had neglected this largest industry in the country . . . It is only the failure of the private sector to run these mills and give equitable share to the workers that has forced the government to enter and save the industry at this late stage/ The intention was to take over such mills primarily as an unemployment relief scheme for the benefit of millworkers who had lost their jobs. According to Kasthuri Sreenivasan, who was Chairman of the NTC from 1974 to 1981, 'matters such as the financial needs of the units, their economic viability, technological obsolescence and the needs of modernization were not seriously considered/ 53 Initially, the NTC took over 17 mills and later another 40. The states set up their own state-level textile corporations for the same purpose as well. At this stage, the mills were taken over and managed rather than nationalized. In 1972, the government passed the Sick Textiles Undertakings (Taking-over of Management) Ordinance, under which 46 mills were nationalized. This was replaced by the Industries (Development & Regulation) Act later that year, enabling the NTC to take control of another 57 mills. As many as 103 mills were at that stage under the NTC's control, accounting for 16 per cent of the loomage and 18 per cent of the workers in the textile industry. In 1974, the government completed the process b y promulgating the Sick Textile Undertakings (Nationalization) Ordinance, to acquire and transfer the rights, titles and interests of the owners of the 103 sick mills. 54 By any reckoning, the NTC mills represent the classic instance of industries which are beyond salvation. As V. Sundaram, former Chairman and Managing Director of NTC (South Maharashtra), 52 53 54

Quoted in Leadbeater 1993, p. 226. ibid, pp. 227-9 ibid, p. 231.

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representatives of the mill owners, unions, experts and activists, V.Y. Tamhane, Secretary General of the MOA, cited how powerloom workers earned an average of Rs 2000 a month, in contravention of the Factories Act, while the Mumbai mill hand earned Rs 6075 (though this is actually the cost to the management). The powerlooms have now flourished away from the old textile centres, in towns like Bhiwandi, Surat, Madurai, Ichalkaranji and Salem. Goswami shows that Bhiwandi alone has more installed looms than the entire composite mill sector. 64 Tirthankar Roy cites that official estimates in 1995 put the powerloom sector at around 1.3 million looms and employed 6.6 million people, which he believes is an underestimate. Industry sources believe that the figures are 1.7 million and 8 million respectively. Assuming that in 1991, powerlooms employed 4 million, this accounts for a fifth of all wagelabour in industry and a third in the informal sector. By comparison, all factories employed 8.7 million that year. 65 Powerlooms at that stage produced 18,000 million sq metres of cloth, or two-thirds of the total production, while integrated mills accounted for only 4150 million sq m, or less than one-seventh the total. 66 Similarly, in 1995-6, powerlooms accounted for 58 per cent of the total export of cotton cloth. Assuming that nearly the entire production of non-cotton cloth and cotton garments came from powerlooms, nearly 90 per cent of the cloth exported directly or indirectly from the country was from this sector. Roy points out that success in the world market is a better test of competitiveness than performance in a regulated market and by this standard, powerlooms have succeeded remarkably. Both management and labour in the organized sector hold lower wages largely responsible for the runaway growth of powerlooms. According t o Anubhai, the index of wages per metre for powerlooms is around 60 per cent of mill wages. Roy draws attention to the fact that there was a symbiotic relationship between the two in the last couple of decades. 'Mills and powerlooms were no longer mere competitors,' he says. 'The mills were increasingly 64

Omkar Goswami, 'Sickness and Growth of India's Textile Industry: Analysis and Policy Options', Economic & Political Weekly, 10 Nov 1990. 65 Tirthankar Roy, 'Development Or Distortion? "Powerlooms" in India, 1950-1997', Economic & Political Weekly, 18 April 1998. 66 Satyajit Bhatkal, 'In the Slaughterhouse of the BIFR',Voice of the People Awakening, Mumbai, Nov 1994.

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per cent by private mills. His more realistic alternative was to slash the wage bill by 40 per cent, restructure the mills and increase sales by 35 per cent, which would salvage half the mills. Nothing has come of any of these proposals at the time of writing. Early in 2000, the Textile Ministry was preparing a Rs 3300 crore rehabilitation scheme, leading the Business Standard to draw a caustic parallel: 'If it is cancer, they say, it is not curable; and if it is curable, it isn't cancer. That applies very strongly to the National Textile Corporation, whose chronic sickness has defied a cure so far.'61 Even as late as in July 2000, the Maharashtra government was considering taking over five mills belonging to Maf atlal Industries — two in Lower Parel and Mazagaon and three in Gujarat. Sachin Ahir of the RMMS, who had been elected a National Congress Party ML A, alleged a conspiracy between the government and the owners to bail out the mills, which had been closed for two years. The mills' liabilities to banks and other institutions, which the state would take over, amounted to Rs 959 crore and in addition, VRS would cost Rs 67 crore. The assets, mainly land, were expected to fetch only Rs 342 crore. According to the state textile minister, as a last resort, the land would be sold and the workers paid from the proceeds. 62

Competition from Powerlooms In 1986, J.R.D. Tata, the late doyen of Indian industrialists whose family's diverse interests included some of the country's earliest cotton mills, explained why the textile industry was on the decline: 'The reasons for such deterioration are many, but the principal and most important one . . . has been Government's policies... which banned the expansion of the organised sector in order to promote and protect the decentralised sector'.63 The main structural factor which Prafull Anubhai holds responsible for the ailment of the mills is the competition from powerlooms. They work on 12-hour shifts, instead of eight hours in mills, and at a lower wage, thereby undercutting the organized sector. At a workshop organized by this author at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences on the sale of mill land, which was attended by 61

'Terminating NTC', Business Standard, 8 Feb 2000. 'State Government to Buy Out Five Mafatlal Mills', Business Standard, 28 July 2000; ' Takeover of 2 Sick Mills to Cost Government Rs 1000 crore', Times of India, 28 July 2000. 63 quoted in Leadbeater 1993, p . 193. 62

King Cotton Dethroned 93 Mills also lost out to powerlooms with the increase in production of cloth from synthetic fibres. In an earlier article, Roy showed how blends, have gradually been polyester, and later polyester-cotton replacing cotton in the domestic market, which explained the stagnation in cotton cloth consumption. 69 Unlike in the case of cotton, where composite mills gain from the advantages of integrated production and scale, rayon and polyester do not confer the same benefits. Additionally, consumers no longer went in for branded mill cloth and this lack of loyalty went in favour of powerlooms. Composite units began as spinning mills and weaving was added from the turn of the century. Roy believes that already by 1960, 'the integrated mill looked like an idea whose time had gone, at least in ordinary grey cotton cloth.' They represented a pattern of industrialization produced by specific circumstances, which have changed. Between 1977 and 1987, employment in the unorganized sector grew four times as fast as factory jobs. In 1991, 70 per cent of industrial employment took place in units not registered as factories.

Labour Costs The second structural factor responsible for sickness, according to Anubhai, is the high labour complement and inflexible labour laws, He cites the fact that some 60,000 which prevent retrenchment. Mumbai mill workers lost their jobs after the 1982-3 strike without affecting productivity. Barriers to exit complicate matters further. Even the closure of a section of a composite mill —for example, a plain loomshed —is not permitted to save the other activities. In some cases in the state sector, he alleges, the losses are greater than the wages paid and the government would be better off shutting down such units even while paying the workers. However, other observers point out that real wages in the cotton textile industry have stagnated over the years. Between 1970-1 and 1987-8, real wages in the industry rose by less than 1 per cent. Historically, mill owners have always prospered at the cost of their labour. Early in the twentieth century, H.E.E. Proctor, Vice Chairman of the Bombay Chambers of Commerce (where the city initiative 'Bombay First' is located today), accused the owners: 69

Tirthankar Roy, 'Market Resurgence, Deregulation, and Industrial Response: Indian Cotton Textiles in 1990s', Economic & Political Weekly,25 May 1996.

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less capable of competing. Capital shifted out of the mill network The mills in Bombay supplied discarded into the powerlooms. looms and processing machines almost at scrap rates. To utilize low wages or bypass capacity restrictions, some mills subcontracted with powerlooms for cloth that was sold on mill brands.' Bidwai alleges that at least half the most active powerlooms, which work up to three shifts a day, were owned, benami, by the mill owners themselves. 67 Roy does not demonize the powerloom sector, which in western India he finds a life of 'very hard work, but with far better chances of employment, quicker mobility, and chances of saving much more than wherever the average migrant comes from.' (One should recall that originally, most of the mill workers in Mumbai hailed from the Konkan coast where 'jobbers' hired them and persuaded them to migrate to the city, where they were sometimes offered in chawls.) The average Bhiwandi worker in 1997 accommodation earned Rs 100 a day, which translates to Rs 3000 a month. This could amount to a saving of Rs 2000 a month since he could hire a bed for Rs 100 a month and eat in a collective kitchen for Rs 700 a month. This level of savings compares favourably with that of any semi-skilled worker in a big city. Roy cites how the Dutch scholar, Jan Breman, in a recent book refers to the brutal conditions of work and life in the powerloom sector (Breman is also cited in the introduction to this book). However, in Mumbai, where rents are extremely high, the 'quality of life of a mill labourer without a home is only marginally, if at all, better than that of a powerloom worker in Surat or Bhiwandi.' At the same time, it is true that thanks to unionization, mill workers could expect proper amenities and allowances which their towns could not. In that sense, the counterparts in powerloom organized sector sets the norms which other industries ought to observe. In a country with a vast reserve army of the unemployed, wages and working conditions should not be fixed according to the lowest common denominator. By 2001, the powerloom industry too was beginning to feel the heat of liberalization: in Andhra, the recession in this sector was so acute that an entire family committed suicide, leaving a five-year-old as the sole survivor. 68 67

Praful Bidwai, Factsheet, Centre for Education and Documentation,

1983. 68

'A Despairing Weaver Kills Self, Family in Recession-hit Andhra', Indian Express, 4 Apr 2001.

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Textiles (Control) order came into force, which remained more or less intact till 1985. The objective was to protect handlooms in particular and labour-intensive production in general. These included a freeze on mill weaving capacity, differential excise duties on cloth and yam, curbs on the growth of powerlooms through licensing and the reservation of some products for handlooms — notably coarse and coloured saris. Roy notes the contradictory policies in the 1950s regarding powerlooms —one which (in his view, correctly) saw that this sector represented upward mobility for handloom weavers, while the other adopted a Gandhian approach in recommending restrictions on power-driven weaving. The 1985 Textile Policy legalized all powerlooms by requiring them to be registered. An order in 1993 also removed the restrictions on them. He concludes: 'The government and banks have wasted resources in subsidising mills and handlooms, and done nothing to develop infrastructure and institutions in powerloom towns. There is no other example from Indian industry of an activity that employs so many, has been so successful, and has received so little of government resources.' He believes that the received view among textile scholars that powerlooms represent a particular form of government failure is wrong, and that their growth is due to the expansion of a general pattern of industrialization. It is simply 'the most important industrial activity in India today'.

Hands off Handlooms While the traditional antagonism is between the composite mill and powerloom industry, handlooms are generally dismissed as a Gandhian relic. An official census in 1987-8 estimated that there were between 2 and 2.5 million weavers directly working on handlooms and another one million engaged in related activities. Weavers' organizations estimate the figure is ten times higher, at 20 million, working on three million handlooms and an equal number engaged in pre- and post-weaving operations. This is an exaggeration because those directly employed would be equal to the total number of jobs in the textile sector as whole. However, there would have been an undercount in the official census, since most handlooms are in the household, and hence the figure will lie somewhere in between. 73 As van Wersch notes, 'Of all the sectors 73

K. Srinivasulu, 'Textile Policy and Handloom Industry: Policy, Promises and Performance', Economic & Political Weekly, 7 Dec 1996.

94 Ripping the Fabric To swell your profits, you are ready to sink all feelings of humanity and to sweat your mill-hands to any extent. You know this is so. It is not a question of compensation from Lancashire or Japan, but it is a question of increasing profits, which are already anything between 20 per cent and 50 per cent. 70

Bomanji Dinshaw Petit also told the Bombay Mill Owners Association: I deliberately assert that every additional pound of production got by making them work longer than 12 hours a day is wrung out of their aching limbs . . .Strong efforts will be made to bring the matter to the notice of the government and to make it interfere in the matter, and to bring to an immediate end this degrading and disgraceful spectacle of cold-blooded inhumanity. 71

By early 2001, mill owners, said to 'have given up all hope of a in labour laws', were asking for the full-fledged liberalization freedom to sack at least 1 per cent of its workforce, while the minimum number of employees required to form a trade union ought to be increased from the current level of seven to 100. 72 Thirdly, Anubhai cites locational factors. Sickness has set in the older textile centres — namely, Mumbai and A h m e d a b a d . Coimbatore, by contrast, has invested in more modem machinery, diversified its product lines and inoculated itself to a large extent against chronic ailments. The first were cities where industrialization took off. This led to early unionization and a tax structure in these states which focused mainly on the textile industry as a source of revenue since it was easier to collect taxes from large industrial clusters. As a consequence, these states suffered from high locational costs compared to the new textile centres established in the last couple of decades. Since property prices have been soaring, along with charges for electricity and water, the old centres are at a disadvantage. Inventory costs are also higher in mills than in powerloom sheds.

Textile Policy The government's textile policy has also been held guilty of working against the interests of the organized sector. In 1948, the Cotton 70

Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, 'Cotton Mill Workers in Bombay, 18751918: Conditions of Work and Life', Economic & Political Weekly,28 July 1990. 71 ibid. 72 'Textile Mills Want the Power to Sack', Economic Times, 22 Jan 2001.

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year and cotton powerlooms twice as fast. By the Sivaraman committee's ratio, the 2,90,000 lakh powerlooms added between 1974 and 1988 should have displaced 1.74 million handlooms, which in turn would have rendered some 4.176 million people in this sector jobless every year. This extent of immiseration has never been reported. But, circumstantially, it is known that in 1991, for instance, there were 110 deaths of handloom weavers in Andhra Pradesh due to starvation or suicide. By 2001, when the quantitative restrictions on imports of textiles were removed and the economy was exposed to globalization, it was unofficially reported that there were 400 cases of suicides and starvation deaths among handloom and traditional powerloom weavers from 1999. 76 As many as 40 powerloom weavers committed suicide in the first half of 2001 and others were threatening to follow suit. 77 Another perceptive scholar, C. Shambu Prasad, traces a related tragedy : the suicides of cotton farmers —300 in Andhra in 1998 and later in Vidarbha —to the downgrading of Indian species of cotton in colonial times. He writes: The history of cotton growing in India since 1790, when Bourbon, the first exotic variety was introduced, can be seen as essentially one of the replacement of indigenous varieties of cotton, which had been carefully bred over centuries to provide the world's best cloths, by American varieties, to suit the emerging mill production in Lancashire. Consequent to the poor understanding of the difference of the two types of cotton, the indigenous was branded 'inferior'. While the 'deindustrialization' caused due to colonial rule has been well researched, there is little understanding of the technical dimensions of the process . . . Cotton in India, unlike in other parts of the world, came into general use as clothing for the rich and poor at an early stage in history. Cotton cloth reached a stage of perfection that made Indian textiles known all over the world and the textile industry gave employment to vast numbers of people at each stage of production. Different varieties were grown in different parts of the country, each being suited to the local soil, water and climate.78

Britain's policy, as we have seen, was to ensure that India remained a source of raw material —cotton —and a market for 76

'Weavers in Distress', Frontline, 27 Apr 2001. 'Weavers— Woes Loom Still', Hindu, 13 May 2001. 78 Shambu C. Prasad, 'Suicide Deaths and Quality of Indian Cotton: Perspectives from History of Technology and Khadi Movement', Economic & Political Weekly, 30 Jan 1999. 77

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of the textile industry, the handlooms have by far the greatest employment potential but, just as in the case of the powerlooms, much basic data are uncertain . . . it seems reasonably safe to state that some 1 0 million people and possibly 15 million find employment in the handloom sector'. 74 For the composite mills, handlooms are 'enemy number two'. Certain items are reserved for their exclusive production and there were quotas and product restrictions on mills. However, as one observer, K. Srinivasulu, comments, it was another matter altogether that both the letter and spirit of these restrictions were not observed. Handlooms were afforded protection because of their huge employment potential. The Seventh Five-Year Plan document, for instance, promised an employment-oriented plan and identified generation of productive employment as the central feature of development strategy. Since the 'potential of direct employment generation in large-scale industries is not high because these industries are fairly capital-intensive', there was a need to generate productive employment in rural areas by intensifying village and small industries and diversifying economic activity there. 75 Srinivasulu shows that the falling share of the mill sector in textile production has been caused by the 'restrictions on fibre use, imposition of heavy excise duties, controls on the import of polyester fibre and of technology for the modernization of the mill sector by the earlier policy regimes and of course, the resistance of the organised working class to the mill owners' attempt at retrenchment. Though this, policy intervention was intended to protect handlooms, its unintended consequence was the expansion of powerlooms. In contrast, the advantage of low duties, the presence of an unorganised and low-paid workforce and the possibility of flouting all kinds of regulations in every conceivable way has benefited the powerlooms.' The high-powered Sivaraman committee set up by the Planning Commission in 1974 found that for every powerloom set up, six handlooms were rendered idle. This meant that every job in the powerloom sector displaces 14 handloom weavers, since the productivity per weaver in powerlooms is 14 times greater. Between 1963 and 1974, powerlooms overall grew at nearly 10 per cent per 74

van Wersch 1992, p. 47. K. Srinivasulu, 'High-Powered Committee, Low Voltage Report: Mira Seth Report on Handlooms', Economic & Political Weekly, 14 June 1997. 75

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policies were shaped as a result directed mills, post-independence towards import substitution of long staples. The focus was on highyielding varieties in irrigated areas in rich alluvial soils with large inputs of fertilisers and pesticides.' It was the consequence of this policy, with massive government intervention in favour of varieties dependent on large doses of fertiliser and pesticides, which has led to the suicides of cotton farmers in recent years. Cotton, which occupies only 5 per cent of the cultivated area, accounts for half the pesticides consumed in the country today. Gandhi saw nothing less than the industrial revival of India through the khadi movement in the 1920s, which 'consciously rejected some of the established axioms of the textile industry', according to Shambu Prasad. It was not just a cultural response but also based on a different scientific agenda which predicated the growth of the indigenous cotton industry on the development of local varieties. This science could be validated in farmers' fields, not in the laboratory. Maganlal Gandhi, in his book Charkha Sastra, translated from Gujarati in 1924, saw the connection between hand spinning and cotton cultivation and remarked that the extinction of the fine art of spinning 'spelt the death of fine cotton growing in India'. He was no Luddite, fighting American varieties of cotton, but a hard-headed scientist who believed that there was an alternative path for the cotton industry to take, one which would not have led to the present crisis. Government scientists, after Independence, disregarded swadeshi research which stressed that India's strength lay in the improvement of short-staple cottons. The khadi movement slowly degenerated, like Gandhianism as a whole, by merely paying lipservice to it, and it was thoroughly bureaucratized. It is only in recent years that some scientists have started questioning policies that have downgraded indigenous varieties. This is the challenge whether to understand the before the scientific establishment: historical nature of the crisis or to fall into the trap of going in for transgenic species and becoming yet more dependent on chemical inputs, with all the attendant problems of debt and penury. This puts the entire sordid saga of the decline and fall of the Indian cotton industry in its total perspective. The decline of the mill sector can be seen as the culmination of industrial policies which favoured Western models at the expense of indigenous traditions of growing and cultivating cotton.

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finished products. To this end, indigenous cloth manufacture was taxed at every stage. Shambu Prasad quotes from a letter that a planter, F.C. Brown, who spent several years in the Madras in 1862: presidency, wrote to the Raj administration The story of cotton in India is not half told: how it was systematically depressed from the earliest date that American cotton came into competition with it, about the year 1786, how for 40 or 50 years after, half of the crop was taken in kind in revenue, the other half by the sovereign merchant at a price always below the market price of the day, which was kept habitually low for the purpose; how the cotton farmer's bullocks were taxed; the 'charkha' taxed, the bow taxed, and the loom taxed; how inland custom-houses were posted in and around every village, on passing which cotton, on its way to the coast for sale, was stopped, and like every other produce taxed afresh; how it paid export duty both in a raw state, and in every shape of yarn or thread, cloth or handkerchief, in which it was possible to manufacture it. 79

As household spinning declined, both the growers and weavers of cotton became the clients of the intermediary spinning mills. The import of machine-made yam into India 'broke the connection between the cultivation of cotton, the spinning, and the weaving.' While cotton had been grown largely for local consumption, it began to be cultivated for export and the numerous textile production centres dotted across the country declined. Significantly, Shambu Prasad argues that the length of staple, so important for Lancashire machines, which imported cotton from America, was not crucial to India's production. Dacca muslin, the finest cloth in the world, was produced from the shortest staple. A British commentator in the Raj noted that machinery manufacturers had a lot to leam from Dacca muslin . A comparison between Indian and American cotton in the nineteenth century under a microscope revealed that the former was much finer. However, once deshi varieties were condemned as inferior, it was equated with coarse cloth. The need for a different kind of machine to suit the specificity of Indian staple received little attention. Unfortunately, after Independence, the nationalist Indian government did not take up the agenda of improving Indian cotton. 'On the contrary/ writes Shambu Prasad, 'in a misplaced national zeal for self-sufficiency in long staple varieties, a crisis caused in part by partition which separated cotton growing areas from Indian 79

ibid.

King Cotton Dethroned 101

The greatest benefits have been reaped by the unorganized sector. Roy points to the steadily declining share of composite mills in cloth production and characterizes this sector as consisting of bankrupt and obsolete integrated factories. While they produce a certain amount of yarn, their cloth — at a higher cost than powerlooms —has not much demand either at home or abroad. 'The reason why the mills continue at all is the dominance of the public sector National Textile Corporation among the mills/ he believes. Globally, cotton consumption is increasing at the expense of man-mades. In India too, cotton casual ware is gaining popularity rapidly. Buyers are also going in for specific brands of garments and there has been a shift from branded fabrics to garments, which favours low-cost fabric-makers like powerlooms. This new-found domestic capability has been achieved thanks to the concessions in the new policy, permitting the import of machinery and inputs. This brought a range of affordable technologies within the reach of the small-scale producer. It explains the phenomenal rise of the town of Tirupur, near Coimbatore, sometimes referred to as 'the T-shirt capital of the world'. As much as 85 per cent of India's cotton knitwear is exported from here. It has some 4500 small-scale industries. In 1997, the town exported garments worth Rs 2500 crore from a base of just Rs 16 crore in 1985. Buyers include the world's leading supermarket chains like C&A, Otto, Karstadt and Woolworth. 81 (Elsewhere, DCM, a traditional textile mill in Delhi, has entered into a joint venture with Benetton of Italy to start a knitwear factory; Mother Care of UK and Marzotto of Italy have also entered into joint ventures. 82 ) However, out of Tirupur 's 2 lakh workers, 7.5 per cent are children, according to official estimates, while NGOs believe there are 35,000 of these young workers. The children scurry to work — instead of school —carrying their tiffin boxes. 'Tirupur thus acquires who the dubious distinction of the unemployed or underemployed sit at home, sending their children to work/ writes J. John. 'It leads to a twin phenomenon —one, a degenerating adult work force and 81

J. John, 'Tirupur: Dollar City in Tiffin Box', Labour File, New Delhi, Aug 1998. 82 Subesh K. Das and P. Panayiotopoulos, 'Flexible Specialization: New Paradigm for Industrialization for Developing Countries?', Economic & Political Weekly, 28 Dec 1996.

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Liberalization after 1985 Textile Policy There are contradictory reactions to Rajiv Gandhi's New Textile Policy introduced in 1985, depending on a commentator's political predilections. Anubhai lists its salient features as: (i) dismantling the sectoral approach to the industry and retaining the special role only for non-power technology; (ii) multi-fibre orientation and fibre flexibility; (iii) adequate raw material at reasonable and stable prices; (iv) progressive reduction of prohibitive levels of duties on synthetic raw material; (v) removal of entry and exit barriers; (vi) emphasis on modernization, making possible technology and machinery imports at international prices and (vii) to make Indian textiles more competitive in the world market. According to Roy, the macroeconomic crisis of 1991 induced many changes, the core area of which was trade policy and the industry most affected by these structural changes was textiles. The first major shift was the encouragement of export of textiles, the import of equipment and generic intermediates. The costs of inputs thus went down from what they were in a protected market. Secondly, deregulation removed barriers to expansion and restructuring of mills and powerlooms. The new policy was reflected in the 1993 Textile (Control) Order and universalized in the 1992 round of reforms. 'An industry notorious for inefficiency began to play a key role in exports and export-led industrial growth, and was in principle allowed to re-equip itself to sustain and enhance competitiveness.' 80 While the per capita consumption of cotton cloth declined from 1970 to 1990, which was partly due to substitution of cotton by synthetics —in the last 15 years, India has emerged as one of the leading producers of synthetic textiles —cotton now appears to be staging a comeback, both in absolute terms and in relation to manmades. Exports have led this revival. Powerlooms accounted for 58 per cent of the exports worth Rs 7030 crore in 1995-6. 'Cloth and garment exports together constitute about 30 per cent of India's exports,' Roy asserts, 'and have been the greatest beneficiary of the economic reforms and export drive in the 1990s [emphasis added] . . . exports in the first five years of the decade grew by 350 per cent (in rupees).' 80

Roy 1998.

King Cotton Dethroned 103

The policy paid lip-service to preserving "the distinctive and unique role of the handlooms to enable them to realise their full potential and ensure higher earnings to the weavers'. However, in practice, even policies like the reservation of certain items for production by this sector were honoured more in the breach. The powerful powerloom and mill owners' lobbies challenged these in court, and the government was lethargic about granting such protection. The policy promised to ensure adequate availability of yam and other materials. However, as the Abid Hussain committee appointed in 1988 recognized, 'High and fluctuating prices of yam imposed great hardship on handloom weavers, who suffered as a But the contmittee specifically refused to see the consequence.' connection between the new policy which encouraged the export of yam and their high prices. The mills' obligation to produce half their total marketable yam output as hank yam for handlooms was also not enforced. committee under Mira Seth, a A report of the high-powered member of the Planning Commission, to review the performance of the handloom sector, waxes eloquent about handlooms being a work of art, craft as well as an industry representing one of the most aesthetic aspects of existence embodying the concept of total harmony of the human being with the environment and ecology, where 'the artistic creativity of the weaver, the designer and the marketing skills of the trader' find expression. Further, the 'handloom sector occupies a place of eminence in preserving the country's heritage and culture plays a vital role in the economy of the country.' In fact, as Srinivasulu notes, the liberalization process of initiated by the 1985 policy has hastened the marginalization the once fairly well-to-do weaver community. By attempting to orient this sector towards the global market as a principal strategy for its survival, it is negating its strength in the local market. 'The specificity and speciality of handloom products is largely determined by the local needs governed by local traditions and customs/ he writes. 86 In fact, the real challenge to the Indian textile industry will loom as 2004 draws near. This is when the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) will be phased out, after the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreement to this effect in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 1994. While industrial countries will no longer impose quotas on import 86

ibid.

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two, a regenerating and reinforced child labour, both feeding on each other, creating a vicious cycle. Today's dwarfed adult work force were yesterday's exploited children, who, in turn are today sending their children to work in hosiery manufacturing units. Child labour creates child labour.' 83 With the decline of Tirupur's composite mills, barely 10,000 workers there may remain unionised. When a 15-year-old girl died in an accident at work in a hosiery unit in June 1998, her family received a pittance as compensation. The impact of the New Textile Policy on the mills and handlooms, was altogether different. As K. Srinivasulu writes: The hallmark of the early phase of Rajiv Gandhi's tenure was a decisive attempt at a shift from the framework of state-controlled import substitution to that of a liberalised market economy and export-oriented growth. The economic discourse centred on the concepts of modernization, efficiency, productivity and market-governed competition which distinguished it from earlier ideological precepts of employment generation, social justice and socialism. If a new crop of political managers and economic technocrats who formed the core of Rajiv Gandhi's thinktank and close advisors 'known for their decontrol and pro-liberalization proclivities' gave Rajiv Gandhi's initiatives a pronounced visibility, then the catchy slogan of launching 'India into the 21st century' its rhetorical flourish. The image of the regime being truly 'liberalised', especially among the post-independent generation of the elite, was unmistakable. 84

The shift in emphasis in the policy from employment to productivity was decisive. Restrictions on composite mills, meant to aid handlooms, actually worked in favour of powerlooms. The proposed restructuring of the textile industry cited in the policy to provide fuller flexibility in fibre use and pragmatic policies to increase competition and promote healthy growth in the industry were intended for the mill sector. Hence a Textile Modernization Fund, soft loans from the IDBI and a Rehabilitation Fund for workers to facilitate their retrenchment were envisaged. Rs 750 crore was allocated for the Modernization Fund and a special loan provision of Rs 100 crore at very favourable terms, in deference to the mill owners' lobby. In the first three years of the new policy, some 1.8 lakh mill workers throughout the country lost their jobs. The trend continued till 1989 when around 567 mills were closed, affecting 7.27 lakh workers. 85 83 84 85

J. John, Aug 1998. K. Srinivasulu, 7 Dec 1996. ibid.

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NTC's India United Mill No. 1, Lalbaug

the MOA put the total number of units which had closed down by October 1999 in the country at 226 spinning mills and 105 composite mills. 88 In Mumbai, which was the country's cotton textile centre, it would seem that the one asset left to owners, whether in the public or private sector, is the mill land. We will examine the exploitation of this asset in the next chapter.

88

'Textile Mill-owners Unhappy Over the Lack of Incentives in Union Budget', Financial Express,6 Mar 2000.

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of textiles from Indian and other developing nations, the latter's markets will now be open to textiles produced in other countries. Even though India's exports have risen in recent years, they remain abysmally low for what was the world's market leader a couple of centuries ago. The World Trade Organization Annual Report, 1997, shows India's share of world textile exports in 1996 at 2.9 per cent and of apparel at 2.6 per cent (up from 2.5 per cent in and 2.2 per cent respectively, in 1991). Corresponding figures for China in 1996 were 8.1 per cent and 15.3 per cent. After Hong Kong's integration, China's share has jumped to nearly 30 per cent. Even smaller countries like Turkey and Thailand enjoy greater shares. 87 India depends largely on the US and European markets, which absorb 68 per cent of the total apparel exports. India's unique advantages have been nullified by Tow productivity, obsolete technology, particularly in weaving and processing, high cost of capital, rigidities in labour markets, cascading taxes, complicated procedures for the import of duty-free raw materials and transportation bottlenecks'. India has one of the largest areas under cotton in the world but produced only 266 kg per hectare in 1998, as against 1500 kg in Israel, 800 kg in China and 571 kg in Pakistan. It has the largest number of looms in the world and. the second largest number of spindles, but their productivity is well below world standards. China has five times as many shuttleless looms and even Pakistan 20 per cent more. Two-thirds of India's fabric exports are of grey cloth; the processing is done elsewhere. It is competitive only in eight or nine items based on cotton and viscose, mainly for summer or casual ware, in the lower and medium price ranges. ★ While there is no doubt that the composite cotton textile mills are in the doldrums, it is an open question whether they are a terminal case or can be resuscitated. For the purposes of this book, however, it is assumed that the days of the composite mills are over. If at all, spinning could be modernized, not weaving. This would not require the same amount of space the mills now occupy. In March 2000, 87 Sheeia Bhide, 'India's Textile Trade: Marrakesh & Beyond', Economic & Political Weekly, 23 May 1998.

Land as the Last Resort 107

panels appointed by the group was on industrial location. It Observed that Mumbai accounted for a third of the total number of factories in the state. What is more, out of some 3500 factories in Greater Mumbai, three quarters were located in the island city — an area of just 6.7 sq km, out of a total area of 466 sq km. These employed nearly half of some 10 lakh industrial workers in the state; 85 per cent of Mumbai's jobs were within the island city.1 that all industries should be located near the It recommended regions where their raw materials were grown. If it was not possible to establish units away from Mumbai, the possibility of locating them in some satellite townships around the city should b e examined. No new industrial units should ordinarily be permitted in the island city. It made exceptions in the case of industries which processed large quantities of imported raw materials mainly for exports of finished products, or those dependent on the port or were umbilically tied as ancillaries to existing units. It did not want the state government to recommend to the central government that any industries in this area be allowed to expand or diversify. It recommended that large units be encouraged to shift to the suburbs and satellite towns. Plan for Greater Bombay, published by the The Development Municipal Corporation in 1964, reiterated these recommendations and advocated that no new large-scale industrial units employing more than 50 workers should be permitted in Greater Mumbai. The following year, the state government decided to permit new industries or allow old ones to expand very selectively, and vigorously to discourage any further concentration of industries. It hoped that such a policy would benefit the backward districts of the state and help towards balanced industrial development. Notably, it made an exception in the case of textile mills, which were allowed reasonable expansion to match the level of operations which were sanctioned. 2 This exemption was obviously granted because of the enormous employment they provided. Another committee, in 1965, under D.R. Gadgil, the well-known economist, formulated broad principles to guide regional planning.

1

Report on the Revised Development Plan (Draft) for Greater Bombay, 1981-2001, Mumbai Municipal Corporation, 1984, Ch IX, p. 27-8. 2 ibid, pp. 29-30.

4

Land as the Last Resort A new chapter is being appended to the history of Lower Parel, which was re-written in the early 'nineties when textile mills began selling land, ostensibly to generate funds for redevelopment. The smoke from the chimneys may never have risen skywards again: what did were spanking new offices, residential complexes and even an art gallery.* —Nandini Ramnath The change will not lead to local employment. Rather, it will set up a clash between two cultures, two classes. Ultimately, one will have to give way. No prizes for guessing which. . . Coupled with no new employment, this means that there are no new workers to replenish those who will soon retire. — Datta Isvalkar, General Secretary, Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti

The deteriorating environment in the industrial and commercial capital of the country began to cause planners some concern as early as the 1950s. The state government appointed a study group under S.G. Barve, later a distinguished Finance Minister, to consider 'problems relating to congestion of traffic, deficiency of open spaces and playgrounds, shortage of housing and over-concentration of industry in the metropolitan and suburban areas.' One of the five * '"Uncool", Lower Parel is Hip-shakers' Indian Express, 24 June 1999.

and movers' New Mecca',

Land as the Last Resort 109

apprehension, whenever any controls—planning, economic or environmental —are sought to be placed on industrial growth in Maharashtra. 5 The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Planning Board was formed in 1967 and its proposed plan adopted in 1973. It argued that the dispersal and decentralization of industries ought to be accepted as a major thrust in industrial location policy. Major incentives had to be provided for this purpose, with the emphasis on the carrot, rather than the stick. Textile mills, with their large employment capacity, were singled out for such attention. The following year, the state government divided the MMR into four zones. The first was the island city where, because of the shortage of housing, transport etc, there was an outright ban on location of any industry —irrespective of whether it was large, medium or smallscale. Once again, however, textile mills were granted an exemption and allowed to expand marginally, provided they were not in a non-conforming zone. Due consideration also had to be given to the additional water and power needed, as well as the possibility of air and water pollution. Zone II, the rest of Greater Mumbai, Comprising the suburbs, was subject to a ban on large and medium industries, while mills were exempted. 6 It was the first time that the state enunciated its policy clearly. The Municipal Corporation was asked to divert at least 800 hectares earmarked for industrial use in the Greater Mumbai Development Plan to other uses, like housing. A study group was also appointed to examine the feasibility of imposing a levy on existing and new industrial and commercial establishments in the MMR to act as a disincentive for further industrial concentration. It was to examine how concessions were to be extended to industries in Zones I & II in Mumbai to shift elsewhere in the state, even while developing alternative growth centres. Yet again, however, the policy was still liberal in respect of textile mills (and small-scale industries), particularly in the suburbs and extended suburbs. The state announced an even more stringent dispersal policy in 1976, but failed to take any decision regarding the shifting of mills. In 1977, the state ratified the privilege extended to cotton mills, whether in the conforming zones or not, by asking them not to 5 6

ibid, p. 40. ibid, p. 41-2.

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It recommended that in the wake of the rapid industrialization of the state, planners should prevent the formation of conurbations and take bold measures to decentralize industries and disperse employment throughout Maharashtra. The Mumbai Regional Plan had to reduce the concentration of industries in the island city and ensure that the areas vacated by such industries were not filled by other factories. The committee also felt it was necessary to do away with the special treatment accorded to textile mills in the island city. All industrial zones and 1 areas in the Mumbai region had to be reserved for industries which were to be shifted from the city proper. 3 Already, the contradictory responses to the encouragement of economic activity in general and industrial growth in particular, a theme which surfaces constantly in this book, was evident in these early years. In 1968, the state reviewed its industrial location policy for Greater Mumbai and permitted industries sited in conforming zones to expand freely subject to normal municipal building regulations and the availability of water. Specifically, textile mills were encouraged to expand since these would help reduce unemployment to some extent. This went against the recommendations of the Barve study group and Gadgil committee and was considered by many planners to have been too liberal, since this would amount to uncontrolled industrial growth in the city. 4 The City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) asked Tata Economic Consultancy Services (TECS) to help formulate the state's industrial location policy. It was meant to determine the best siting pattern for the next 10-30 years. It aimed at a social objective: to distribute factory employment in the state in proportion to the anticipated growth in the labour force and to develop a least-cost plan for this. TECS recommended that industries in all categories should be frozen at the 1969 levels (whereas employment in the Thane chemical complex could be increased). It urged a ban on the growth of new industrial units and even the expansion of existing establishments, unless the enforcement of such a policy led to the migration of such investment to developed centres in other states. This is a recurring 3 4

ibid, p. 39. ibid, pp. 39-40.

Land as the Last Resort 111

at 0.5 in all of Greater Mumbai, instead of 2.0 in the island city and 1.0 in the suburbs. The FSI in the island city was fixed uniformly at 1.33 for commercial and residential zones. The restrictions on builtup area was thus conceived as the main tool to control the growth of jobs. Maharashtra succeeded to a large extent in arresting industrial growth in Mumbai, although its location policy was only one factor responsible for the stagnation in factory employment between 1971 and 1981, and the sharp decline thereafter. Between 1977 and 1987, industries in the MMR grew by only 2-3 per cent. On both counts — employment and value added —Mumbai performed rather poorly compared with the rest of India, the 1996-2011 Regional Plan pointed out. Among the other contributory factors was the 'obsolescence, sickness or closure of Mumbai's traditional industry, namely cotton textile'. There was also the natural process of the decentralization of industries. 9

Relaxation of Controls on Location In 1991, in line with the liberalization of the Indian economy, the central government relaxed the restrictions on the location of industries. As the 1996 Draft MMR Plan stated, 'The specific objective underlying the new industrial policy is to create conditions which will encourage and enable Indian industry to modernise, technologically and managerially, to increase its productivity and to improve its competitiveness in the domestic and international markets . . .The policy has sought to dismantle the present regulatory systems and to bring about appropriate changes in the Industrial Location Policy. . .' 10 The important change, as far as the MMR was concerned, was that no industrial licence would henceforth be required to set up a new industry or to expand an existing one. In cities with over one million people, no locational clearance would be required for the central government to set up any industry within the industrial areas designated for them. Moreover, licences were not required for non-polluting industries, such as electronics, computer software and printing. There was the caveat that: 'Despite the abolition of 9

MMRDA, Draft Regional Plan for Bombay Metropolitan Region, 19962011, Oct 1995. 10 ibid, p . 186.

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shift out of the MMR and even allowed them to expand to ensure their economic viability. The very same year, it did an about-turn by coming to the conclusion that even the non-textile units were finding it difficult to modernize or conduct research because of the curbs on expansion. It decided not to compel units to move unless there were compelling environmental reasons for doing so. It allowed modernization, replacement and diversification of plant and machinery in the island city, even if this meant an increase in employment. Seven years later, in 1984, the state reviewed its policy, confirmed the earlier permissions for modernization, etc. for large industries, but added a rider that there could be no addition to the built-up area of a factory, employment or water requirement. While it was applied to the textile industry, cotton mills were yet again exempted. 7 In the revised Draft Development Plan for Greater Mumbai, 1981-2001, the authorities reiterated that no medium and largescale industries would be permitted. Neither would new industrial estates be authorized. Only marginal additions and alterations would be allowed' in the case of existing industries in conforming zones and that too with caution, not to allow indiscriminate expansion. In Mumbai, there were 59 cotton textile mills, which employed 1,85,600 workers, in 1967. Citing 1974 figures, the plan listed the working cotton mills in the state at 105, as compared to a total of 685 in the country as a whole. This constituted 15 per cent of the total. There were 2,32,000 workers, 30 per cent of the total number. 8 The Development Plan envisaged four zones: residential, commercial, industrial and no-development. Two-thirds of the island city was devoted to housing, nearly a quarter to industrial use and 5 per cent for commercial use. In the suburbs, by contrast, only 40 per cent was allocated for housing and less than 10 per cent for industries; the no-development zone accounted for as much as 45 per cent of the total. The no-development zone was meant to protect the ecologically sensitive tidal flats or marshy areas. The Regulations by way of the Development Control (DC) rules were meant to govern construction activities so that there was adequate open space around buildings, better light and ventilation, adequate width of access roads, etc. For the industrial zone, the FSI was fixed 7 8

ibid, p. 44-50. ibid, p. 40; table 9.20

Land as the Last Resort 113

they generated. Hence, the entire thrust of the policy was to contain the growth of factories, particularly in the island city. However, it is important to note that the cotton mills were time and again singled out as exceptions to the rule. In 1977, for example, these units were not allowed to shift outside the MMR and were able to expand.. This in spite of the fact that this industry was considered to be one of the major sources of air pollution in the island city. The Draft Plan itself recognized that the policy was meant to 'help traditional industries come out of industrial sickness and to retain the traditional employment base of the city, such as cotton mills'. 15 The reason is that as the major industry in the city, it was accorded a special status. It was not merely the number of mills and the jobs they provided, but the very culture of 'Girangaon', as in mid-town Mumbai, is known. the mill district of Parel-Lalbaug, This working-class culture is an integral part of Mumbai and has given it its distinctive identity, which no other city in India has.

Restructuring and Exit Policy As we have seen in Chapter 2, the restructuring of industry, which began in the 1990s, sent seismic tremors through the entire system. Seemingly innocuous phrases like VRS and exit policy, acquired ominous overtones. In a column titled 'The Elusive Policy' in BusinessWorld magazine in 1993, P. Chidambaram —who followed Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister and was his successor as the architect of India's economic liberalization —cited how some one lakh small and medium units were closed. Industry faced two threats: redundancy and bankruptcy. The government had responded to the lack of competition, due to licensing and a surfeit of regulations, by stricter laws, which made the former difficult, not the latter. It has created a behemoth like the NTC; wiser after some years, the state set up the BIFR.16 Layoffs and retrenchment were permitted under the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947, but industry had to pay a high cost for these. Compensation amounted to three months' wages for every year of service if a worker was retrenched. Bankruptcy was a more serious issue. Easy exits might spur new entrants into industries, but the social and political costs were high. 'No government can be seen to 15 16

ibid, p. 201. P. Chidambaram, 'The Elusive Policy', BusinessWorld, 21 Apr 1993.

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licensing and liberalization of locational constraints, the policy envisages that industrial location will continue to be regulated by the local zoning and land use regulations and environmental legislation/ The Plan did not think that the industrial decline of the previous two decades had to be considered an inevitable, ongoing process. It had to be countered by a new industrial growth policy, with specific economic, environmental and urban development objectives. The first of these was: 'to provide modem, technologically advanced, environmentally friendly industries by encouraging changes in Mumbai's industrial structure and facilitating sick and obsolescent industries to be revitalized or replaced.' 11 In 1992, the new Industrial Location Policy redefined the MMR into three zones instead of four. The first consisted of Greater Mumbai and the outlying townships of Thane and Mira-Bhayander, the second of Kalyan, New Mumbai and other townships and the last the rest of the MMR. Industries were also reclassified into three types. In retrospect, however, the planners admitted that there was little in this policy to either encourage or compel 'old or obsolete industries to regenerate or make way for new, modem industries.' 12 In the Draft MMR Plan, the planners intended to increase the urban zone in the MMR from 418 sq km to 939 sq km (called Ul), as well as 255 sq km in new development areas (U2), which are areas like those adjoining highways etc.13 It noted that industrial employment was unlikely to rise and that some 5450 ha was still available for development. To bring about structural changes in industrial growth, it recommended sunrise industries: environmentfriendly, hi-tech, high value-added, export-oriented industries and 'those for which Mumbai or its proximity is considered essential'. 14 From this chronicle of the industrial location policies which the Maharashtra government laid down for Mumbai, it is clear that from the 1960s onwards, planners apprehended that the city would burst at its seams if it grew any further. Industries were seen as the villain of the piece, because they attracted migrants for the jobs 11

ibid, p. 188. ibid, p. 189. 13 'Objections to the MMRDA's Draft Regional Plan, 1996-2011', Girangaon Bachao Andolan, seminar organized by the Nagarik Vikas Manch, Mumbai, 23-24 Oct 1996. 14 MMRDA 1995, pp. 475-6. 12

Land as the Last Resort 115

'Adaptation and Exit', explained why it was in favour of the closure of unprofitable industries and the sale of their land. 'Giving companies greater freedom to make investments, enter new lines of production, and expand . . . may have only a modest effect if firms are not concurrently given greater freedom to adapt to market forces by retrenchment, merger or closure or sale of assets . . . Transferring assets between alternative uses could be simplified and achieved much more quickly. Take-overs, mergers or share purchases that do not involve other regulations such as Monopolies & Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) could be freed from government and court intervention. Greater flexibility to liquidate wealth held as land and to relocate manufacturing activities should be provided, which would involve policy changes by State and local governments as well as the Centre.' 20 The ideological underpinning of industrial restructuring in India, as we have seen, was provided by the Omkar Goswami report on industrial restructuring in 1993. It saw such a shake-up as medicine not only for ailing firms but for healthy ones as well. But it was mainly a prescription for those which were sick, characterized by certain common features: liabilities that exceeded assets, inefficiencies in labour deployment, arrears in the payment of statutory dues to workers and 'an excess of unproductive but saleable fixed assets.' 21 of which the first It listed four barriers to such restructuring, was the land on which the factories were located. These were but were operationally companies which may be cash-strapped viable. 'This is true for all composite mills located in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Kanpur and Calcutta, all jute mills located in or around Calcutta, and most of the engineering and fabricating companies that were established in the 1950s or earlier.' These lands were not being used by the companies and commanded high real estate prices, since they were located in what would today be known, in American parlance, as 'downtown' areas. The committee believed that their sale could generate substantial additional funds 20

Cited in LHS, Murder of the Mills: An Enquiry into Bombay's Cotton Textile Industry and Its Workers,Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, Mumbai, Oct 1996, p. 6. 21 Report of the Committee on Industrial Sickness and Corporate Restructuring, headed by Omkar Goswami, Union Finance Ministry, New Delhi, July 1993, p. 71.

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facilitate closures/ Chidambaram noted, 'not when there were 30 million on the live unemployment registers and another 30 million looking for jobs.' There was, according to the former Finance Minister, a 'menu of options': VRS, mergers, take-overs, spin-offs, workers' co-operatives role. It and sale of assets. The state had to play an interventionist had to set up the machinery to find a 'quick-fix' for a problem or allow closure. He was in favour of scrapping the BIFR and team with a mandate substituting a managerial, problem-solving to take decisions. It had to come up with an answer in 60 days. This was the most advanced advocacy from a seasoned proponent of such policies. The 2001 budget proposed to abolish the BIFR altogether. Somewhat more crassly, these views were echoed by business interests. Kantikumar Podar, as President of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), spoke of the exit policy as 'nothing short of a right to manage our own business'. Only the implementation of these measures would persuade Indian and foreign companies to invest in the economy. Industry had to have the right to sack workers for poor performance and remove surplus labour when these were identified in the course of modernization. The Industrial Relations bill was being introduced to liberalize retrenchments and layoffs, lower closure barriers and overhaul the machinery to settle industrial disputes. While the long-standing existing law did not permit retrenchment in units with more than 300 workers, this number was proposed to be trebled.17 Very surprisingly, even the Marxist Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, if he was correctly quoted, told a Mumbai seminar in 1991 that he thought that the exit policy was the only way out.18 An internal note of the World Bank prescribed that the BIFR ought to be armed with the powers of liquidation for all loss-making PSUs. 'It is important that a programme to deal expeditiously with the sick public sector enterprise be adopted in the near term, of in order to allow timely disposal of assets and compensation affected workers.' 19 In its report titled 'India —an Industrialising Economy in Transition', the World Bank, in a section headed 17

'Exit Policy: Tightrope Walking', Business Standard, 23 Apr 1993. Udayan Namboodiri, 'Exit Policy: Workers in Limbo', Deccan Herald, 23 Dec 1991. 19 'WB Prescribes BIFR For All Loss-making PSUs', Pioneer,8 Aug 1993. 18

Land as the Last Resort 117 is no basis for determining the amount of vacant land. It continues to remain unutilized, with no claimant getting any benefit of its market value.22

Cotton Mills in Distress Cotton textile mills constitute the classic case of non-performing assets in Indian industry. The ICICI lists the textiles industry as a whole as accounting for the largest increase in these bad assets in its portfolio in 1997-8. These increased to a tenth of the financial institution's total non-performing assets of Rs 2811 crore that year. 23 Throughout the country, as many as 300 textile mills, covering all sectors of the industry, including powerlooms, sericulture units and synthetic units, were registered with the BIFR in 1996. Reported the Economic Times: The who's who of the industry is on the mat. Samples: New Gujarat Synthetics, Sirsilk, JK Cotton Spinning mills, Ahmedabad New Cotton Mills, East India Cotton, Binny, Modi Spinnings, Orissa Synthetics, Transasia Carpets, Pasupati Haryana Woollen, Travancore Rayons, Jiyajeerao Cotton Mills, Modern Mills, Nirlon, Fabina Mills, National Rayon, ABS Spinning, JCT Fibres, Bhilwara Wool Textiles, Dhana-Lakshmi Mills . . . the list is endless. 24

Gujarat, in the heart of the country's cotton-growing belt, led the pack, with 62 sick mills, followed closely by Maharashtra with 56. Tamil Nadu and UP came next with 35 each. As a group, the nationalized mills under the NTC, as we have seen in the previous chapter, were closely identified with morbidity. These were the behemoths of Indian industry which, in the eye of the public, were little better than establishments where workers were paid to do nothing but punch their cards every morning and play cards for the rest of the day. As this writer found in the course of visits to several NTC mills in Mumbai, the workers were a dispirited lot, clad in shorts and vests and sleeping listlessly wherever there was a cool, shady spot. The looms and spindles in the cavernous galas or sheds were often covered with dust and cobwebs; just a handful of departments were functioning. Several mills had fresh water 22

ibid, p. 77. 'Textiles Second Largest Contributor to ICICI NPAs', Indian Express, 9 Jul 1998. 24 '300 More Join Chorus with Ailing NTC Mills', Economic Times, 28 Nov 1996. 23

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to repay whole or part of the outstanding debts and also for meeting the costs of rationalizing the labour force. 'Land sale is the most profitable and economically meaningful way of generating internal resources for (i) reorganizing viable companies or (ii) getting the best value for unviable firms.' The two examples it cited were a group of 15 sick mills in Ahmedabad and India United Mills a group of six mills under the NTC in Mumbai —which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, were started by the wealthy Sassoon family. The Goswami committee deplored that very few land sales had taken place due to two barriers: the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act of 1976 (ULCRA) and local municipal, and statelevel deterrents. The Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act of 1985, known as SICA, could not overrule ULCRA. What is more, states that suffer from the highest incidence of sickness — Maharashtra, Gujarat, UP and West Bengal —had all accepted and implemented the urban land ceiling legislation. It made no distinction between persons, individuals or companies holding excess land and subjected them to the same ceilings: in the first category, applicable to Greater Mumbai, Calcutta Urban Area and Delhi Urban Area, the permissible vacant land holding was just 500 sq m. The government could acquire this land for Rs 10 a sq m and pay it in very small instalments which, the Goswami report asserted, amounted to appropriation by the state. The first problem was who had first claim to the proceeds of the land sale, as we shall see later in this chapter. The committee contrasted the conflicting positions: The state governments argue that (i) the land was sold at low prices to the firms for industrial purposes, (ii) the firms have failed in their objective of producing industrial output and providing gainful employment, and often failed in paying workers their statutory dues. Hence shareholders of such firms have no rights to any benefits from the capital gains of land sales. The first cut should go to the state. In rare instances where state governments have allowed sale of surplus land, it is acquired and then auctioned off by the government, and part of the proceeds is loaned to the company for rehabilitation. Companies believe otherwise. The land is usually their freehold asset whose market value can be realized to reduce current and long-term liabilities, to pay for labour rationalization, and even to generate some surplus. The enormous differential between the market and the government's offer price for urban land heightens this conflict. This is a prisoner's dilemma: companies rarely voluntarily disclose the amount of excess land under section 6 of ULCRA. Without a firm filing a return, there

Land as the Last Resort 119

going to finance an unviable restructuring scheme. Besides, the NTC had to realize that its loom sheds were in direct competition with powerlooms, which would undercut it. Similarly, the finishing departments (bleaching, dyeing and printing) could neither compete with processing houses in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan nor with the efficient, modernized mills. 26 At best, he estimated, the NTC could survive with 70 mills, employing some 60,000 workers. 'Sheer survival implies a redundancy of 50,000 workers,' he observed. In his three-year scheme, which could be adopted by secret ballot, the worker would get his full salary for the first year, three-quarters in the second and half in the third, together with the normal termination benefits. Goswami assumed a monthly salary of Rs 3500 a month (Rs 42,000 per year), which translated into a total package of Rs 210 crore for the first year. It would fall to Rs 158 crore in the second and Rs 105 crore in the third, a total of Rs 473 crore over three years. 'This oneshot payment compares favourably with the annual budget support given to these loss-making mills,' he pointed out. 'The financing should come from the sale of valuable surplus land in Bombay and, to a lesser extent, Ahmedabad. If the estimates of land value are anything to go by, then the NTC should not only be able to finance the severance package but also maintain a surplus to fund a more sensible modernization plan.' At a seminar on Land Resource—A Remedy to Textile Sickness in Mumbai in November 1997, Nandan S. Damani, the Chairman of the MOA, cited how the number of mills closed in the country had risen from 123 mills in March 1993 to 210 in August 1997. As much as 17 per cent of the spinning capacity and 41 per cent of the weaving capacity in the organized sector was lying idle. Land had to be made a performing asset. Damani turned almost lachrymose: In our day-to-day life, when a family unfortunately falls on bad days, its precious metals come to the market to tide over the crisis. What is true of a family is equally true of a business entity. Nobody should grudge if a business enterprise decides to convert its non-performing assets into performing ones to make available interest-free funds for revival.27 26 'Far Beyond Redemption', guest column by Omkar Goswami in 'NTC Revival: Expensive Gamble', India Today,15 Apr 1996. 27 Nandan S. Damani, 'Land Resource —A Remedy to Textile Sickness', Textile Association of India, Mumbai Unit, Nov 1997.

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reservoirs in their compounds —presumably they were located near these sources in the nineteenth century, in the era before industries were supplied piped water in the city. For instance, the only daily activity in Kohinoor No 3, opposite Sena Bhawan in Dadar, was the arrival of tankers to carry away water which the mill management was selling. The NTC management has been hoping to sell surplus land in the cotton textile mills in Mumbai and elsewhere in the country in order to pay off its accumulated losses. One of the components of its nationwide revival package in 1992 was to encourage workers to seek retirement. It hoped to coax some to opt to buy a maximum of two looms each at a nominal cost of Rs 500-1,000 each. A worker would require around Rs 44,000 to overhaul the old looms, including buying a motor to convert them into powerlooms. He would contribute a third of this cost and obtain a bank loan for the remainder. Alternatively, he would buy up to four looms on the market, with three-quarters of the Rs 1,80,000 cost provided as a bank loan. Reeling units could be used for the conversion of yam to meet the statutory obligation (of both public and private sector mills) to pack half their production as hank yam for use in the handloom industry. This would cost under Rs 2 lakh and 24 workers could form a co-operative for this purpose. The management estimated that some 20,000 of its employees might choose any one of these schemes. 25 Omkar Goswami dismissed as a 'fairy-tale plan' Union Textile Minister G. Venkat Swamy's (a former union leader) 1994 scheme to raise Rs 2006 crore for the turnaround of these sick emits to be financed through the sale of mill land. For a study he conducted for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), using operational data of the NTC mills, he found that for such a revival to work, without a single employee being retrenched, would require NTC's sales to rise by 75 per cent —an incremental sale of Rs 740 crore a year, 'something that is only in the realm of fantasy'. He proposed an alternative, more realistic plan, which would both address the issue of how to minimize job loss and design a fair compensation package. He congratulated the BIFR for rejecting NTC's scheme because the revenue from land sales was 25

'Three New Rehabilitation Schemes For NTC Workers', Economic Times, 17 Aug 1992.

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to examine the issue. Chandrasekhar Prabhu, a former Congress MLA and architect, who was later Chairman of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Agency (MHAD A), and later still, a strident tenants' activist, opposed the sale of land, as did Sharad Khatoo, of the Kamgar Aghadi, Datta Samant's union, and raised it in the assembly. 30 One of the earliest proposals to deal with surplus mill land was presented by Murli Deora, then President of the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee, and an influential Congress city boss. In 1989, he argued for a permanent solution, rather than a cosmetic one 'to revive the economy of the city by restoring full employment of the affected millmen. By merely allowing the millowners to sell off their surplus land, this may not be quite achieved.' He advocated that the government set up a special rehabilitation cell under the Ministry of Industry & Labour. The government ought to then stipulate that all surplus mill land be purchased by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), which regulates land management in the industrial sector, paying a near-market price. These funds ought to be deposited in an account managed jointly b y the state government, workmen's representatives and millowners, and be used exclusively for the rehabilitation of the workers. 31 The MIDC would lever funds from institutions like the Unit Trust of India, General Insurance Corporation and so on, for the construction of industrial sheds on the land. It would offer these sheds to new entrepreneurs from selected industries, such as diamond cutters and polishers, garment units, food processors and the like, which were non-polluting. The government could, in fact, offer these sheds to these industries as a package deal, which would include MMRDA clearance, all the No Objection Certificates required, power and water supply and all other related civic permissions which were otherwise not forthcoming due to the MMRDA's restrictions on industrial location. The industries were finding it difficult to find land from which to operate (this was well before the diamond bourse in Bandra-Kurla was conceived). As a pre-condition to the sale of these sheds or galas, the government 30 'Mumbai's Textile Mills and the Land Question', Economic & Pblitical Weekly, 25 Oct 1997. 31 Murli Deora, 'Surplus Mill Land: A Way Out', Business India, 6-19 March 1989.

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Another speaker, M.N. Chaini, the President of Reliance Industries, one of India's most modem textile mills, spoke of solving the crisis in the industry by exploring new opportunities. 'Solutions can b e found out,' he noted, 'but not b y creating complex melodramatic situation [sic], emotional arguments.' He went on: In the present legal imbroglio, we have to recognise that that 'change is imperative and inevitable'. History is ample proof of this. A century back when British started importing machine-made fabric, the Indians resisted the imports as the hand-made cotton fabric could not be sold. Mahatma Gandhi took up this movement. Baba Genu and several others died in this movement. [Baba Genu was a heroic nationalist leader who stood his ground against an oncoming truck carrying foreign cotton, was mowed down and killed instantly in 1930: author] But the machine-made fabric became popular and dominated the market. The trade unions and workers who are fighting the 'mills wages issue' need to remember this history and think of ways to find an acceptable workable solution, and should accept the solution. By keeping the issue unresolved, neither workers and trade unions nor the owners of the mill are at an advantage. The productive land will remain non-productive, non-remunerative.28

Mill Land in Mumbai One has to remind oneself that the same cavalier attitude towards mill land did not exist earlier. The official policy of the state government was clearly enunciated in the MMRDA plan of 1973, which retained textile mills in the industrial zone within the city, although mills constitute a heavy industry. As the document titled Murder of the Mills by the Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, a Mumbai civil liberties organization, pointed out, 'The mills were therefore in a conforming zone and sale or lease of land for any other purpose was illegal. This represented an overt intervention by the state government to preserve the jobs of the mill workers. As early as the 1960s, mill owners would have found it more profitable to switch to other industries or to real estate speculation.' 29 Not surprisingly, it was 'The Great Liberalizer', Rajiv Gandhi who directed Pratibha Patil, President of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee as far back as in 1987 to look into the sale of tradition, she appointed a committee mill land. In time-honoured 28 29

M.N. Chaini, 'BOT Schemes for Textile Mills', ibid. LHS 1996, p. 10.

Land as the Last Resort 123 Part of the proceeds are proposed to be used to pay off the mill workers whose jobs have been eliminated in the process. Since some of the mills can remain operating with more efficient modern equipment and can so maintain the present production levels, decisions have also been taken to divide the sites, often arbitrarily and without regard to the commercial potential of the sites . . . It was the economic stimulus of these mills for the livelihood of its citizens and the position in the world economy that gave Bombay its life blood... Mumbai now has the highest price per square foot of real estate in the world, surpassing even such traditionally high-priced cities as Tokyo, Hong Kong and London. This is a function both of the intensive commercial activity as well as the shortage of available land and buildings due to the complex land ownership and leasing situation.33

Murder of the Mills has a partial list of the total land occupied by Mumbai's mills, including the built-up areas. According to it, the amount of vacant land in the 54 mills is roughly 500 acres or 203 ha. It estimates that its value at the height of the real estate boom was between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 crore ($7.5 billion at the prevailing exchange rates). This gives us an idea of the tremendous value of this property, situated in the midtown area of the island city. Even if prices have since declined by 40 per cent, the value remains Rs 6000 to Rs 9000 crore. As Karan Grover stated: When built, the mills were in the heart of the city, and today they remain in a strategically central location. As the Fort area has been joined by the recently expanded Bandra [-Kurla] area (which has undergone significant commercial growth and development in the last few years), the textile mills have remained in a broad swathe between them. This makes them ideally situated now to form a link between the two areas of intensive development as well as to benefit from their proximity. The textile mills are also intermingled with dense residential and commercial areas which enables them to both benefit from the economic vitality of these areas as well as to offer potential amenity value to these densely populated districts . . . There is the opportunity to develop subsidiary commercial nodes as linkages between the two CBDs (of Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla). The mill sites and many of the existing mill buildings thus have vast potential for commercial and civic renewal together with the technological upgradation of the mills by virtue of their strategic location on the island.34 33

Karan Grover, Revitalizing Bombay's Textile Mills: A Pilot Study, Baroda,

1995. 34

ibid.

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could insist that three out of every four workers would be displaced millmen. If a person was disqualified due to his age or lack of training, a relation could be employed instead. The Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council and Apparel Export Promotion Council were very interested in Deora's proposal. The latter proposed setting up 100 factory sheds of 10,000 sq ft each on this land, which would employ 15,000 people, and it had agreed to the 75 per cent reservation for mill workers. In February 1996, the Maharashtra government appointed Charles Correa, India's best-known architect, to head a study group to draw up an integrated development plan for the cotton textile mill land in Mumbai. As we have seen in Chapter I, Correa along with two others were largely responsible for masterminding the entire concept of the twin city in the 1960s. The committee found that there were 58 cotton textile mills in the city. Of these, 26 were taken over because they were sick —all by the NTC, except one which was run by the Maharashtra State Textile Corporation. A little more than the majority were in private hands. 32 A year earlier, a Baroda-based architect, Karan Grover, with Chandrasekhar Prabhu (who had objected to the sale of mill land in 1987) and Stephen Harby of the architects' firm of Moore, Ruble Yudell, in Santa Monica, California, conducted some tentative studies on an approach to integrated conservation and development of these lands. Somewhat breathlessly, they stated: This proposal outlines some exciting potential for Mumbai to capitalise on a win-win situation of revitalising some buildings of extraordinary heritage value, responding to the strong market forces for development, providing much-needed amenity spaces to the city, and addressing the social and economic problems of the large redundant work-force of mill labourers . . . A crucial part of Mumbai's industrial heritage and economic patrimony is threatened. The government and NTC have taken a decision to sell off the mill sites under its control for the land value of the sites in order to dispose of the surplus properties. Similarly, it is assumed that the remaining mills would go through the same process. The premise that surplus property exists and can be used for the public good represents a unique opportunity that would be lost forever if the land passes into the control of private development. 32

Study Group on Integrated Development of Mill Land, headed by Charles Correa, Government of Maharashtra, Feb 1996.

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an interview to Amanat, the newsletter of the Mumbai chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage (INTACH): If you go back by 15 to 20 years prior to 1991, you will see that the land use for cotton textile mill land was frozen by the Development Plan then in force. They were not allowed to be used for any purpose other than cotton textile mill use. If a fire occurred in a mill, for instance, and the owners went to the BMC and asked for building permission to redevelop the land, as it was reserved as a textile mill in the development plan, permission would not be given unless the lands were to be again used for a cotton textile mill. If one had to close down a textile mill and put the lands to some other useful purpose, it would not be allowed unless first the Development Plan was changed, and these lands earmarked for that purpose. This meant a long-drawn procedure, involving all the members of the Municipal Corporation in two stages, and then approval from the state government. As there was, at that time, no policy for disposal or use of cotton textile mill lands, whoever was the ruler of the day —b e it bureaucrat or politician —would decide, rather arbitrarily, what was to be done with any particular erstwhile textile mill land. By the early 1990s, land in the city had become of great value. Whenever you isolate something of high value and restrict the use and keep it inflexible, the implications are that it becomes a source of harassment and of corruption. Either no action is taken, or speed-money has to be given, I felt that if we could devise an overall policy for those mill lands in Mumbai which are not being used, we could regulate it to the best advantage of the city and at least set some standards and norms about how to use these lands. In the last century, the textile mills led to Mumbai becoming the engine of growth. A hundred years later, things are very different. The role that was played by cotton then is now played by the high-value land on which the mills’stand. We felt that we should share the benefits —for the general public, for low-cost housing and the remaining as incentive to the textile industry. It is better than letting the management take the benefit of the entire land or not allowing anyone to do anything and keeping the area as a 'museum piece'. 35

'Land use policy is always a rearguard action. The government should follow, it cannot lead/ Joseph told the authors of Murder. He insisted that the revised DC rules did not contradict previous laws. Contrary to public perception, mill land could be sold even before 1991, but it could only be used for the industry. By 1996, 35

Interview in Amanat, vol 1, No 2, Mumbai, July 1998.

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Development Control Rules In 1991 —a significant year for the introduction of the economic liberalization policy of the country, which had its impact on the urban growth of Mumbai as well —the Maharashtra government amended its Development Control (DC) rules specifically for the development or redevelopment of cotton textile mill lands. Rule 58 (1) governed lands belonging to sick and/or closed mills. It allowed the sale provided a plan was submitted showing the open and built-up areas, as part of the measures recommended by the BIFR, financial institutions and Commissionerate of Industries for the rehabilitation of the mill. Under clause a), the existing or newly built-up areas were to be used for the same cotton textile mill or related use, subject to the permissible FSI. It could be used for diversified industrial purposes in accordance with the industrial location policy, with office space only ancillary to and required for such users, subject to an FSI of 1.00. The catch was in the third provision. It could be put to commercial use, provided one-third of the land was surrendered to the MHADA for public housing or by public sector undertakings for their housing. Another one-third was to be given up to the BMC for open spaces—gardens and the like, and the last one-third could be developed by the millowner or sold, subject to the prevailing regulations regarding the use of land for residential or commercial purposes. This was the well-known one-third scheme or formula which has been honoured more in the breach than observance. There was an escape clause, Rule 58 (2), built into the revised DC rules. If the land in question was less than 15 per cent of the total, it could be sold without observing the one-third formula. As Murder puts it, 'Not surprisingly, all the proposals cleared so far invoke this exemption: it has proved to b e the window of opportunity for the city's millowners-tumed real estate-holders. The city has not benefited from these reservations. Fifteen per cent of the area of Mumbai's 54 mills is worth at least Rs 3000 crore.' It pointed out that the rules were a reversal of previous policies which laid down zones to keep industrial land separate from residential and commercial. By implication, it felt, the rules removed the safeguards on employment, subjecting it to the logic of the real estate market. D.T. Joseph, the well-respected bureaucrat and former state Urban Development Secretary who drafted the revised rules, gave

Land as the Last Resort 127

OCEAN

' MAHIM BA

INDIAN

DADAR

CHURCHGA

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GATEWAY OF INDIA SSOON DOCK

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Mumbai's

Mill Area

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some nine proposals for the sale of land had been cleared, mostly under the 15 per cent formula. But all the land sold or leased had been illegally converted into commercial uses which had nothing to do with running a mill. 'If land has been leased for any purpose unconnected with the textile industry, then it is illegal/ admitted Joseph. 36 The draft DC rules attracted a spate of writ petitions when they were introduced. The Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) contended that some of the provisions were 'objectionable opposed to sound canons of town planning and the development needs of Greater Mumbai.' The Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti, which fights for the rights of the homeless, filed a petition which accused the state of allowing millowners to profiteer. The millowners, it said, had 'not framed a viable scheme to rehabilitate the workers in terms of employment and accommodation.'

Correa Committee The Correa committee took a much more positive view of the DC rules. It believed that they intended to regulate the redevelopment of mill lands to generate open spaces and public housing for the city, 'in a manner which would create coherent urban form. It is a truly unique opportunity for Mumbai —and that too in a congested area in the heart of the city which has been long neglected. Unfortunately, in reality, this has not happened. On the contrary, the sickness and closure of the mills has frightened the workers into a state of insecurity. And such redevelopment that has occurred has been in a piecemeal and haphazard manner on a totally commercial basis, without any portion of the land becoming available either for low-income housing or for public amenities. This has happened for a variety of reasons —one of the most crucial ones being the lack of any overall planning and development strategy seeking to create coherent urban form, housing for low income groups and civic amenities, and generate new employment opportunities for workers thrown out of employment by the closure of the mills.' The Correa committee listed 58 mills —there is always some confusion as to the exact number, depending on which are closed permanently or temporarily —with 25 belonging to the NTC. Very surprisingly, it was denied access to the private mills, which is 36

LHS 1996, pp. 11-12.

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spanking new office b u i l d i n g s . T h e main feature of the redevelopment, apart from the transport axes and shopping malls, was the conversion of mills into commercial spaces. Pictures of the dank, dingy mill buildings and galas were contrasted with bright open commercial spaces, with trendy street furniture, overhead walkways and arcades. The committee attempted to fuse its concerns for preserving the area's heritage as well as providing new avenues of employment: Any new building built in the historic heart of Parel must reflect its very special context. Several of the old existing mill structures are not only memorable but valuable enough to merit inclusion on the Heritage List, but also robust enough to be recycled as studios for artists, work places for fashion designers, computer software engineers, etc. Thus would come into being a new centre for Mumbai in the heart of the city, with its own distinctive character, vitality and ambience —a centre which adds another dimension to this vital metropolis.

It prescribed some key design principles for urban form in this area to avoid the alternatives to the high-rise towers which were springing up indiscriminately in so many parts of the city. In Parel itself, there was the tubular Falcon's Castle and Phoenix Towers on mill land. Both the committee and the Raheja college study before it drew upon the work of Rahul Mehrotra, Executive Director of the Urban Development Research Institute (UDRI), on the comparison of the 'footprints' of two characteristic Mumbai building typologies: high-rise at Nariman Point and New Cuffe Parade, on the one hand, and low-rise at Ballard Estate and Marine Drive (Table 4.1). This showed that the FSI of a building Table 4.1 Comparative 'Footprints' Nariman Point 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Total area (sq m) Built-up area (sq m) Plot area (%) Footpath area (%) Road area (%) Plinth area (%) Global FSI

2,57,735 5,67,017 63 6 31 20 2.2

Ballard Estate 70,000 1,26,000 55 15 30 . 36 1.8

Note: Percentages rounded off. Source: Study of Parel Mills Area Development, Sen Kapadia and Anirudh Paul, Kamla Raheja College of Architecture, Dec 1995.

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inexplicable, considering that this was a group officially appointed by the Maharashtra government. Three private mills, however, did want to cooperate because they appeared extremely keen to sell some of their land immediately. In effect, therefore, the committee had to contend only with the 25 mills belonging to the NTC. It divided these mills into three groups. The first were those that the NTC identified as being viable and whose lands had to be retained in toto. The second consisted of those mills which were also considered viable, but had a certain amount of surplus land. The last were mills whose land could be disposed of totally. .The transport links to the mill area were stressed: Lower Parel and Elphinstone Road on the Western Railway; Parel, Byculla, Chinchpokli and Currey Road on the Central; and Dockyard Road, Reay Road and Cotton Green on the Harbour Line. The two major north-south roads were Senapati Bapat Marg (Bapat, somewhat ironically in today's context, championed the cause of those displaced by the Mulshi dam in the early 1920s; he was christened Senapati or General because of this leadership), N.M. Joshi Marg and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marg. The redevelopment could enhance the capacity of rail and road links. What is more, it would address 'an issue of critical importance in the mill area, viz. pedestrian movement [original emphasis], particularly from the railway stations to the mills and the proposed new employment centres.' The committee proposed that pedestrian plazas could b e developed in front of some stations, along with covered shopping arcades for pedestrians along major arteries like Senapati Bapat Marg, as an integral part of redevelopment. In the vicinity of railway stations, some of the roads could be reserved forbuses, since several thousand commuters were expected to interchange between buses conducted and trains. A study of Parel mills area redevelopment b y the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture in Mumbai in 1995, for which the advisors were Charles Correa and Kamu Iyer, had sketched out some of these design ideas on the possibilities of re-using existing buildings and open spaces. These were also presented at a seminar on 'Open Spaces' organized by the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai in December 1995 by Sen Kapadia, then Principal of the Raheja college. In contrast to the existing congested streets flanked by tall mill structures, it proposed covered shopping arcades and pedestrian malls with smart-looking kiosks. The commercial spine along the north-south traffic corridor was represented by a broad road, with

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the precinct to its formal beauty by relocating hawkers and improving on the street furniture and other public design. 37 In an expanded version of a lecture titled 'The Poetics of FSI', Mehrotra elaborated on this theme: Even virgin landscapes, swallowed by our expanding cities, are being inundated by a singular building typology—the high-rise block. This building type, besides being unsuitable for the lifestyle of the people it intends housing, has the disadvantage that its potential resaleability will create a situation where higher income groups would invariably buy into this housing stock. This would bring to the fore another critical issue and failure of the present policies—that of the privatization of urban development without creating a reliable system of checks and balances to ensure public and social good. . . For example, presently, the transformation taking place in the mill lands in Parel area in Mumbai do not in any way respond to either the real needs of the people that occupy these areas or to the perceived deficiencies that exist in the city. The nature of development in these areas today is determined by the efficient exploitation of the Floor Space Index (FSI) and the growing speculative real estate market of Mumbai. If the mill lands were treated as a separate zone with their own development controls and building by-laws, the nature of development could then through legislation, be designed to respond to and give expression to the real needs of the area and the potential it holds for the city in terms of the provision of physical and social infrastructure, from parks to schools and hospitals as well as affordable housing which ensures that local residents are not displaced despite their new employment patterns. Similarly, the historic urban fabric of the area could be safeguarded by encouraging the recycling of mill buildings and stipulating appropriate urban design guidelines for new construction. 38

The Correa committee proposed to provide open spaces in the mill area, which varied from large maidans to small neighbourhood parks, to permit a variety of different open-air activities. The large pedestrian plaza in front of railway stations would enable commuters to buy vegetables and other goods on their way home — 'a classic pattern found all over Mumbai'. If the principal roads were widened and lined with trees, they would be converted into leafy boulevards (possibly with Paris as an inspiration). There was 37

Gunvanthi Balaram, 'Corporates Aim to Upgrade Ballard Estate to City's Premier Workplace', Times of India, 21 June 1999. 38 Rahul Mehrotra, 'Energies within the Cityscape', Humanscape, Mumbai, Aug 1996.

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was dependent not so much on its height but on the area of a plot it occupied, its footprint. The committee felt: 'By allowing larger footprints, we can achieve the same FSI through far more economical yet more energy-efficient construction (as witnessed in Ballard Estate, or Jaipur or, for that matter in European cities like Paris and London) —and this approach has the added advantage of using the building facades to help define the streetscape.' This table clearly establishes that it is possible through low-rise, high-density development to achieve almost the same FSI as through a multi-storeyed construction. What is more, in Ballard Estate, the end-result is aesthetically much more pleasing. People also relate to such a building because it is on a human scale: it occupies the entire plot and is eminently accessible. They are not intimidated, as they are by the sheer altitude of the office complexes of Nariman Point or residential blocks of Cuffe Parade, which require lifts to reach one's destination. In the Raheja college study of built volumes, the FSI consumed is 4.0 in Nariman Point as against 3.15 in Ballard Estate. For housing, it posed a global FSI of 1.4 with just three storeys, using as a model the pleasant Parsi colony of Cusrow Baug in Colaba, and 2.66 at Marine Drive with five storeys, as opposed to just 1.33 at the posh 28-storey Phoenix Towers on Senapati Bapat Marg. For low-income housing, the typical MHADA housing plot had a built-up area slightly less than the total plot area with an FSI of 1.0, whereas a chawl had a built-up area 60 per cent greater than the size of its plot, with an FSI of 1.5. In 1999, on behalf of the UDRI, Mehrotra launched a move to upgrade Ballard Estate as a business district—on the lines of New York's Business Improvement District (BID) programme, in which local businesses, community boards, city agencies and not-for-profit organizations worked in tandem to provide supplementary services and make the area clean, safe, friendly and efficient. According to the Estate Manager of synthetic textile giant Reliance Industries — which has its corporate headquarters in the area —who is the secretary of the Ballard Estate Welfare Association (BEWA): 'The idea is to upgrade the district both aesthetically and in terms of its operating efficiency as a premier workplace in the city.' This was Mumbai's earliest planned commercial district, planned by the wellknown architect George Wittet between 1908 and 1914, and inspired Edwin Lutyens in his design for New Delhi. The °im was to restore

Land as the Last Resort 133 in the 1970s [Author's note: factually incorrect—some departments still function]. Today it has been restored into a trendy business centre that houses the who's who of Mumbai's corporate world. Great Eastern Shipping. HTA. Trikaya Grey. Sterling Holidays. Lintas. Most of them migrated from illustrious downtown addresses in the early 1990s to carve their swish new empires in these derelict old mills. Others are still moving in . . . Now like downmarket Dockland [sic] in London's East End, the unthinkable has happened: Parel is getting gentrified. Everywhere poky chawls are metamorphosing into haughty high-rises, pinstriped shirts are replacing blue collars and old addas are turning into trendy little eateries. 39

Interestingly enough, the theme of urban regeneration through transformation into 'modernity' has echoes throughout the world. Take the former industrial city of Birmingham in the UK, which Convention Centre— a much-sought-after built an International urban symbol in Mumbai too —in 1991. According to a highly hyped account in a local newspaper: 'The International Convention Centre . . . is the missile which will launch Birmingham over the moon and into the twenty-first century. Like it or lump it, it is the future for Birmingham and the whole of the West Midlands. It's; a firm footing to a fine future. A future in which the people and the city of Birmingham can be confident and proud.' 40 In 1996, the author spoke to Prabhakar' Panchai, a Phoenix Mill worker, who cited how a fire in 1977 had halved the original work force to 3500; there were currently only 1000 labourers. His late father, Krishna Panchai, had migrated from the Konkan in the 1930s and was earning around Rs 500 in the mill when he retired. Panchai e a r n e d Rs 3750, having worked his w a y through s e v e r a l departments. The mill was not producing cloth any longer, only yam. He estimated that flats in Phoenix Towers, then not occupied, were selling for Rs 1.5 crore. He lived in a private chawl directly opposite the mill and it was worth Rs 3.5 lakh at the time, indicating the new-found demand for space in the locality. Panchai was proud of his mill and confident of his own capabilities, but was insecure about its future in the hands of the Ruias, who became its owners in 1968. 39

Farah Baria, 'New Look: Parel', India Today,2 Nov 1998. Birmingham Evening Mail, 28 Mar 1991, quoted in Tim Hall, '(Re)placing the City', in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds), Routledge, London, 1997, p. 213. 40

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a tendency in the Correa committee as well as the Raheja and Grover studies, and numerous forays by architects and journalists after these, to veer towards the gentrification of these working-class areas. It was all very well to talk about shopping malls and arcades, but what about the old residents of Girangaon, who were seeing the transformation of their precinct right before their very eyes? There was not much point planning shopping areas if former mill hands had lost their jobs or not been paid for months on end. For them, it was sheer survival that was at stake, not some upmarket scheme on a drawing board. In a presentation by Grover and Chandrasekhar Prabhu to the board of Bombay First at the HDFC, the two architects showed slides of how the ground outside a Kohinoor mill canteen was covered by a leafy banyan tree and could be converted into an openair restaurant. This smacked of an insensitivity towards the condition of the workers, who were in effect excluded from these redevelopment proposals. Murder cited how the population of Parel had fallen by 1.5 per cent per year between the census of 1981 and a decade later. The Elphinstone Road area had similarly declined by 0.3 per cent and Sandhurst Road — which included the Kalachowkie mills —by as much as 2.2 per cent annually. This, when the overall population of Mumbai increased by 1.8 per cent per year. Quite obviously, the closure of mills had led to a displacement of the population in Girangaon. The gentrification of the precinct is a theme to which we will return. The thrust is apparent in an article titled in the 'Living' section of India Today, where a feature writer waxes eloquent about the 'New Look' Parel: Phoenix Towers, Tulsi Pipe Road (Senapati Bapat Marg) , Lower Parel. Odd address, odd name. Until you shoot up to the 28th floor penthouse and look down on dilapidated old mills and sooty smokestacks, belching their noxious fumes into the air. For literary types, a scene straight out of Dickensian London. This is Parel, Mumbai's embarrassing eyesore, once the nucleus of a flourishing industry that died in the early '80s [1980s]. Today it is teeming with sweatshops, churning out garments for international fashion houses. And the mills are in ruins. Home to Mumbai's working class, Parel is grim, seedy, decidedly downmarket —save for this swanky skyscraper, rising from its industrial graveyard like that fabulous, mythical bird. Phoenix Towers is not the only oasis in this depressing district. Right next door is Phoenix Mills, a massive yarn spinning unit that closed down

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Comments Achyut Kantawala, who is working on a thesis on Mumbai mill lands at Harvard: 'The developers behind the $2 million project, the Ruias, see no contradiction in placing a pleasure dome in the midst of chimneys, chawls and trade union offices. In fact, according to A.D. Singh, a restaurant owner and developer, the location is just right. "The singular reason why Lower Parel is becoming the city's hottest entertainment destination is because of availability of space at affordable rates in an accessible location," he says. Singh has also hinted that some other mills may be following suit in setting up entertainment complexes but is coy about giving details.'42 Elsewhere, Singh waxes eloquent about the off-beat cafe at the Bowling Company, which was going to serve desserts, appetisers and coffee: 'It's a wide theme that covers a multitude of sins. The cafe will be about performing arts, from theatre to jazz. There has always been a market for live performances, the problem is finding the talent. We hope to generate it.' 43 In November 1999, the newly sworn-in state Labour Minister, Husain Dalwai, visited the Bowling Company one week-end and spent a few minutes at the different amusement outlets. He also saw the spinning department, which is still functioning, observing that there were only 59 out of the 3000 workers left. Dalwai said he was 'saddened to see youngsters blowing up at least Rs 500 per head when the nation was mourning the devastation in Orissa (the cyclone).' The General Secretary of the Maharashtra Gimi Kamgar Union, Jayprakash Bhilare, told the minister that according to the workers, all 42 outfits in the compound were illegal. 44 By 2001, the Ruias had created Phoenix Mall —a 3 lakh sq ft retail and entertainment complex within the old mill. Occupiers of this retail space included Pantaloon, one of the country's biggest retailers, Big Bazaar, India's first hypermarket chain, MacDonalds, Domino's pizzas and the Barista coffee shop chain. There was going to be a 30,000 sq ft seven-screen multiplex cinema complex as well. Already occupying commercial space in the mill were Standard Chartered /Grindlays Bank, Nokia and Computer Associates. The 42

Achyut Kantawala, 'A Cultural Centre: Reinventing the Wheel', draft thesis, Harvard University, May 1999. 43 'Good News for Thirty Somethings, Art Cafes', Express Newsline,14 Aug 1999. 44 'Dalwai Visits Entertainment Complex in Mill Compound', Times of India,18 Nov 1999.

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In 1999, the Ruias launched a venture called the Bowling Company, spread over 30,000 sq ft. Fraudulently, they had a year previously in a letter to the Deputy Municipal Commissioner for Ward F South, proposed an addition to the mill of recreation facilities such as a club, indoor sports facilities such as carrom, billiards, table tennis and a number of bowling alleys as well as a health club, spa and sauna for the 'over 1000 workers and more than 200 staff and additionally 1000 to 5000 executives of various other offices located in our premises.' According to an expose of Phoenix Mills compiled by the Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, the letter cited the municipal approval of this plan as being required under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act 1946 and the Factories Act 1948, though 'the question of change of user does not arise.' The letter further stated 'our mill workers are continuously demanding for the aforesaid facilities and they went on agitation in the month of January 1998/ and that if the permission is not granted 'we may have to face critical situation in the mode of agitation or we shall be put in great loss of goodwill which cannot be compensated in terms of money.' Needless to add, the workers had agitated against the closure of the mill and for the payment of their wages. The Bowling Company is a major attraction for rich youngsters today. Its 20 lanes attract some 2000 people every evening; there are also pool tables and a sports bar. In the offing are a jazz cafe, multiplex theatre, video arcade, food cafes and laser games. As the Indian Express reported: The list of pin codes where Mumbai's happening pleasure haunts are located has a new entry: 400 013. These days, the swank cars heading out of south Mumbai and suburbs are converging in the centre of the city, at the Bowling Company at Phoenix Garden City, Lower Parel. The Company, which also has a pool joint and a spots bar, is destination next for those who can afford it . . . A new chapter is being appended to the history of Lower Parel, which was re-written in the early nineties [1990s] when textile mills began selling land, ostensibly to generate funds for redevelopment. The smoke from the chimneys may never have risen skywards again: what did were spanking new offices, residential complexes and even an art gallery. The leader of the pack was Phoenix Mills, where a fire in September 1977 destroyed entire spinning units. 'A change of user was allowed in 1984 to construct residential and commercial complex/ says Anjan Warde, architect on the project. Instead of soot stacks, Phoenix Towers was to rise out of the ashes. 41 41

Nandini Ramnath, '"Uncool" Lower Parel is Hip-shakers' and Movers' New Mecca', Indian Express, 24 June 1999.

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low-density patterns of the existing mills/ An appendix to the report stated that the process of mergers, modernization and recycling of land was bound to affect the employment potential of the industry. 'It is therefore necessary to ensure that while facilitating the process of recycling of land job opportunities for comparable skills are also created/ The average area that a worker occupied was 39 sq metres, based on the fact that the density of workers in the mills was around 258 per hectare. It went on to state: If even half of the 18,000 workers at present working in NTC mills can be trained to acquire new skills, the remaining can easily be absorbed as semi-skilled workers in the new work centres —this does not include the even greater number of semi-skilled jobs which will spring up in the support activities around, owing to the multiplier effect. And while of course it is true that NTC would endeavour to continue the jobs of its present workers, any guarantee of permanent extension at the same level of employment may not be assured in the textile industry itself. Hence it is essential that job opportunities of a similar magnitude are created as a long-term strategy . . . It should be noted that the 12,000 households coming to live in this area will also generate a large number of semi-skilled jobs . . . The process of mergers, modernization and recycling of land is bound to affect the employment potential of the industry. It is therefore necessary to ensure that while facilitating the process of recycling of land, job opportunities for comparable skills are also created . . . As against the present workers' strength of about 18,000 in NTC mills, 32,000 new jobs can be created . . . In the long run, it may be assumed that nearly 50 per cent of the existing workers may opt for voluntary retirement schemes, but the remaining 50 per cent can be retrained for new jobs. Job opportunities of similar magnitude therefore need to be created as a longterm strategy. Admittedly, the new jobs will demand a skill profile different from that of the present textile workers. However, amongst the 25,000 new jobs, a significant proportion would be semi-skilled in nature (about 25 to 30 per cent). Similarly nearly 12,000 households (3,500 high income households and 8,500 households on MHADA and public sector undertaking land) would also support some low and semi-skilled jobs.

After surveying the mill lands, and making detailed observations regarding the NTC units, the Correa committee recommended that the land retained by the mill owner should not be restricted just to housing, which would probably end up at the luxury end of the market —as Phoenix Towers was the first to demonstrate —but should also accommodate new hi-tech industrial units to create

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owners were talking to two or three more department store chains, the Planet M music store and Funky Orbit, a children's play station chain. Big Bazaar was said to be coming in as an anchor, positioning Phoenix as a mid-segment mall, promising a 'footfall' of at least 15,000 customers a day, and modelled on global hypermarket chains like Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Truly, from mills to malls! 45 Datta Isvalkar, the General Secretary of the GKSS cited in the introduction, who works in Modem Mills and is the son of a migrant from the Konkan in 1947, has stayed in the same kholi for half a century at Saat Rasta. He took a quite different view of these goingson. 'This change will not lead to local employment. Rather, it will set up a clash between two cultures, two classes. Ultimately, one will have to give way. No prizes for guessing which . . . Coupled with no new employment, this means that there are no new workers to replace those who will soon retire.' The owner of Hanuman Theatre at Lalbaug, Madhukar Nerale, observed: 'The residents are not part of these changes; even the middle class can't afford the houses being built on mill land.' His tamasha theatre, which was set up in 1948, shut in 1994. These theatres were an integral element of Girangaon culture, as were the Ganeshutsav, Govinda and Holi festivals at Parel, Sewri, Byculla, Mazgaon and Girgaon. Hanuman Theatre had a show every night till the 1980s. But the 1982-3 strike put paid to all that. Recalled Nerale: 'Here, hotels (eateries) would open at 5 am to catch workers after their night shift. They would serve malpuvas, wada pav, poha, sheera . . .'. Perhaps the most depressing epitaph for the theatre is that it now serves as a wedding hall. 'I don't think Girangaon will stay this way for more than 10-15 years' is Nerale's gloomy prediction. 46 The Correa committee did put its mind, somewhat perfunctorily, to the question of generating employment in Girangaon, to make up for jobs lost when mills sold their land. It recommended that if some of the developable land was used for 'new high-tech nonpolluting industries like computers and the garment industry (the 1993 Industrial Location Policy allows such industries in the Island City), the number of semi-skilled jobs [original emphasis] generated in Parel can be more than equal to those at present provided by the 45

'Pantaloon Leases 52,000 sq ft in Phoenix Mall', Economic Times, 13 Nov 2001. 46 Ramnath 1999.

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In his Harvard thesis proposal, Achyut Kantawala suggested that a Cultural Centre ought to come up in Girangaon. This, somewhat ambitiously, could emphasize the cultural importance of textiles in Indian history, be a venue to complement the National Centre for Performing A r t s located at Nariman Point for performances, exhibitions and cultural events and provide a model, integrating textile manufacture through indigenous, intermediate and modem technology. It had the potential for 'pump priming': creating jobs for unemployed mill workers and training mill workers for other potential sources of employment within redeveloped mill zones. This would have a multiplier effect, using indigenous and intermediate technology, in E.F. Schumacher's terms (Small Is Beautiful) to produce consumer goods that could be sold in local markets. He quotes Deyan Sudjic, author of 100 Mile City, as extolling the virtues of museums as vehicles of urban regeneration. Sudjic observes how museums in the West have attempted to 'breathe new life into sinking cities, and to give ascendant ones more of an edge over their competitors . . . Museums are pump primers, their presence can be compared to the opening of a subway station, or even an airport: an investment which has the effect of raising property values.' 48 The Correa committee cited the 1991 amendment of the DC rules that land surrendered to the BMC had to be only for public open spaces. It believed that it could also be used for other 'social facilities' like schools, clinics or community centres, depending on the specific needs of the neighbourhood. This was not well received by city environmental groups which have always pointed out how Mumbai has one of the lowest ratios of open space of any major city in the world. Indeed, it could be argued that contrary to the popular perception, working-class districts need maidans even more because workers live in such squalid and congested conditions. We have specifically referred to the living (and working) conditions of textile workers in the previous chapter. What is more, as the experience of countless other reservations for social facilities in the city shows, this policy is often honoured more in the breach. It is quite common, for instance, to find a plot reserved for a municipal school or library simply hijacked by a builder. In some cases, one can even find such a public amenity housed in a private multistoreyed apartment complex: this honours the letter of the law, rather than the spirit. 48

Deyan Sudjic, The 100 Mile City, Harcourt Brace, UK, p. 133.

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jobs. The Industrial Location Policy permitted this conversion. In addition, office activities —financial and other services —could be permitted, as endorsed by the Draft MMR Regional Plan 1996-2011. Some sites could also be developed for hotels and for exportoriented units or electronic industries, both of which were nonpolluting. 'Properly done, such recycling of land (essential to the health and vitality of any of the world's cities), can generate at least as much semi-skilled and unskilled employment per hectare as exists in the present land-use,' it said. This is probably the weakest part of the Correa report, for it does not go into any detail as to how alternative jobs can be provided. As is well known, all modem industries and services are employing fewer and fewer hands with each passing year. The report does not address the problem of reconciling this modernization with employment. (In February 2000, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh announced that the government was planning to set up technology parks on surplus mill land in an effort to stop the IT industry from migrating to southern states. This was a typical knee-jerk reaction on the part of the establishment, with no thought as to how the existing labour force could be re-employed in the process.) The structures identified as having heritage value, the committee felt, ought to be designated by the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee in order to preserve them. They could be recycled to accommodate offices and 'studios' — the latter presumably genuflects to the burgeoning demand for TV programmes and advertising spots—in accordance with the regulations. As a corollary, several conservationists suggested that a textile museum could be set up in Parel, and specifically suggested Jupiter Mills on Senapati Bapat Marg. As Gunvanthi Balaram reported in The Times of India: 'Jupiter has a number of vernacular structures of heritage value which could be converted into a museum that would be a capsule of Mumbai's textile manufacturing history. The museum complex would also serve as a precinct in itself: it would be a microcosm, as it were, of the mill area as a whole.' 47 This was like waving a red rag to a bull, as far as unions were concerned. At a critical juncture, when they were faced with closure, or its imminent possibility, the mention of converting their workplaces into the venue for a textile museum —with artefacts and objects of the past — was anathema to them. 47

Gunvanthi Balaram, 'Parel's Old Cotton Mills Can House a Textile Museum, Says Panel', Sunday Times of India, 13 Oct 1996.

Cityscape from Kohinoor Mills in Dadar

NTC's India United No. 6 on Cadell Road, a Main Traffic Artery

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While the present DC rules permitted compensation for the land surrendered to the BMC and MHADA in the form of TDR which had to be used in the suburbs (not the island city), the committee that the rights surrendered could be transferred to recommended the one-third portion being retained (or sold) by the owner. In other words, the benefit would be gained in situ. The TDR on land transferred to MHADA would continue to be receivable only in the suburbs. The committee clarified that the land made over to MHADA for public housing should essentially be used for low income housing or for creating housing stock to facilitate reconstruction of dilapidated buildings or redevelopment of slums. It also wanted to speed up the process by getting MHADA to alter its procedures so that it could dispose of land by calling for tenders after stipulating the size and density of housing units to be built instead of taking on construction itself. was to put some order into Perhaps its boldest recommendation pattern where private mills developed the current redevelopment land and small portions of it on a piecemeal basis. 'This not only results in haphazard development of no benefit to the city, but (as per the rules) bypasses contributing the one-third shares of the city and of M H A D A . ' I t s u g g e s t e d that before preparing any redevelopment proposals, the private mills ought to be made to submit an Outline Development Proposal (ODP). This would include a map, showing the surrounding area with its road network; a plan showing existing structures, with an inventory and photographic coverage of these structures, leading to identification of heritage structures that needed to be preserved; and land allocation for these three uses and an outline of the built form. The proposal ought to be reviewed by a committee appointed by the state government, on the lines of the Heritage Committee (at one s t a g e , h e a d e d b y former Municipal Commissioner, D . M . Sukhtankar, who was also a member of the Correa study group). An interesting conceptual innovation for private mills was the proposed Golden Triangle. This was the massive area between Paragon, Mumbai Textile and Matulya Mills as three comers of a triangle. It was bounded by Pandurang Budhkar Marg to the north, Senapati Bapat Marg to the east and to the west, Gawli Passage (Arun Gawli is a notorious underworld don, who figured in the notorious Khatau Mills case, cited in the next chapter). Some idea of the scale can be gauged by the fact that it is 1.5 times bigger than the triangle formed by Hutatma Chowk (Flora Fountain), Horniman

Land as the Last Resort 143

The committee felt that the key factor in this process was finance. To enable the mills to provide vacant possession of the land, which was a prerequisite for the sale, the mill owners required funds immediately to pay off the dues of the existing workers; purchase land at an alternative site where the mill could shift its existing plant and machinery and pay the dues of financial institutions. Such expectations were totally exaggerated, since in no case in recent years has a management shifted to another site ; nor has any authority required them to. Many of the mills, the committee noted, were heavily in the red and were carrying accumulated losses in their books. Some were already in the embrace of the BIFR. Their single largest asset was the land on which they were located. While it was true that the land was extremely valuable, owners could not realise the full value unless the encumbrances on the land were removed. According to the committee, land laws in the country were so complex that it was unlikely that any bank or financial institution would provide funds without a clear title to the land. 'Under the circunlstances,' the report noted, 'the present state of impasse would continue and the mills would be unable to shift their location.' It felt that the state government had a role to play by creating a corpus for providing finance to the mills. This could be done through a consortium of banks and financial institutions, including SICOM, housing finance institutions (of which HDFC was by far the most prominent) and infrastructure companies (like Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services). In turn, the consortium would provide the funds immediately required by the textile mills to enable them to shift. The funds could be provided by the consortium against the purchase of FSI from the mills. The land vacated would have its FSI to sell. The plant and machinery could be shifted to an adjoining area. The Maharashtra government would have to guarantee the of land would consortium that the permissions for redevelopment be forthcoming as and when required. Alternatively, the report suggested, the government could set up a separate financial institution for this purpose. It could be fully owned by the state and receive funding from various intermediaries. It would provide funds by purchasing the FSI. These proposals have proved a nonstarter for the simple reason that very few managements are genuinely concerned about modernizing or restarting their mills. The proposals by the Correa committee, and architects like Grover before it, should not be dismissed as impractical or idealistic

142 Ripping the Fabric

Circle and Bori Bunder. 'The decisive advantages in pooling all the available NTC land together and allocating appropriate uses at a meaningful scale to each of the various plots should be kept in mind/ the committee stated. 'By providing adequate incentives for pooling of land in order to rationalize the development, the private sector units could co-operate among themselves to form a new financial umbrella organization which would allow the kind of comprehensive development the study group has proposed for the NTC units/ As a further incentive, to persuade private owners to agree to pool land rather than carve it up into small plots, the committee advocated that this area should be allowed a higher FSI of 2.0. This was the case in the relatively newer CBDs of Bandra-Kurla and Belapur in New Mumbai. By pooling these mill sites, two crucial benefits would follow: 'Large new public spaces (on the scale of Azad Maidan) could be created in the dense heart of the city. The cluster of taller buildings generated by the additional FSI would create a visible landmark, recognisable across the city's skyline as a symbol of the regeneration of Parel— and with it, the city of Mumbai' [emphases added]. This is wishful thinking at best, if the current crop of highrise structures that have raised their ugly head in Girangaon is any evidence. Many architects and activists took strong exception to this additional concession to mill owners, who were already entitled to TDR on the land they surrendered. The committee spelt out its redevelopment policy in an appendix: Many of the textile mills in Mumbai own huge plots of land located in the centre of the city. The land is not being put to productive use since some of these mills have closed down and some others are operating at only a small part of their total capacity. A proportion (about two-thirds) of the land owned by these mills could be recycled and better utilized for the provision of the much-needed open spaces, widening of existing roads and accesses as well as provision of new ones, provision of public housing along with social facilities and amenities in the congested areas of the city. By commercially exploiting (a) the redevelopment rights bestowed as compensation for the land diverted for public interest users as mentioned above and (b) the residual land (about one third) left to be developed/ redeveloped by the landowners themselves, substantial funds can be generated not only for the rehabilitation of those mills which are potentially viable and can be restored to health b y appropriate reorganization but also for retraining of textile workers rendered unemployed, and promotion of non-polluting industries and services sector activities.

Land as the Last Resort 145

of mili workers, claims that he would not take any step that would go against workers' interest. This may sound convincing for the uninitiated, but it does not cut much ice with political observers. It is not workers' interest that is close to Mr Joshi's heart; it is the builders he wants to protect.'49 True to type, the state government kept its cards very close to its chest and has till date not made the Correa report public. This is inexplicable, considering that it is an official committee appointed by the state and not some citizens' report by an NGO, like Murder of the Mills. The only explanation is that the authorities have a vested interest in withholding information on the sale of mill land, so that it can favour one sectional interest or the other, or both: mill owners and the building lobby. Its hands are also tied by the fact that it has to pay lip service to protecting the working class —not out of any sympathy for the underdog but because it forms a very sizeable voting constituency and cannot be ignored. Datta Samant, the veteran unionist who was murdered in 1994, was elected from Mumbai South-Central, in which Parel falls. Significantly, an opinion poll on the Correa report commissioned by The Sunday Times of India in September 1997 found that 'an overwhelming majority were of the opinion that the mill workers would be eventually cheated out of adequate compensation by the government and millowners.' 50 Even ministers in the erstwhile BJP-Shiv Sena coalition hailed from Parel-Lalbaug. Joshi, being an astute politician, would perform rapid somersaults on the sale policy, promising he would give the green signal, only to back down immediately when there was a public outcry. Incidentally, 60 per cent of the respondents in the opinion poll were not even aware that millions of square feet of mill land in the city might be up for sale. In a column titled 'An Urbanisation Model' in Business Standard, Ashok V. Desai, its Consulting Editor, commended the Correa committee: This is a surprisingly sensible report coming from a bunch of architects, ecofreaks [sic!] and bureaucrats; but it is not sensible enough. Physical division of land between the players is bound to lead to inequities; restrictions on land use will lead to even more. The only way to dissolve 49 50

Shubangi Kapre, 'Joshi Protects Builders' Lobby', Pioneer,26 Sep 1996. 'Going Through the Mill', Sunday Times of India, 14 Sep 1997.

144 Ripping the Fabric because they all relied on the logic of the market. If the land was the last remaining asset of any value, it could be redeveloped in a variety of ways, depending in the ultimate analysis on the predilections of the developers and policy-makers. This asset could be employed to raise resources and recycled as one wished. The tragedy is that in virtually every case of the reuse of mill land in Mumbai, it has been dictated by the biggest commercial interests, which has seen the growth of high-rise office and apartment complexes rising on the ruins of mills.

Reuse of Land The Correa committee looked at the total area occupied by NTC mills. As we have seen, it divided the land into three categories: units of plots which could be disposed of partly; fully; and those which had to be fully used to run the mills. It estimated their total surplus land at 5,67,718 sq m, or about 57 hectares. This area was broken down into three parts: one-third for the BMC to provide city amenities; another third for MHADA and the remaining third for commercial exploitation. Each mill was surveyed by a team of conservation architects to examine 'all structures to identify their heritage significance, structural quality, construction technology and potential for adaptive reuse/ These surveys were conducted visually and the report recognized the need to carry out further studies to confirm structural construction. There were structures that were in sound condition; which required some localized repair and those which required major work. It made suggestions on how to recycle land at specific sites, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The official response to the report was puzzling. While Chief Minister Manohar Joshi reportedly told the annual general meeting of the MOA that the government was in favour of permitting mills to sell their land, he quickly denied this was the case. At this, the now-defunct Pioneer accused him of a conscious political strategy to protect the builders' lobby, which was already reeling under the shock of falling real estate prices. 'Most of the mills are located in central Mumbai, in Lower Parel, Tardeo and Kurla, predominated by the middle and lower middle class people. If hundreds of acres of surplus land was released, the bridge between demand and supply of real estate would automatically ease, thus upsetting the builders' ongoing projects as well . . . Mr Joshi posing as a champion

Land as the Last Resort 147 they will sell off everything in bits and pieces. We have to have some controls over land use under the DC rules . . . The textile secretary said: Why divide each mill into three parts separately? Why not add all the mills and divide them into the three-way formula? This will make planning meaningful. So we did that for Parel. We clubbed eight mills into a 'Golden Triangle' which will have a pedestrian plaza and shopping malls connected to the Elphinstone railway station as the hub . . . I am dead against tall buildings with small footprints. We have generally opted for the Ballard Estate model where the facades of old buildings marked out the area's streets. The large footprint model. But for Parel we have allowed for tall buildings and an FSI of 2.0 against the normal 1.33. This will allow the value of land to jump. The tall structures create a beacon, a kind of symbol . . . There are those who want to retain the old as if nothing has changed. They have the arrogance of deciding for the workers. This is a great chance for Mumbai . . . Mumbai too has the energy and the land to rebuild itself. 53 Boston, like Mumbai, was a city based on the textile industry—which in the 1950s was in the doldrums. What did they do? Instead of thinking negatively, they reinvented themselves as a city specialising in high-tech industries —and for the last two decades, Boston has been the city with the highest rate of employment in the whole of the US. And there are other examples as well. For instance, Glasgow. At the height of the British Empire, it was the centre of the ship-building industry. Today, those jobs have all dried up —and so Glasgow is out to re-invent itself as a city focusing on new sources of employment, generated by other manufacturing and service industries. 54

With the state government neither accepting the Correa report, nor rejecting it, the entire policy on redevelopment of mill land remained in limbo since it was presented in September 1996. The following year, in a bid to break the impasse, Manohar Joshi was said to be in favour of a one-fourth formula, where workers would receive a quarter of the share of the land, in addition to the BMC, MHADA and owner. Joshi had to resign in early 1999, following a land scandal in which his son-in-law was involved in Pune. After the new Chief Minister, Narayan Rane, assumed office, virtually the first promise he made was that he would resolve the tangled mill land sale issue. In principle, the one-fourth formula would basically meet the long-standing demand of unions that 53

'Private Mills Can't Keep Us Out Forever', Charles Correa's interview to Gurbir Singh, Economic Times, 20 Oct 1996. 54 'New Horizons', Charles Correa's interview with A manat,July 1998.

146 Ripping the Fabric the inequities is to form a corporation that would own the land on behalf of the players. The millowners should get shares in the corporation in proportion to the value of the land they bring in; if necessary for political reasons, shares should also be given to BMC-MHADA and ,NTC. The corporation will permit the divorce of decisions about land use from the division of the spoils. The memorandum of association should state the aim of the corporation to be the maximization of shareholder value. The shareholders should appoint a board of directors including Charles Correa but dominated by hard-headed people [Author's note: implying, presumably, that he was not]. The management should estimate the maximum value of the land if there were no restrictions on its use. This can be easily done from the land prices recently obtained by MHADA in the colossal auction of the Bandra-Kurla complex . . . The best use of the land will probably turn out to be as office and commercial space . . . If the corporation works, the Maharashtra government —and, indeed, public authorities all over India—would find it a useful model for urbanisation.51

Correa himself was not very forthcoming about his report, presumably for fear of treading on the toes of politicians. According to an unnamed member of the study group, who sounds suspiciously like him: 'Parel was the real heart and origin of the city. It is wonderful that we are returning to it . . . People working in the industry should get a good deal in the entire process. Every city has to recycle its land, particularly when an industry is no longer viable. By recycling the land, you not only get employment and a lot of activity, but the whole tax base of the city is changed. This is a unique opportunity. Mill owners, government and workers together should decide what can be done with the land and some sort of process should be set up to facilitate matters.' 52 The anonymous member referred to Boston, which had reinvented itself into a hi-tech city and Glasgow, which once had a ship-building industry, was trying to do the same. A city had to be a generator of employment and wealth. In press interviews, Correa stated: We have stepped in because it was found that the millowners were selling off small plots using the exemption under the DC rules which allows sale if the plot is less than 15 per cent of the total area. That can't be allowed as 51

Ashok V. Desai, 'An Urbanization Model', Business Standard,14 Sep

1997. 52

Milind Kokje, 'Mill Land Becomes a Bone of Contention', India, 30 Sep 1996.

Times of

Land as the Last Resort 149

As far as public space was concerned, a quarter of 600 acres worked out to 150 acres, which had to be surrendered to the BMC. Of this 150 acres, 22.5 acres were for various public amenities. This would involve construction of 1,20,000 sq metres with an FSI of 0.05 on the total land. 'The physical open space in reality will be much more than 15 per cent, about 127.5 acres out of 600 acres/ the architects said. Public parks could be maintained by citizens' groups and private enterprise — this was a reference to Das' ongoing projects to preserve the beach fronts throughout Mumbai; the first such citizens' initiatives were in Bandra, in which this author was involved as well. Funds had to be raised only for those amenities which could not be developed by private initiative —for example, fire brigade stations and police stations. These would have to be provided from the state and municipal exchequer and there would be no TDR on such land. The next 150 acres would accrue to the state government. This would involve the development of 10 lakh sq m at a gross FSI of 0.41. Of this, a little less than half, 4,50,000 sq m would be developed by the government to meet the dues of the workers. This was estimated at Rs 1250 crore, assuming there were 50,000 workers, and ah assumed FSI value of Rs 15,000 per sq m. The remaining 5,50,000 sq m would be sold by financial agencies like HDFC to be put on the market to raise funds for workers' housing. Mill owners would be entitled to 150 acres. However, the architects clarified: 'The location of this land will depend on the comprehensive planning which will first accommodate viable mills that will run. It will then provide for other potential sites for commercial development by the mill owners.' The total area that they could develop, with an existing FSI of 1.33, according to the DC rules, would be 27,13,200 sq m. Out of this, 10,00,000 sq m was proposed to be handed over to the state government to safeguard the fulfilment of financial liabilities towards workers. The remaining 17,13,200 sq m would be available to mill owners for development. The land of the mills which were to be deemed viable would be included in this area and the FSI would be 0.71. Half the potential would be restricted to industrial use —existing mills and other new industries. The remainder would be open for commercial development in keeping with the DC rules. The architects felt that this would enable the owners to raise the funds for development as well as for modernization. They had also to repay the loans taken from financial institutions. The government

148 Ripping the Fabric

the workers' interests had to be protected since they were in no way responsible for the mess that the mills were in and were more than prepared to continue working. Despite a great deal of lipservice p a i d to s u c h concerns, the Shiv S e n a - d o m i n a t e d government, and its Labour Minister, Shabir Sheikh, could not or did not solve the problem.

Alternative Proposal In March 1999, three architects who are also activists put forward an alternative proposal. Neera & Arvind Adarkar and P.K. Das stated that their objective was to maintain and create industrial jobs and avoid displacement of workers; safeguard the rights of workers by providing housing on mill land; provide development opportunities to the mill owners to exploit the full potential of the land; give the city badly needed open spaces and public amenities; potential for the state government so and provide development that amenities and infrastructure development could be facilitated without strain on the state. It covered all the mills in the city— private and those belonging to the NTC and MSTC (Maharashtra State Textile Corporation). It assumed that there were 600 acres (243 ha) in the mills and the total number of workers, permanent and 'badli', was 50,000. 55 They stressed that an extensive survey should be carried out to indicate viable mills, potentially viable mills after modernization, and non-viable mills, somewhat on the lines of the Correa report. The lands had to be thoroughly surveyed to determine which areas were vacant and which built upon. All 600 acres ought to be clubbed planning, on the lines of the Town together and comprehensive Planning schemes, carried out. Where it differed radically from the that all the land ought to be Correa report is that it recommended taken over by the state government and development rights were to be allocated according to the final planning proposal. This was a bold gesture because it based the entire process on sound planning principles, unlike the previous proposals, which pandered too much to market forces. Like the Maharashtra government -s own second thoughts, it allocated one-fourth of the share to the workers. However, one quarter would be due to the state government, rather than MHADA. 55

Neera and Arvind Adarkar, P.K. Das, Draft Proposal for Development of Mill Lands, Mumbai, March 1999.

Land as the Last Resort 151

In sum, the group stressed that their scheme did not entail the raising of additional funds but financed itself. Moreover, it consumed a gross FSI of 1.75 and if taken on the net area, 2.08. 'This compares favourably with all other schemes approved by the state government so far which involves FSI above 2.5 and also involves TDR/ they pointed out. 'This proposal does not involve any TDR at all.' The density of tenements provided for is up to 333 \ tenements per acre, as against 500 per acre accepted by the government in the slum redevelopment programme. Further, the construction for workers would be managed professionally and they would not be left to the vagaries of market forces. The state government would raise valuable resources for the city. And finally: 'The proposal allows for a unique opportunity for integrated development of the area. Designed by planners and the special planning authority a s against piecemeal and haphazard development of the area going on at present.' This was a noteworthy attempt to reintroduce planning into the process and involve housing agencies, architects and other p r o f e s s i o n a l s in redevelopment schemes. Since it would have put an end to collusion between mill owners and the state, this proposal was not given the attention it deserved. In October 2000, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, heading a Congress coalition, announced yet another 'new' textile policy, whereby the DC rules would be amended to permit 30 per cent of the land to be modernized, instead of 15 per cent. Mill owners could submit joint proposals for redevelopment. If an owner wanted to develop on land occupied by existing chawls in the mill premises, he would have to' rehouse the workers in a 225 sq ft tenement (on the lines of the state's slum resettlement norms). Any owner who wanted to start another industry on the land would have to offer a worker retiring after January 2000 a job in the new unit. The VRS would be based on the 'Gujarat pattern', with 35 days' salary for every year of service. A tribunal would be set up, headed by a retired judge of the High Court, comprising representatives of owners and workers. It would oversee the modernization or shifting of mills by selling land. The proceeds would be deposited in a separate account, from which the workers' dues would first be settled. The Shiv Sena, seeing itself upstaged by this announcement, vowed to oppose it on the streets of Parel-Lalbaug. Former Chief Minister Narayan Rane said: 'This textile policy will destroy the Marathi mamis.

150 Ripping the Fabric

would not be required to bear any of this expenditure. While the viable mills could b e run profitably, those which would be modernized could go into the black. Those which were beyond redemption could be closed down. The new element in their scheme was the recognition that workers' interests had to be protected too. With 50,000 workers, using an average size of tenement ,of 28 sq m per worker (which coincides with the existing density of occupation in the mills, according to the Correa report), a development potential of 14,00,000 sq m was earmarked to safeguard their rights. The FSI equivalent of 0.58 of the gross land would be used in the process. It was suggested that agencies like HDFC be involved in developing this one-fourth share for the workers. All those on the existing rolls would become 'owners' of 28 sq m each, which would be pledged with this agency. With the FSI rate being roughly Rs 15,000 per sq m, each worker's share would be Rs 4.5 lakh. He could also choose to participate in any other proposal mooted by HDFC, depending on market conditions, and could avail himself of further benefits. The construction cost of building 50,000 tenements (out of the 14,00,000 sq m which is the workers' due) at Rs 10,000 per sq m would amount to Rs 1400 crore. Of this area, 5.5 lakh sq m would be made available by the state government (out of its share of 10 lakh sqm) to HDFC, which would construct on it and sell the space on the open market to fetch Rs 2200 crore. The total construction cost of these 5.5 lakh sq m and workers' housing would be Rs 1950 crore. This would cross-subsidize this housing without any burden on the state exchequer. The group recommended that a special planning authority like the MMRDA be appointed to prepare designs and the necessary framework of additional rules and regulations. The BMC was to approve all planning proposals and carry out necessary changes in the Development Plan and make additions and alterations to the DC rules. Most significantly, in the light of the steadfast refusal of the Maharashtra government to make the Correa study group report public, as well as the persistent rumours of corrupt politicians being in league with mill owners in evading the law, the team advocated that the entire process of planning approvals and the roles of the government, BMC, mill owners and agencies like HDFC ought to be closely monitored by a committee consisting of concerned bureaucrats, and other sections like mill owners, unions and social scientists.

5

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold I think I am the only foolish trade union leader fighting for the workers' rights and I know I am going to die an unsung hero.* —Datta Samant, two days before his murder By the early 1990s, the old, established order in urban life was giving way to fresh uncertainties. The loss of industrial jobs was a grim reality; prices of real estate were going through the roof; and the ugly face of the underworld was emerging. All three ingredients of this deadly brew were on the boil when it came to the sale of mill land in the notorious Khatau case. The saga has all the ingredients of a 'Mollywood' blockbuster, replete with guns, gangland killings and the subversion of unions. As it happens, the Khataus are one of the earliest mill-owning families in Mumbai. Their mill in Byculla was 125 years old in 1994, which means that it was established barely a dozen years after the first mill in the city. It occupies 13 acres of very valuable land: Byculla is more up-market than ParelLalbaug, since it is closer to the CBD. In the early 1990s, the mill, with 5700 workers, had accumulated losses totalling Rs 54 crore. The Chairman and Managing Director, Sunit Khatau, who was 55, wanted to shift to a larger, though less

*As quoted in the Bombay Times,18 Jan 1997.

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Workers will lose their livelihood. So far only one-third of the mill land was left to the mill owner; now he has all to himself. Also, no powers have been specified for action against erring mill owners. The owner can very well disappear with all the money.' 56 In April 2001, the state government followed this up by constituting the tribunal and arming it with quasi-judicial powers. It would ensure the implementation of the package of measures recommended by the BIFR for the revival or rehabilitation of a potentially sick or closed mill. Alternately, it would monitor the modernization or shifting of mills. In particular, it was meant to see that the funds were also used to pay workers dues under VRS, as well as to repay loans from banks and financial institutions. 57

56

'New Mill Land Policy Set to Revive State's Textile Sector', Economic Times, 12 Oct 2000; 'Government Sold Out to Mill-owners, says Rane', Asian Age, 13 Oct 2000. 57 'Mill Land Panel Conferred With Quasi-judicial Powers', Indian Express,6 Apr 2001.

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 155

the all-India Congress-sponsored organization —had personally briefed Chief Minister Sharad Pawar on what was happening and. the trade warned him that inaction would mean compromising union movement. 2 However, what caused a furore in the Maharashtra assembly was the disclosure that Ajit Pawar, the Chief Minister's nephew, and Govindrao Adik, the CM's close aide, were named in the RMMS election panel sponsored by Gawli, which would imply a degree of collusion in this coup. After the opposition raised a stink in the assembly, the Congressmen bowed out. Both ruling Congress and opposition MLAs demanded the arrest of Khatau for recruiting underworld characters. The media and other politicians kicked up a fuss about the RMMS take-over and a public interest litigation was filed against the manipulated election, which took place while Haribhau Naik was away in Geneva, attending a meeting of the Labour Organization. Nothing came of it and it International seemed as if the Congress turned a blind eye to this blatant takeover of the country's biggest textile union, supposedly with 1,00,000 workers, by deadly criminals. 3 With Jadhav ensconced in the corrupt and manipulative RMMS— which w a s a p o s t - w a r creature of the C o n g r e s s government, godfathered by the notorious BIR Act to ensure that there would be only one union to represent all textile workers — Khatau is believed to have connived with Gawli to sell his Byculla land. Gawli is variously alleged to have been promised Rs 5 crore or 5 per cent of the sale value—the land was estimated to fetch anything between Rs 250 and Rs 400 crore, considering it was at the height of Mumbai's real estate bonanza. The two Ahirs (Sachin is currently the Secretary of the RMMS and Govindrao Adik the President) went on a rampage inside the mill and coerced the workers to sign a declaration agreeing to shift the mill to Borivli. Armed with this declaration, Khatau went back to the state government and sought permission to sell the land. According to reports, he had almost sewn up a contract with a construction company which was a front for the gang led by Dawood Ibrahim, the most feared of all Mumbai dons, who had set up base in Dubai. Datta Samant openly made this allegation, saying that the deal had been struck for Rs 400 crore. He stated that politicians and mill 2 3

Harish Nambiar, 'Bloody Ricochets', Indian Express,15 May 1994. ibid; 'The Overlord', The Week, 22 May 1994.

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valuable, 40-acre plot that he had acquired in Borivli. Alternately, he wanted to move right out of Mumbai to Mahad, where the mill had established a weaving unit in 1985. In 1991-2 —note yet again that it was the introduction of the liberalized economic policy which served as the backdrop for this sordid drama, the Khatau Makanji Spinning & Weaving Co. went to the BIFR. This scion of the Khataus did not enjoy a good reputation for running the mill and the financial institutions refused to bail him out so long as he was in charge. He initially refused to hand over charge but when the institutions did not budge and withheld funds for a fortnight, Khatau agreed to step down. 1 Part of the rehabilitation package was the sale of the Byculla land. The BIFR and Maharashtra government approved of the scheme provided the recognized union, the RMMS, consented to it. There was initially a disagreement over what the 50,000 sq m of land was worth. According to Khatau, it was only worth Rs 80 crore, but the government and financial agencies believed it was closer to Rs 250 crore, judging by the prices of nearby real estate. It was further complicated by the lack of clear title. Moreover, the President of the RMMS, Haribhau Naik, refused to allow the sale to go through unless there was a clear proposal to rehabilitate the workers who would lose their jobs. He suspected that Khatau was interested in liquidating his prime asset for his personal gain. The workers resisted it because they were not sure where they would be relocated, if at all. Although Khatau insisted that no one would be retrenched, his assurance was taken with a fistful of salt. Since all mills were running with excess staff, Khatau could also get rid of a third of those on his payroll without affecting productivity. Khatau engineered the defeat of Haribhau Naik in the RMMS "elections to further his scheme. Naik was replaced by Shankarrao Jadhav with the help of the gangster, Arun Gawli. His nephews, Sachin and Vijay Ahir, were already working as Khatau's personal assistants and bodyguards. Khatau is alleged to have come to an understanding whereby he would help Jadhav become President in return for his persuading the workers to shift to Borivli. Jadhav was supported by the Gawli gang, which supplied him with arms, ammunition and lakhs of rupees. Naik and Narendra Tidke, State President of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) — 1

'Deadly Deals', BusinessWorld,18 May 1994.

r

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 157

in speculative land deals in the commercial capital. According to one theory —and gangland killings often lent themselves to wild and partly-substantiated speculation on the part of the police and media —Khatau was identified too closely with Gawli and was murdered by the rival Amar Naik gang. Had the Byculla land deal gone through, Naik feared that Gawli would be able to buy every AK-47 in town and eliminate rivals. It was also said to be in retaliation for the near-fatal attack on Ash win Naik, Amar's brother, on 18 April at the sessions court in Mumbai, when he was shot in the head at point-blank range, which reduced him to partial paralysis. Amar Naik was killed in a police 'encounter' in August 1996. Ashwin spent six months at the JJ Hospital after being shot, and went underground after he was released. According to the police, hfe first fled to South Africa; his areas of operation included Ahmedabad, Kathmandu, London and Toronto. He was arrested by the West Bengal police while trying to cross over to Bangladesh in 1999 and was wanted in Mumbai for 15 cases of murder, assault, extortion etc, including the murder of Khatau. He had got involved in selling mandrax to South Africa and the huge profits on the drug trade had enabled his gang to amass sophisticated weapons. The two gangs, incidentally, continued their old enmity: Gawli's operated from Yerwada Central Prison, while Naik's from the Arthur Road jail in Byculla, from where his contacts with the drug underworld were established. 7 The fervid imaginations of newspaper reporters were set aflame by Naik's presence on the eve of the September 1999 general elections: he could influence the vote in the South Central and North Central constituencies, as well as the assembly segments there. With Gawli externed to his village outside Pune, Naik could mobilize the youth to*support the sitting Shiv Sena MP, Mohan Rawle, in South Central, which he won by a wafer-thin majority of 100 votes the previous election. 8 Only three weeks earlier prior to Khatau's murder, Jadhav himself narrowly escaped being killed by armed gangsters, also on a motorcycle, who fired at him when he was being driven in his car to his office. The police believed that the Amar Naik gang had 7

'Ashwin Naik Arrested While Crossing the Indo-Bangla Border', Times of India,6 Aug 1999; 'Ashwin Naik: The Man Behind Murder and Mandrax', Bombay Times, 7 Aug 1999. 8 'Why is Ashwin Naik in Mumbai?', Sunday Mid-Day, 22 Aug 1999.

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owners were responsible for the infiltration of criminal elements into unions. 'To get the consent of the majority of mill workers for such deals, they brought in criminal gangs to intimidate workers/ Samant alleged, citing the Khatau episode. 'Our democratic means to fight this menace are proving weak. I am raising (our) voice against it . . . I took out morchas, organized programmes . . . It has put some check (oh the gangs).' 4 After Dawood Ibrahim —of 'D Company' notoriety —fled to Dubai in the early 1980s and the remnants of his gang were hunted after the March 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, the two rival gangs of Arun Gawli and Amar Naik sought to fill the vacuum. Gawli, described as the more earthy of the two dons, was said to have planned entering politics. One of his gang members, holed up in the infamous Dagdi Chawl, its den in south central Mumbai — ironically, cheek by jowl with several cotton mills —asserted: 'Bhai is the only rival worth the name to Dawood. So naturally Dawood's men are after him. But the police here would also like to see him dead. Sooner or later he is likely to be shot down in an encounter, so politics is the only way out.' 5 According to Amarjit Singh Samra, the former Mumbai Commissioner of Police, 'The Arun Gawli gang is a force of nearly 800 daredevils, who get a monthly honorarium of up to Rs 4000. Pitched battles for the underworld crown are being fought and it appears that the final fight will be between Arun Gawli and Amar Naik, as Dawood is fast becoming an out-of-sight, outof-mind character, although he owns crores worth of assets here. In 10 years, this ordinary-looking son of a police head constable had become, virtually, omnipresent in any crime.' 6 On 7 May 1994, Sunit Khatau was being driven in his white Mercedes at a traffic light near the Mahalaxmi Race Course when two gangsters on a motorcycle broke a window using a hammer, shot him in cold blood 11 times and escaped. His driver whisked him to the Nair public hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. It was the first such killing in broad daylight of a prominent industrialist, which sent shock waves through the city. In a highly dramatic fashion, it focused attention on the role of the underworld 4

'Dawood Firm bought Khatau Mill Land for Rs 400 Crore, says Datta Samant', Indian Express, 23 May 1994. 5 Harish Nambiar, 'The Reign of the Dons', Indian Express,13 Nov 1994. 6 'Amar, Arun, Ibrahim', Amarjit Singh Samra interview, Hindustan Times, 16 May 1994.

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'The government is increasingly playing into the hands of the industrialists; Sharad Pawar gave blanket powers to the mill owners to sell off their land and build five-star hotels, thus precipitating a crisis. The government is the main culprit. It is fooling the workers. Its anti-labour policies have thrown over 2 lakh workers out of jobs. More and more industries are closing down every day.' Getting carried away by his own rhetoric, he believed there were two solutions: "Either make it a political solution like Mandal or Ram Janambhoomi or take to a Naxalite-like movement.' 12 That year, Samant also pooh-poohed the claim by both the Congress and Shiv Sena for taking the credit for stopping the sale of mill land in election speeches. 'This kind of lip sympathy is not going to help/ he thundered. 'It is a clear collusion between the Congress (I) and Sena. Between them, they will finish off the poor mill workers.'13 This was not the first time that there were allegations of muscle power being used in the Khatau Makanji mill. Members of Datta Samant's union cited how the Gawli gang was used to intimidate workers during the textile strike. Recalled Samant: 'As the strike showed no sign of ending, Bhai Bhosle, who was the RMMS general secretary, got all the underworld gang leaders, including Arun Gawli, released from the Arthur Road prison during the strike. Now again this gang is being used to allow the government to undertake land sale. The government cannot do it openly.' 14 It was also called in to browbeat workers into not campaigning for Samant in the 1989 elections for the parliament constituency of South Central Mumbai —which he lost (he was unsuccessful three times; he won in 1984, immediately after the so-called failure of the strike). By any reckoning, the Khatau episode was a sordid chapter in the history of Mumbai's industrial relations. There were some early indications of these murky trends. In 1989, the police arrested Kirti Ambani, the head of public relations of Reliance Industries, the rapidly rising synthetic textile empire masterminded by Dhirubhai Ambani, for hiring Arjun Babaria, a local gangster, to kill Ambani's arch rival, Nusli Wadia of the well-established and modernized Bombay Dyeing mill. The clinching proof of the infiltration of gangland politics into mill affairs, according to a Khatau mill worker whom the author interviewed, was the fact that at Sunit Khatau's 12 13 14

'Textile Workers Languish', Times of India, 7 Oct 1991. 'Parties Woo Labour Class', The Independent, 12 Oct 1991. 'Divided by Guns and Money', Business Standard, 28 April 1994.

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targeted Jadhav because of his election to the RMMS. He feigned ignorance as to who the attackers could be and denied that he had any links with the underworld or that goondas had entered the textile union. 'It is just wishful thinking on the part of some people/ he said. 'They couldn't enter the unions and so are claiming that the unions are full of goondas. I am an engineer and I have been a union member for the past 30 years. I have a good reputation.' He had only of late come to know that some of Gawli's 'distant relatives' were members of the RMMS. 'I just know them as workers/ he claimed. 'Sachin is a graduate, speaks good English, and he works at the Khatau mill. That is all. I am sure that none of our members belongs to the mafia.' Jadhav was said to be under pressure from Sharad Pawar to quit the union because of his crooked connections. 9 On his part, Pawar reacted to Khatau's murder by immediately stopping the sale of any more mill land because the underworld had entered these transactions. The state government was also said to be planning to remove the textile industry from the purview of the BIR Act of 1946, but that was political bluster: the Congress had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing control over the union it had in its pocket. Govindrao Adik still presides over it, with Sachin Ahir as Secretary. (At the 1998 annual general meeting of the Mill Owners Association at the Taj Mahal hotel, Ahir was resplendently attired in a three-piece suit; indeed, he looked far more affluent than the assembly of mill owners. So much for union representatives of the RMMS variety . . .) After the murder of Khatau, industrialists were quoted as saying: 'The killing could slow down the sale of surplus land by other mills or the underworld may start demanding a share.' A magazine put the total value of over 500 acres of surplus mill land alone at Rs 8275 crore and these properties after development as apartment or office complexes at Rs 15,270 crore. 10 Datta Samant, who led the 1982-3 marathon textile mill strike, was a bitter critic of the policy to permit redevelopment of mill land. 'The sale of mill lands and other factory lands is because of the Chief Minister's policies/ he alleged. 'Several sick units have closed down over the past two years because of the nexus among the politicians, the builders, the owners and the unions. They want to throw the workers out and make money. Most of the mills are •not sick. They are made sick.' 11 As far back as 1991, he had warned: 9

The Week, 22 May 1994. 'The Khatau Killing', Sunday, 22 May 1994. 11 The Week, 22 May 1994.

10

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Manohar Joshi sanctioned the sale of surplus land but clarified that it had been permitted as an exception since the workers had themselves demanded it, because the State Bank of India (SBI) had refused to loan money to the mill to meet their wages till the disposal of the Borivli land was sanctioned. 20 Only the RMMS, which actually represented a minority of workers, agreed to any such deal, which reveals the collusion, explicit or implicit, between the mill owner, union and successive Chief Ministers, irrespective of their political affiliations. The sale was only permitted on condition that the land w a s u s e d for industrial purposes, to guarantee employment in the city. 21 She entered into an agreement with a wealthy diamond merchant, Bharat Shah, of B. Vijaykumar & Co., for the sale of the 40 acre-Borivli land in 1995. Shah bid Rs 80 crore for it through his company, Rishina Constructions Pvt Ltd. and paid an advance of Rs 10 crore, which was deposited with the State Bank of India, the main banker for the BIFR-approved rehabilitation package. The promoters, banks and financial institutions were to bring in Rs 15 crore each to meet Khatau mill's working capital needs. However, by 1997, Shah wanted to back out of the deal because land prices had crashed and the original terms were no longer favourable. 22 'The conditions are absurd/ complained Shah. 'I cannot transfer the property in my name, I must return 25 per cent of the land to the government, I cannot sell the land without informing that government. Who will invest their money with such conditions?' 23 Parma Khatau, who was caught in a bind with Shah backing out, reported she was re-negotiating an additional loan write-off with the financial institutions and was hoping to re-work the rehabilitation package. If the ICICI agreed to write off its loans, a fresh Rs 102 crore package would be submitted to the BIFR. She stopped paying workers their wages in February 1997. 'Operations stopped at the mills due to shortage of funds resulting from a delay in getting the consideration amount from the developer, which in turn was due to the delay in getting the permission from the Urban Land Ceiling Act/ she stated. 'As soon as the consideration amount 20

'Khatau Mill Land Sale an Exception', Sunday Mid-Day, 13 Apr 1997. 'Khatau Land Sale Gets Govt's Nod', Indian Express,17 Mar 1997. 22 Amrita Nair-Ghaswalla, 'Khatau Chief Restarts Land Sale Talks', Times of India, 5 Sep 1997. 23 Mid Day, 14 Sep 1997. 21

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15

funeral, it was none of the senior managers who delivered the oration but Sachin Ahir himself. He is reported to have pledged to fulfil Khatau's dream and shift the mill to Borivli. The worker cited that there were 500 employees who owed their allegiance to Gawli. Everyone in the mill was afraid but they could not raise their voices The RMMS had apparently because they had families to support. agreed to the retrenchment of 650 workers in Khatau's revival scheme. 16 Three days after the murder of Sunit Khatau, The Times of India carried an editorial titled 'Reprisal Killing', part of which read: At one level, the Khatau murder can be viewed as a fall-out of the continuing war between Bombay's two main ganglords . . . At a deeper level, the incidents reflect the lack of a rational land use policy in a city where archaic laws have pushed up real estate prices to unrealistic heights. The contentious issue of the sale of mill land is linked to the absence of such a policy. In the case of Khatau mills, located on 13 acres of prime land in central Bombay, the permission of the workers for shifting the mill had been deemed necessary by the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction. In the current climate of economic liberalization, which calls for the upgrading and modernization of the ailing textile industry, millowners desirous of raising funds for this purpose must provide adequate compensation for workers. The tragic murder of Sunit Khatau demonstrates that relying on dubious elements to achieve such aims carries too heavy a price.17

This was by no means the end of the Khatau saga. His widow, Panna Khatau, who had alleged that her husband's murder was at the behest of some of his relatives, possibly to deflect attention from his nexus with the underworld, assumed charge of the mill. The BIFR had sanctioned the rehabilitation package in November 1994 had given it its consent in and the Congress state government January 1995 to sell 10 lakh sq ft.18 Two years later, after a fierce controversy arose over the illegal closure of the mill, the BIFR threatened the Maharashtra government with legal action unless it cleared Khatau's land sale.19 The Shiv Sena Chief Minister 15

The Week, 22 May 1994. 'Give Us the Mill', Mid-Day, 14 Sep 1997. 17 Reprisal Killing', Times of India, 10 May 1994. 18 Sanjoy Jog, 'City Textile Mills Flout Development Control Rules', Financial Express,11 Aug 1997. 19 'Clear Khatau Land or Face Legal Music: BIFR to Govt', Economic Times, 15 Feb 1997. 16

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 163 consider factors such as the revenue generated and how it would benefit the city. "There should be an integrated plan for sale/ she added. 24 Sachin Ahir, however, dismissed the workers" co-operative for not being a viable concept. 25 The ICICI prepared a modified Rs 175 crore revival package for the mill, which envisaged the modernization of the Byculla unit. The Maharashtra government, however, told the ICICI that it had lost faith in the Khatau management and had serious doubts about the owner's intention to run the mill. 26 The BIFR itself objected to the management's revised scheme and, despite much lip-service paid by the state Labour Minister, Shabir Sheikh, nothing came of either Panna Khatau's plan or those floated by the workers. In August 1999, the BIFR was reported to have given its go-ahead for the mill to reopen, with the co-operation of Panna Khatau, according to the RMMS. The workers were to receive a third of their salaries for 30 months and bonus for three years. There was also a proposal to reduce the number of workers by 1500 with a VRS. The scheme required Rs 102 crore, of which a third would be financed by the Khataus and Rs 37 crore through the sale of surplus land in Borivli. Two construction companies, Krishna and Fateh Nav Nirman, were said to be interested in buying the land. The GKSS opposed the scheme, alleging that the RMMS had signed an agreement to pay one-third of the wages six months earlier, which had not been done, which was proof that the owners were only interested in selling the land, not in re-starting the mill. Further, it accused the state government of not being interested in the future of the mill, considering that it had not even sent its representative to the BIFR hearing. 27

Gangs Eye Derelict Mill and Factory Land In January 1997, Datta Samant was brutally gunned down by four hired assassins outside his home, sending reverberations through 24

'6,000 Khatau Mill Workers to Re-start Unit', Asian Age, 27 Dec 1997. 'BIFR directs Khatau Management to Submit a "Revival" Plan', Indian Express, 25 Nov 1997. 26 Sanjoy Jog, 'ICICI Chalks Out New Rehabilitation Plan for Khatau Makanji', Financial Express,16 July 1998; Sanjoy Jog, 'State Disowns Khatau Mills' Rs 175-Crore Revival Plan', Financial Express,30 July 1998. 27 'BIFR Opens Door for Khatau Mills', Indian Express,13 Aug 1999; 'Workers' Union Rejects Khatau Mills' Agreement', Indian Express,15 Aug 1999. 25

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is received from the developer, I am ready to contribute the balance amount of Rs 13 crore when I get management control of the company.' When the GKSS, the independent and committed cotton textile union, took up the cause of the workers and filed a case in the High Court, it directed the mill to pay the February wages in September that year. Of the Rs 43 lakh to be paid out as wage arrears, SBI would contribute 40 per cent, ICICI 20 per cent, the IDBI 20 per cent and the remaining one-fifth from Khatau herself. She wanted the builder to fulfil his obligation, since the entire scheme rested on this. "Since time is of the essence here, all of us— the BIFR, the labourers and the government —should join hands and recover the money rightfully due to the company from the builder . . . I would definitely like to get the mill rolling by November. And no, there is going to be no sell-out/ she promised. The extent of support expected from financial institutions is significant here: the only reason they were prepared to write off old loans or extend new credit was to protect the workers on the payrolls of mills. This is why land in the possession of mills cannot be treated as a private asset to be disposed of at will —the mills have been running on public funds and bear a moral and social responsibility towards their workers. Eventually, faced with fasts-unto-death by workers and a contempt of court charge, Panna Khatau paid the arrears of just one month's wages. The GKSS realized that unless it swung into action, the workers would be left high and dry. It floated a Rs 21 crore revival scheme of its own. It proposed to run the mill as a workers' co-operative, with all the employees joining the society and contributing Rs 5000 each from their provident fund, a total of Rs 3 crore, with the Maharashtra government matching this contribution. There would be need for professional management, as was the experience with the first such sick industrial unit taken over by workers — the celebrated Kamani engineering case in Mumbai. A board of directors would include representatives of workers, managers, professional textile experts to be nominated by the state government, nominees of financial institutions and the BIFR. They would require a professional Managing Director and other senior executives for production and marketing. Meena Menon, a GKSS committee member, clarified that the samiti was not opposed to the proposal to sell land per se but was "asking for a moratorium on the sale for the simple reason that there should be a policy decision on it.' Any such proposal had to

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 165 The more muscle unions displayed, the better the rewards . . . The high point in a career built on championing workers was when one-third of the oldest and largest group of workers in the city was wiped out by an ill-conceived, badly organized strike in 1982. With the eight [sic]-monthlong textile strike, Samant managed to do what no government or management policy could. The strike laid the ground for modernization of the ailing industry but at costs in human terms which were unconscionably high. It is a bitter jrony that Kamgar Aghadi unions continued to thrive after that disaster. 28

The Times' editorial, in nfiuch the same vein, was titled 'A Violent End': In the 1970s and early 1980$,Samant had become a cult figure of sorts for the city's working class, largely because he could extract hefty concessions from the managements of prominent industrial units in the forefront of Mumbai's economic boom. He frequently achieved this by the reckless use of violence as a weapon to bludgeon managements into submission, a tactic which he also effectively employed against rival unions. Samant dominated his union by a larger-than-life personality, thus making it entirely dependent on him for its survival . . . Unfortunately for Mumbai, the vacuum created by the decline of trade unionism in the city has been sought to be filled by the systematic intrusion of the underworld. The acknowledgement by the police that Samant was the victim of a 'contract killing' has reinforced the suspicion that he was very likely murdered by a powerful gang at the behest of vested interests . . . The rise of a new class of trade union leaders with underworld connections is also apparent in the appointment of Sachin Ahir, nephew of Gawli, as the general secretary of the pro-Congress RMMS. This trend, coupled with the slow deindustrialization of Mumbai, now poses a challenge to the trade union movement in the metropolis . . . His brutal death clearly serves to underscore the aphorism that violence only begets more violence. 29

Such equation of union militancy and strong-arm tactics with the nefarious crimes of the underworld was totally unwarranted. It took a contributor to the Economic & Political Weekly to speculate on who could have been responsible for the murder: The barons of real estate and designers of deindustrialization, for whom Samant was still a 'nuisance' for his dogged opposition to the land sale campaign? Corporate leaders like the Premier Automobile bosses, who 28

'Anti- Working Class Hero: Data Samant's Influence on Mumbai was Pernicious', 'Indian Express,17 Jan 1997. 29 'A Violent End', Times of India,18 Jan 1997.

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the entire trade union movement There was endless speculation regarding the killers. Just before his murder, Samant had been involved in a prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful lock-out at Premier Automobiles, which had a collaboration with Peugeot, at its Kurla and Dombivli factories. The veteran trade unionist, a former medical doctor, had made his mark in the engineering industry after coming into contact with patients who were working in quarries and getting drawn into their struggles. At the height of his power, he probably commanded the support of more workers as a leader of unions run by a single individual than any other such unionist in the entire world —as distinct from unions affiliated to political parties or other groups. His Kamgar Aghadi (Workers' Movement) had a combined strength of nearly 2.5 lakh workers in 300 industrial units. Although he is widely seen to have miscalculated his strategy in prolonging the 1982-3 textile strike and was alleged to be singlehandedly responsible forbringing this industry to its knees, it must always be recalled, as we saw in the previous chapter, that he was initially reluctant to enter into a struggle in this industry, with which he was not familiar. Two facts prove conclusively that whatever industrialists, the state and the elite thought of Samant's militant tactics, the working class revered him. He was elected to the Lok textile strike ended Sabha just a year after the 18-month-long (officially, it was never declared closed), one of five non-Congress candidates. More importantly, at a time when the media was writing epitaphs for the trade union movement as a whole —a cover story in Business India in November 1996 was titled 'Trade Unions: Losing Clout?' — the regard workers had for someone who did not compromise and was perhaps the last bastion against the general with such politics was evident in the spontaneous disillusionment turn-out of thousands of people for his funeral, the cortege of which wound its way through Parel-Lalbaug. A fair idea of the scepticism of the establishment with his methods can be gleaned from the editorials written when he was murdered. The Indian Express titled its comment 'Anti-working class hero: Datta Samant's influence on Mumbai was pernicious': No one who watched his rise to power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when he held labour unions in his fist, can escape the thought that in his beginnings lay his end . . . Above all, the terror of Mumbai's industrial estates, the great hope of the working class will have to be remembered as the man who sealed the fate of the trade union movement in Mumbai . . .

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 16'7

that the 36 acres belonging to the firm's Mulund unit ought not fo be sold. 31 In July 2000, three alleged assassins, connected with the Chhota Rajan and Guru Satam gangs, were convicted for Samant's murder. Dada Samant, Datta Samant's brother, was unhappy with the verdict, because he believed that small fish had been convicted, whereas he wanted to know who had paid them to commit the crime. Samant's PAL union rivals had been let off.32 According to B.S. Ghughe, Vice President of Samant's Association of Engineering Workers, there were severed disputes in the MulundBhandup industrial area involving companies which were trying to dispose of their land, which he felt ought to be investigated. The management of the defunct API scooter factory belonging to the Muthiah group wanted to sell 35 acres, which the veteran leader had opposed. A multinational company, Etemit Everest, employing 300 workers in Bhandup, had arrived at a settlement with the Lok Group to pay off the workers. The Samant union claimed the resignations were forced and the pay-offs actually made by the builder. Although the rumour mills worked overtime, and many speculated that mill owners may have been responsible for ordering the death of Samant because of his opposition to the sale of vacant land, there was absolutely no evidence of such complicity. In all probability, it was inter-union rivalry which claimed his life. Only a month before his death, Datta Samant had given an interview to Bombay Times. These are some extracts: I think the Sena-BJP government is more dangerous because on the face of it, it keeps promising one thing and when it comes to implementation, it does a volte face. Manohar Joshi keeps saying 'I will not sell the mill land' but the mill and factory owners keep approaching Bal Thackeray who gives the directives to Labour Minister Shabir Sheikh. Sheikh actually threatens the workers in some cases when the stakes are very high. Like Mukesh Mills near Colaba where some 12 acres of prime land is involved and the present cost of the property is worth over Rs 1000 crore . . . Mill and factory land cannot be used for housing or commercial purposes. Unless, of course, the Urban Development department gives permission for change of user from industry to commercial or residential . . . The mill owners actually don't want to turn the mills. Who would want to, when the government is willing to bend backwards to give them permission to sell the mill land? Are you aware of the going rate of mill 31 32

Gurbir Singh, 'Whodunnit?', Economic Times, 17 Jan 1997. '3 Convicted for Samant Murder', Indian Express, 25 July 2000.

166 Ripping the Fabric had grown tired of Samant's stubborn resistance to their dreams of rationalization? Thackeray and his men, afraid as they were that Samant might add a militant working class dimension to the growing popular concern over rampant corruption under the Sena-BJP rule? Or was it the handiwork of underworld dons who are out to lumpenise the trade union scene in Mumbai, dancing to the tune of the lumpen bourgeoisie's campaign for economic reforms? . . . The enemies of the working class have succeeded in getting rid of a leader who could still dare to fight for workers; rights in these dark days of Hong Kongization of Mumbai . ... The systematic destruction of the textile industry by proliferating powerlooms on the one hand and by a virtually officially sponsored sabotage of the National Textile Corporation on the other has often been sought to be explained away as a fall-out of the Mumbai textile strike . . . Was the Mumbai textile strike a failure? Did it really hit the proverbial last nail into the coffin of India's textile industry? As Samant used to point out, the textile strike was confined to Maharashtra and there was no action of even remotely matching dimensions in the mills of Ahmedabad, Kanpur or West Bengal; how come then all over the country today the textile industry is said to be in a state of terminal crisis? The 1982 textile strike raised the all-important demand of granting mandatory recognition to the union with majority support and ascertaining this majority through secret ballot . . . And, most importantly, the 1982 strike gave the textile workers of Mumbai a new identity and they are still proud of it . . .' 30

In November 1997, the police closed the Samant murder case as unsolved after naming 16 accused, though nine of them, including gangsters Chhota Rajan and Guru Satam, were absconding. Sachin Ahir was also interrogated. The police alleged that inter-union rivalry at the Premier Automobiles (PAL) plants was responsible; unionists cited how there were clashes between Samant and Ahir, who had gone on record as supporting the controversial proposal by mill owners to sell their land. With Ahir's tentacles spreading beyond the city's textile mills, their rivalry was intensified. Samant was ousted from Modistone's Sewri unit and Ahir installed as its union President. Ahir had also made a bid to enter the sick public sector engineering giant, Richardson & Cruddas. The previous year, Samant had alleged: 'Some management representatives were taking Ahir around the plant and trying to bring pressure on the workers.' According to a Samant unionist, Ahir's moves had closely followed the decision by the BIFR to uphold Samant's contention 30

Dipankar Bhattacharya, 'Datta Samant: A Tribute', Economic & Political Weekly, 25 Jan 1997.

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Regional Plan for 1996-2001. Narayan Surve, the well-known Marathi radical poet who was adopted as a child by a textile worker's family, stressed that workers, who had played a leading role in the freedom movement, were being pushed to the wall in the drive towards converting Mumbai into a Singapore or Hong Kong. The firebrand environmentalist, Medha Patkar, who has taken on the epic struggle against the Narmada dam, described the Plan as the blueprint for the destruction of the Mumbai region. 'The forces out to implement the anti-people plan are so strong that they can kill all of us, not only Dr Samant,' she declared. 35 In recent years, there has been a coming together of previously disparate forces: unionists, human rights activists and environmentalists to forge a common front. They have been at the forefront of protests against the nuclear tests in May 1998 and the anti-communal attacks inspired by the BJP-led coalition that year.

Thakkar of Raghuvanshi Mills The third and last of the 'mill murders' that shook the commercial capital of the country took place on 17 April 1997 —only three months after Samant's death. Vallabhbhai Thakkar, the owner of Raghuvanshi Mills was shot dead within his car by two assassins at point-blank range. Since Thakkar had voluntarily accompanied them in his own car, it was obvious that they were known to each other. According to the police, the gangsters were allegedly sent by Sada Pawle, a close associate of Arun Gawli who was running the gang's operations during the latter's imprisonment, to demand some money from the mill owner as payment for 'persuading' some of Thakkar 's tenants to vacate their premises. (According to a Raghuvanshi worker, the RMMS —headed by Gawli's nephew, Sachin Ahir —was like a wad of tobacco in the pockets of business magnates.) They apparently escaped through a route in the docklands —Gawli's ex-boss was a dock union leader, Babu Reshim, who had got several people hired in Mazagaon Docks, the public sector organization, during his tenure. Pawle and his men allegedly possessed passes to traverse this private dock road. 36 The docklands 35

'Blueprint for Mumbai Region's Development Comes Under Fire', Times of India, 20 Jan 1997. 36 'Sada Pawle's New Recruits Were Thakkar Killers', Business Today, 24 Apr 1997.

168 Ripping the Fabric land which is prime property in South Central Mumbai? It is not a question of;a few crores but thousands of crores. The stakes are enormous, both for the owners and the SS-BJP government. It is a virtual gold mine . . . I know in the next three years, there won't be any mills left and I am not worried about not having a job. But there will be the regret that the whole thing has been a big conspiracy. It was these girni kamgar, this Marathi manus who made the Sena and participated in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement . . . Thackeray's relatives have tied up with a murder accused, Karim Maredia, to construct a complex at the T. Maniklal Engineering compound comprising 16 acres in Saki Naka. Currently, I am resisting so many such projects involving hundreds of acres of land in Mumbai and Thane. Calico Chemicals' 60 acres of land in Chembur, Poysha Industries 35 acres in Thane, another 35 acres of land of an automobile production company in Bhandup and several other mills and factories. Of course, I am aware that I can't hold on for long. Because the strategy is that workers are psychologically broken down.33

Samant, as an astute trade unionist, was acutely conscious that economic liberalization and the easing of restrictions on the sale of assets by companies were all working against workers' interests and there was little they could do to arrest the tide. He cited how the mere rumour of a factory closing down would be sufficient, due to the climate of insecurity, to send workers scurrying to claim VRS at whatever rates were offered, virtually. To add insult to injury, looms would be stealthily removed at night, which would break the millmen's morale further. He also reported how he confronted Manohar Joshi a little earlier, who cited the one-third land sale formula. Samant thought this was a tall order because Pawar had promised the very same. 'When it comes to the crux, the one-third rule is waived for the owners. Now the NTC mills are also coming up for sale and it is the state government which will have to give the change of user. Wait and see how much money will change hands.' Only two days before he was gunned down, he seems to have foretold the chronicle of his own murder when he told a reporter: 'I think I am the only foolish trade union leader fighting for the workers' rights and I know I am going to die an unsung hero.' 34 As an epitaph, it is significant to note the tributes paid to the slain leader at a meeting on the citizens' response to the MMRDA 33

'Marathi Manus Made Sena, But Got Kicked in the Stomach', Datta Samant interview, Bombay Times, 17 Jan 1997. 34 ibid.

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 171

apparently revived the mill only to ensure that he could develop its real estate. Thakkar had also bought the adjoining Ambika Silk Mills, which was closed; its land was being developed at the time of his murder. In addition to the two mills, Thakkar owned plots and properties in Walkeshwar (close to where he lived), Banganga (an ancient tank and heritage site which several builders had wanted to fill and build upon), Breach Candy, Kalbadevi and the suburb of Poisar. Two years previously, according to underworld sources quoted by newspapers, he had sought the help of Gawli to evict tenants from a building near Babulnath. Thakkar was said to have purchased 11 buildings collectively valued at Rs 150 crore. One of the tenants told the police that he had twice been taken by Thakkar to Dagdi Chawl in Byculla, the den of the Gawli gang, to arrive at a settlement. He had demanded Rs 7 crore, while Thakkar was prepared to pay only a few lakhs. Thakkar was alleged to have even visited Gawli in his Aurangabad prison cell. In February 1998, Manish Shah, a builder and close associate of Thakkar 's, was shot dead near his residence at Walkeshwar. This was also believed to have been masterminded by the Gawli gang. Thakkar and Shah had constructed three buildings together in the area and paid crores as protection money to the Gawli gang. 40 All this yet again points to the close nexus between the decline of the textile industry, its professed rehabilitation and the involvement of builders and the underworld. In September 1999, the 1600 workers of Raghuvanshi Mills occupied the premises in protest against their salaries not being paid since July. Its new young owner, Hemant Thacker, wras living in London at the time. 41 In November 1998, an Indian Express reporter interviewed at length a former Gawli gang member who had turned himself in to the police as an informer. The introduction to this first part in a series titled, somewhat sensationally, 'Mind of the Mob', read: 'Express traces the route of laid-off workers, jobless youths to the underworld —one of the largest job generators in Mumbai today.' A former mill worker who then became a mathadi (dock loader) leader, described himself, in gangland parlance as a social worker 40

'Builder Shot Dead at Walkeshwar

Junction', Indian Express, 6 Feb

1998. 41

'Workers Sep 1999.

Take Over Raghuvanshi Textile Mill', Economic Today, 17

170 Ripping the Fabric

at Sewri happen to be not only in close proximity to the mill land geographically but, as we shall see in Chapter 7, share many of the characteristics of derelict industrial land. Some months later, Pawle himself was shot dead by the police. Immediately after the murder, when a delegation of city industrialists met Prime Minister Inder Gujral to complain that the law and order situation under the Sena-BJP alliance government was fast deteriorating, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray was quick to dismiss these charges: 'Thakkar fell a victim to his own folly of using gangsters to evict hutment dwellers and razing their homes. It was a case of personal enmity with which society in general is not concerned/ Pointedly, he cited how Sunit Khatau was murdered during the Congress regime in the state, under Sharad Pawar. 37 Govindrao Adik, RMMS President, echoed these sentiments: Tt is obvious that this is the outcome of personal dealings. It has nothing to do with his workers or the mill —there has been no proposal to he pointed out.38 P.N. 'Dada' Samant, sell land at Raghuvanshi,' Datta's brother who took over as head of the Kam gar Aghadi, clearly blamed the builders' lobby for the death of the owner. Unlike Khatau, Thakkar was not the scion of a prominent millowning family. He was reported to have been a cloth merchant and owned Mangaldas Cloth market in Kalbadevi. He was President of the cloth merchants' association there and had made forays into the iron and chemicals trade as well. He had obviously made a considerable amount of money because he was said to have financed a few films.39 He had entered the building trade in a big way and was the owner of the Ajit Singh group of companies. He purchased Raghuvanshi Mills from three members of the Mehta family in 1993 with an eye to selling or developing part of its real estate. However, the mill had been closed since 1989, when there were 1100 employees, following a dispute between the owners and union over the sale of mill land. It was a sick unit, brought to the BIFR for rehabilitation, and Thakkar was believed to have pumped in Rs 9 crore to modernize the mill, which had started making a profit. It had 800 workers and was solely a spinning unit which makes cotton and blended yam, along with other fabrics. He had 37

'Thackeray Blasts Complaining Industrialists', Business Today,16 July

1997. 38

.

39

'Killing Treadmills', Outlook, 30 Apr 1997. 'Soured Land Deal May be Motive', Asian Age, 18 April 1997.

Chronicle of Mill Miirders Not Foretold 173 'This is particularly manifest in the children of retrenched migrant workers/ says criminologist Sanobar Shekhar. 'For these second generation migrants, there is no village to go back to. Mumbai is the only home they have known. So what we have is a class of people that feels deprived, existing in an urban climate of expressiveness that encourages them to let it all hang out—it's a lethal combination.' 42

If there was anyone who sensed that the old industrial order was breaking down, it was Datta Samant. His last major battle was with the PAL automobile management, as we have seen. As in the textile strike, he could be seen to have failed abysmally. Eighty per cent of the PAL workers returned to their jobs in November 1996 after a five-month-long lock-out, after signing new deals guaranteeing productivity and discipline. An internal union was formed, with members deserting Samant's once all-powerful Association of Engineering Workers. Ironically, it was over a 1979 lock-out at the very same company, lasting 14 months, that the management agreed to concede huge wage hikes, albeit linked to productivity on a mass scale, to Samant's union. This was replicated across the Mumbai-Thane-Pune-Nasik industrial region and across different industries. 'I am the last bastion of trade unionism,' boasted Samant. 'The issues I am raising are broader and larger than mere trade unionism. I am questioning the very basis of the need for economic liberalization and the direction it is taking. And unfortunately, I am the only one doing so.' 43 The number of strikes and man-days lost due to strikes in the country has declined since the 1990s. According to the Union Labour Ministry, there were 1810 strikes in 1991, but just 252 in the first half of 1996. There were 12.42 million man-days lost due to strikes in 1991 as against only 5.61 million —less than half —two years later. However, the number of man-days lost due to lock-outs actually increased from 14 million in 1991 to 14.68 million in 1993, suggesting that managements were going on the offensive by preferring to down their shutters rather than settle outstanding disputes. Business India reported: 'The perceptible change in the attitudes of trade unions can be traced directly to the compulsions of economic liberalization. The aspirations of the working class for upward mobility and better lifestyle has increased their financial 42

'When the Mills Close Down, the Mafia Comes to Recruit', Indian Express, 28 Nov 1998. 43 'Trade Unions: Losing Clout?' Business India, 4-17 Nov 1996.

172 Ripping the Fabric

whose job it was to bribe lawyers, lower court magistrates and policemen to ensure that gangsters were quickly discharged or not beaten up by the cops. He was summoned to Dagdi Chawl in April 1997, beaten up and condemned to death by hanging, a fate from which he escaped providentially. He recounted how with the decline of the cotton textile mill industry, former workers were turning to crime. As the story ran: In and around Parel, Worli, Lalbaug, Kalachowki, Byculla, traditional strongholds of Gawli and Amar Naik, and once Mumbai's thriving mill district, a secret army of 'watchers' scurries around, desperately seeking a way out of the decaying chawls and moss-covered skeletal remains of industry gone to seed. 'The underworld taps young sons of redundant mill workers, industrial labourer,' says the man who calls himself Fauji (Soldier), a 20-year-veteran in the textile mills. It begins innocuously enough. They may be asked to keep a watch on the movement of a particular person or a policeman, or just the number of times a patrol van comes into a particular gully. For this, he is paid up to Rs 2,000, a handsome bonus for a family with a monthly income of between Rs 800 and Rs 1,000. That none of this is illegal clinches the deal. But this is the beginning of the seduction. Once he's comfortable with the routine, befriends people and develops some vices, the gang strikes. 'We engineer his arrest, usually on a petty charge . . . When the boy comes out of prison . . . he is given his first assignment . . . On the successful completion of this job he becomes a graduate, ready for a career in the underworld . . . The other recruitment option . . . is to manipulate the unions to get the boys either jobs in the mills that are notionally functional, or with the mathadi tolis where all they have to do by way of work is to go to collect a salary the first week of every month. 'Once a boy is buried under a debt of gratitude, the gangs call for favours,' he says. Arun Gawli, Rama Naik, Amar Naik, all sons of textile mill workers, launched their career in this fashion and over the years abetted the managements in the systematic criminalization of unions like the RMMS. The RMMS . . . has ensured that workers have to 'share' even their Voluntary Retirement Scheme fund with the union. 'Our tragedy was that this socalled representative of the workers sold out to sundry managements and became almost an extension of the gangs,' says Fauji . . . 'As long as the mills functioned, the social life of the workers remained organized,' says Girish Srinivasan, an economist with the Research Unit for Political Economy. 'The breakdown of that since the early 1980s shattered that pattern, especially in the Parel, Lalbaug and Worli area.' Apart from economic pressure, this breakdown led to a sense of rootlessness.

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 175

6000 employees. It was declared sick under the SICA. In 1991, it submitted a revival scheme to the BIFR, which was sanctioned in October that year. The company was to retain 3500 workers, which meant that the mill was to be rehabilitated without retrenching any workers. New machines, including 24 air jet looms, were to be was to be completed by 1992-3. installed and the modernization This was to be achieved by selling or redeveloping 1.2 lakh sq ft till 1994 to raise Rs 1.1 crore. In return, several concessions were offered the promoters, according to the GKSS. These included: i) ii) iii)

iv)

v)

Financial institutions and banks were to waive the penal interest and 'liquidated' damages (which could be quantified). For the period between 1986 and 1990, interest of only 6 per cent was to be charged on loans against the normal 10 per cent. The Maharashtra government was to waive interest and penalties on account of non-payment of sales tax, electricity dues and was to provide power to the mill on a preferential basis. The BMC was to reschedule the outstanding dues on water charges and property tax and waive interest between 1991 and 1996. The central government agreed to exempt the company from certain provisions of the Income Tax Act and to consider the company's request for exemption from Capital Gains Tax.

Once the scheme was sanctioned, a number of departments were closed, alleged the GKSS. No modernization was carried out. Workers were made to sit idle for several years and the losses kept mounting. Astonishingly, when the scheme was given the green signal, there was no surplus land of 1.2 lakh sq ft. The same story has been repeated in other mills. The promoters, in conjunction with the Operating Agency (OA) of the IDBI, secured the permission and subsequently closed several departments. During this period, part of the processing department was demolished to create the surplus land. The workers were shifted to another department and made idle. In February 1992, sections of the weaving department were closed and the following year, part of the spinning department followed suit. In 1993-4, some 2000 workers were pressurized to submit their resignations, even though this went against the spirit of the scheme. Out of fear that they might lose what was legally their due, 2200 workers submitted their resignations in a single day. None of the provisions of the sanctioned scheme were complied with, but no action was taken against the

174 Ripping the Fabric

46

commitments. With VRS and such other sops coming their way, the workers prefer to opt for the money rather than working class rights. Naturally, they are reluctant to resort to stoppage of work, which would deprive them of their wages.' It cites as the most interesting case that of Shree Ram Mills 'where despite union pressure, the workers accepted VRS and allowed the management to sell its property to realtors. Each worker got upward of Rs 2 lakh. Workers are more inclined to take a pragmatic if short-sighted view of the situation. In the Shree Ram Mills case, there was no hope of the mill re-starting. The workers were not being paid. The futility of agitation was evident and the workers disregarded the union.' 44 As we shall see, this was by no means an accurate depiction of the situation on the ground. In November 1998, the author collaborated with Sujata Patel, of the Sociology department of Pune University and Alice Thomer, of the Centre for the Study of South Asia, Paris in organizing a three-day seminar at the Asiatic Society of India on 'Work & Workers in Mumbai —1930s to 1990s'. (The two had previously edited two books on the socio-economic situation of Mumbai, and its culture, for Oxford University Press, which were based on a similar seminar at SNDT University in December 1992. 45 ) The author presented a paper titled 'Redevelopment of Mumbai's Cotton Textile Mill Land: Opportunity Lost' which was subsequently published in the Economic & Political Weekly 6 and reprinted in part or full in some other academic journals and newsletters. Shree Ram Mills was a case study in great detail, with material provided by Gayatri Singh, the lawyer who is a General Secretary of the GKSS. The first three cases in this chapter are taken from the paper.

Case Study: Shree Ram Mills A detailed account of the redevelopment of one mill provides an indication of how owners were in collusion with the state and financial institutions in denying workers their rights. Prior to the 1982-3 strike in the Mumbai cotton textile industry, Shree Ram Mills, occupying 9 ha (20 acres) in Lower Parel, had as many as 44

ibid. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds), Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India and Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, Oxford University Press, Mumbai, 1995. 46 7 Feb 1998. 45

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 177

in the weaving department —numbering around 400— were suddenly terminated. They had to file cases in the labour courts; which were pending. Apetition against the sanctioned scheme was also filed in the High Court, which stayed the implementation of the scheme and admitted the petition. The company then filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court. It allowed the company to implement the scheme but stayed the sale of land. The High Court was directed to hear the parties and hence the matter was referred back to it. Realizing that the sale or transfer of land or FSI would come out in the open, the company tried to settle with the Shree Ram Kamgar Sanghatana, the mill committee. The President, who was a Shiv Sena activist, signed a settlement with the management without referring it to the GKSS, which had fought the case in court. The committee agreed to withdraw the case from the High Court and accepted an extra payment of Rs 1 lakh per worker as VRS. The GKSS refused to withdraw the case unless this was agreed to at a general body meeting. Such a meeting was held and the GKSS requested the workers not to accept the VRS. However, the workers expressed their desire to accept this compensation, at which the GKSS stated that they could not support the workers in such a decision and hence would withdraw the case. While these talks were going on with the workers, the management submitted a further modified scheme in October 1996, claiming that it had continued to make losses despite substantial implementation of the scheme. This scheme envisaged further retrenchment of the work force, higher capital expenditure on modernization and renovation and a further sale of 3,01,392 sq ft of land. In return for this munificence, the company agreed to raise an additional contribution of Rs 7.7 crore as the promoters' contribution, which it would pay to financial institutions and banks, 'to partly compensate their sacrifices', in the words of the AAFIR. The Bench directed the IDBI to prepare a modified scheme based on the company's proposals (Table 5.1). . The company proposed an increase in capital expenditure from Rs 4.56 crore to Rs 30 crore, while compensation to workers would rise from Rs 20 crore to Rs 65 crore. Apart from the sale of a particular plot for Rs 41 crore earlier planned, the sale of surplus land or FSI was to rise from Rs 21 crore to Rs 107.6 crore and the sale of machinery from Rs 1.65 crore to Rs 3 crore. It would run the mill with 25,000 spindles as against 40,000 and process 50,000 metres

176 Ripping the Fabric

promoters. (In 1996, almost the entire work force, by then reduced to 1400, submitted their resignations en masse and accepted VRS, The package was considered unprecedented in the history of the textile industry: apart from the conventional dues, including outstanding bonus, gratuity and other legal entitlements, they were to be paid Rs 1.7 lakh as a lump sum a year after the date of resignation. The RMMS, however, opposed the deal, claiming it breached the Appellate Authority for Industrial and Financial [AAFIR] rehabilitation package. Vikas Kasliwal, Reconstruction's one of the owners, cited how they had proposed extending VRS to only 300 workers, but all the rest had pressed for it as well. 47 ) Following the demolition of the processing department, the management carved out a surplus area of 59,000 sq ft for the first time. This was sold as FSI and, what is more, the promoters disposed of the land or FSI without setting up a sales and asset committee, as it was required to do. Once this charade was enacted, the promoters again approached the BIFR with a second proposal, which was rejected. They went to the AAFIR, which sanctioned a new rehabilitation scheme in October 1994. This envisaged a onetime settlement of the dues of financial institutions, retrenchment of surplus work force through a VRS, sale of surplus land, operational restructuring by closure of unviable sections and partial of the plant. modernization This time, the weaving department was shut down completely and the spindles reduced from 1,22,576 to 40,000. From 80,000 metres a day, the amount of cloth processed came down to 50,000, with 19,000 metres of grey cloth being purchased from outside. The number of employees was cut down to 1450. According to the GKSS, the c o s t of the modernization scheme w a s greatly exaggerated. For example, it was supposed to cost Rs 3.67 crore in the first scheme even though all departments were to be partly modernized. Under the second scheme, the capital expenditure was shown as Rs 4.56 crore even though the spinning capacity had been truncated to a third of its former size. Workers were not given a hearing although their interests were severely damaged. They only learned about the fresh scheme when notices were put up in various departments informing them about the closure of the departments. Thereafter, salaries of the workers 47 Gurbir Singh, 'VRS-led Exodus at Shri Ram Mills Kicks up Storm', Economic Times, 2 Sep 1996.

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 179

during the second year of operations in 1997-8. For this to happen, 60 per cent of the yam would be woven as job work outside the mill and it would also buy an additional 55 lakh metres of grey cloth. The entire output of grey cloth, some 110 lakh metres, would be processed outside as job work; the company would also buy some 83 lakh metres of processed cloth. The crunch was that there would now only be 85 permanent workers and another 104 on contract. It is quite obvious from this lengthy recitation of the tortuous process of declaring three separate schemes for the rehabilitation of the mill that the real objective of the promoters was to dispose of the assets as quickly as possible and dispense with the workers too. How the BIFR could have possibly construed what transpired at the mill as its rehabilitation in any sense of the term is a mystery. The very fact that there was no surplus land amounting to 1,20,000 sq ft when the proposal was first mooted speaks for itself. At each successive stage, the cost of the revival scheme was hiked up and the functioning of each department was progressively dismantled. To pretend that a mill which boasted 3500 workers could function with 200 was on the face of it ludicrous. There was no attempt at monitoring by the BIFR or its Appellate Authority at any stage. The financial institutions and banks, too, were only concerned with recovering their dues to the maximum extent possible and the role of the IDBI in particular as a lead agency in this respect was particularly dubious. Thus the AAFIR entrusted the IDBI with the responsibility of ensuring that the nature and terms of the undertakings and guarantees made by the promoters towards paying an additional Rs 2 crore were satisfactory. How was the entire scheme in any way contributing to the rehabilitation of the mill when it was systematically stripped of its assets and workforce? The number of spindles was reduced to a fifth and the entire production of cloth was woven outside. The only object of the entire exercise, on the promoters' own admission, was to convert a large amount of space as a business centre. It was only belatedly in August 1997 that Chief Minister Manohar Joshi admitted that Shree Ram had leased its building to another party (Reliance Industries) without permission. The state government informed the AAFIR that the Shree Ram case was considered at the highest level and any hasty decision would affect similar schemes in other mills. It instituted an inquiry into the alleged irregularities and violation of DC control rules in this case.

178 Ripping the Fabric Table 5.1 Shree Ram Mills: Three Rehabilitation Schemes Scheme

1991 1994 1996

No. of workers

No. of spindles

Cloth processed (metres) 3

Area to be sold (sqft)

4,000 1,400 200

1,22,576 40,000 25,000

50,000 50,000 50,000

1,20,000 1,20,000 3,01,000

a

some proportion of cloth processed outside the mill Source: Gayatri Singh, Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, Internal GKSS document

per day. Capital expenditure to the tune of Rs 5 crore was to be incurred on 'installation of state of the art equipment for computerization etc at the office/ conferences, communications, commercial premises to be utilised as a Business Centre.' In March 1996, the company had leased 8000 sq ft to Avadh Estate Services as a business centre at a lease rent of Rs 60 per sq ft a month. By the end of June, it had earned Rs 19 lakh on this account. According to the AAFIR, 'the company would take up this activity on a large scale and would lease out a built-up area for about 20,000 sq ft to various parties.. .consequent upon which the rent is expected to increase to a level of Rs 100 per sq ft. An income of Rs 2.4 crore is expected from this activity.' Due to 'continuous labour trouble', the company entered into a memorandum of understanding with the remaining 1200 workers who were given VRS on the basis of 36 days' wages for every year of service, apart from gratuity and earned leave, as well as an additional amount of Rs 1.7 lakh per worker. Almost the entire workforce accepted this and the company estimated that it would have to pay out Rs 45 crore as a consequence. After taking into account the earlier expenditure of Rs 20 crore on retrenching 2200 workers, the total outgo on VRS was put at Rs 65 crore. As part of this rehabilitation package, the financial institutions would receive an additional Rs 2 crore and the banks Rs 5.7 crore from the company. The latter was left free to challenge this amount in court if they felt that the sum was inadequate. The Maharashtra government was enjoined to grant Shree Ram permission to redevelop or sell the additional 300,000 odd sq ft, under the DC rules. The company was expected to earn a gross profit of Rs 11 crore on a turnover of Rs 79 crore at optimum capacity utilization

r

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 181

the very low rate of Rs 1200 per sq ft, which was obviously an undervaluation. The IDBI yet again did not discharge its responsibility as the operating agency for this scheme: the elementary check which it ought to have conducted is whether this amount of land was actually vacant when the first scheme was sanctioned. Despite the sanctioning of this scheme, the company failed to reopen the mill. When the GKSS took the case to the High Court, it ordered that it should reopen. It did so after being closed for two years, but only took back 250 workers on duty and it was only partly restarted, with many departments closed. The company argued that there was an insufficient number of workers available, and therefore could not run. In 1995, there was a fire in the mill —a familiar phenomenon: the working sections of Mukesh Mills in Colaba were almost completely gutted in 1982, during the textile strike — and parts of the spinning department were totally destroyed. Several meetings were held before the state Labour and Industries Ministers but n o action was taken for the nonimplementation of the order. On the contrary, the Maharashtra government Secretary wrote to the A AFIR, stating that the scheme was being implemented properly. In January 1996, the Deputy Secretary of the state government repeated this to the AAFIR, stating that the government had requested the BMC to expedite clearance of the permission to develop the surplus FSI. On this basis and the fact that there were no objections, a modified rehabilitation scheme was sanctioned in March that year. At the meeting, the state government made no mention at all that the earlier scheme had not been implemented in letter, leave alone spirit. Workers challenged this scheme, pointing out that the area earmarked as vacant was by no means the case when the first scheme was given the go-ahead. It was available only after closing down a number of other departments, including the process house, and this is why the company kept other departments —particularly processing —closed. They alleged that the fire was intentionally started to clear the land: the same site was later up for sale. The government conducted no inquiry into the fire. They also cited how only 250 workers had been taken back and how many others had not been paid their dues. About 500 employees had been paid less than half their dues.

180 Ripping the Fabric

In February 1996, the state government had imposed a ban on land development within the mill's premises along with the general ban in the wake of the appointment of the Correa committee. In 1998, the Maharashtra government exempted Shree Ram from the ban on the development of mill land and regularized the construction of flats of nearly 5490 sq m on some 4900 sq m of land, despite dissent from the Urban Development and Textile Ministries. The state Advocate General's opinion had been sought and he had stated that the permission granted by the BMC under the DC rules for commercial and residential purposes was valid. The Textile Ministry had specifically mentioned how the permission was only granted to develop o r redevelop land for the p u r p o s e of modernizing the mill. Both the ministries had also objected to the illegal lease of part of the administrative building to a private company, and that too without a proper licence. The GKSS accused the government of favouring mill owners at the cost of the workers. 48 A writ petition filed in 1999 by Sanjiv Chimbulkar, a Janata Dal activist, stated that the provisions of the Urban Land Ceiling Act were violated by virtually all the private mills in the city. He alleged that he had learned that Govindrao Adik, who is also a Rajya Sabha MP, had received old looms from Shree Ram and installed them in Kopargaon, where he comes from. The Shree Ram premises also saw the opening of the first art gallery, Sakshi, in the mill area. It was fashioned within an abandoned shed, which was largely left intact to convey its industrial ambience.

New Great Eastern Spinning and Weaving The same manipulation of facts and figures is evident in other mills. In the case of New Great Eastern Spinning and Weaving, which has 2.31 ha of land (the owners, the Kanorias, were interviewed in the introduction), there were two rehabilitation schemes. The first, sanctioned in July 1993, envisaged running 29,700 spindles when the actual number in operation at the time was only 10,000, according to the GKSS. Similarly, it listed its weaving capacity at 304 looms when it was in possession of only a fifth of this number. The company cited 1200 workers on the rolls when the actual number was only 200. It stated that 1,20,000 sq ft of FSI was sold at 48

Sanjoy Jog, 'Shree Ram Mills Land Development Cleared Despite Dissent', Financial Express,13 Mar 1998.

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 183

out much earlier than envisaged in the earlier scheme due to the property development. It is clear that the company has substantially diversified and moved into an area which has nothing at all to do with textiles. In essence, it is only engaged in spinning and has abandoned weaving altogether. The gross profit from the sale for yam is put at Rs 2.9 crore as against Rs 26 crore from real estate—very nearly nine times as much. The very fact that there are only 300 workers left speaks for itself: the continuance of spinning activity is a fig-leaf to cover what is a full-fledged diversion into real estate. None of the agencies involved, from central government to state government institutions and the municipal authorities, appears to be unduly concerned about what is a major change taking place in the industrial heartland of Mumbai. The mill is now the site of the 40-storey Belvedere Court, dubbed 'the tallest residential tower in south Asia', as we will see in the next chapter. These instances should suffice to understand not only how the very rationale of the rehabilitation has been undermined, assuming as we have done that it is not possible to run the mill as a composite unit, but that the city has lost the opportunity to revive the dwindling fortunes of its central working class district. The onethird formula worked out by the state should have provided a modicum of security to workers because the entire sale or redevelopment of part of each mill was predicated on fresh investment in plant and machinery and hence the profitability of at least sections of the operation. This policy has been honoured more in the breach than observance: only lip-service is paid to the notion of abiding by the regulations and the promoters in virtually every case have sheltered behind the pretext of running their mills only to indulge in more profitable activity. Khatau Mills is an instance of even more blatant manipulation. There is another consideration which is relevant here. The millowners have borrowed crores of rupees as loans from banks and financial institutions, which is public money. How did these institutions not guard against the mismanagement of these companies and take steps to ensure that they recovered their dues? As we have observed, according to a study by Omkar Goswami and two others, between 1981 and 1987, the bank credit locked up in sick mills amounted to 9 per cent of all advances to industries. In the case of the beleaguered Khatau mills, the loans due to the

182 Ripping the Fabric

They blamed the government for not raising objections which would have halted the acceptance of the second scheme, which had further reduced the spindles and looms. After the closure of the processing house, additional spinning and auto departments, the area to be sold remained 1,20,000 sq ft, which clearly indicated that its earlier claim was untenable. Furthermore, the DC rules had not been complied with because two-thirds of the area had not been reserved for the BMC and MHADA. The financial institutions and state government had not monitored the scheme: there was no techno-viability report or sales committee.

Modern Mills In the case of Modem MiUs, which occupies 5.65 ha in Byculla and had been lying closed for eight years, the company submitted a fresh rehabilitation scheme to the BIFR in 1995, two years after the original proposal. Interestingly, the Maharashtra government had given its approval for the sale of land subject to the condition that the promoters reserve 10 per cent of the built-up area for a workers' housing society if the union sought one, but nothing has come of this proposal. The BIFR observed that the sanctioned scheme was to raise Rs 28 crore from the sale of surplus FSI and TDR. Against this, the company had received interest-free deposits of Rs 20 crore from Great Eastern Shipping for its real estate business which, the Bench observed, would not cover its accumulated losses. It was therefore advised to send in a drastically modified scheme. Its appeal against this decision was overruled and it did submit a third scheme in 1996, where it estimated that it would earn Rs 26 crore profit on a real estate turnover of Rs 86 crore. This was in addition to the earlier Rs 28 crore. Ironically, the third rehabilitation scheme called for a larger expenditure than the first. The AAFIR in 1996 ruled that it could also undertake real estate development. Ironically enough, another 100 specialized workers were to be recmited for the new spinning machinery, in addition to the 300 remaining workers and staff. The company expected to earn a net profit of Rs 69 lakh on both real estate and textiles in 1997-8. This third proposal was approved because it expected that the existing 7616 spindles and 864 new open-end spinning rotors, combined with the real estate business, would revive the company. Its earlier accumulated losses would be wiped

Chronicle of Mill Murders Not Foretold 185

India (IFCI) under the pretext of modernizing the mill, even while applying to the Urban Land Ceiling authority to demolish the mill and workers' quarters and put up a hotel and flats. The Maharashtra government rejected three applications by TCI for permission to close down the mill under the Industrial Disputes Act. After 12 years of protracted litigation, the company was pressing the High Court to reverse this decision. The Mukesh case was further complicated by the presence of 256 workers' tenements on 13,600 sq m out of a total mill area of nearly 40,000 sq m: not only was the site itself enormously valuable, but families had got jobs in the vicinity and were reluctant to move out. TCI had initiated proceedings against them too. Some families had been living there for five generations. A 50-ft-high wall was erected to block off these impecunious dwellers from their well-to-do Colaba neighbours and keep them out of sight. Since the mill machines had fallen silent since the early 1980s, the owners rented out the premises as sets for shooting Mollywood blockbusters like Hum and ad films. One could well picture willowy models sashaying along the sea front, with the bumed-out limbs of the mill serving as a backdrop . . . In 1996, an experimental performance titled 'The Hidden River', fusing classical and folk traditions in theatre and dance, choreographed by the celebrated Delhi designer, Rajeev Sethi, was being staged at the mill when it was gheraoed by angry workers. They remonstrated that they had lost their jobs ever since the mill was closed and while the management was earning an income from leasing out the premises, their living conditions were steadily deteriorating. Sethi declared: 'I am completely in sympathy with the workers. We cannot ignore the people who have given their lives for the economy and the city.' The demonstrators made the most of a well-timed and visible statement before a highly influential section of the city's elite. According to Sethi, who invited the workers to the following day's performance, several did turn up and participated in it. A drama critic commented: 'This episode vividly illustrates the point that while the economy may continue to court transnational investors, it cannot forget the workers outside the gate.'51 In February 1998, Mukesh was ravaged by yet another fire, which totally destroyed three floors of what were once the spinning and 51

'Displaced Workers of Mukesh Mills Upset Over Show Held in Mill Compound', Times of India, 1 Apr 1996.

184 Ripping the Fabric

SBI, which has its Director on the mill board as a consequence, are greater than the potential proceeds of the sale of its Borivili land. While many people believe that land belonging to millowners is their private property and they ought to be free to decide what to do with it, the situation is drastically altered when one realizes that crores of public money have been sunk into running these enterprises —in many instances, taken over in recent years by businessmen who only had their eye on the real estate.

Mukesh Mills The last case is that of Mukesh Mills—-probably sitting on the most scenic as well as valuable chunk of real estate that any textile unit occupies anywhere in the world. Unlike the rest of Mumbai's mills, it is situated at the tip of the island city, in the congested but upmarket Colaba residential area. It is smack on the east coast of the peninsula and is only separated from Sassoon Docks by a narrow channel meant for small fishing craft. It looks out on to the Mumbai mainland, and commands a spectacular view of the sea. Much of the mill, which sprawls over nearly 5 ha (12 acres), was gutted in a fire during the 1982 strike —an 'accident' which, workers allege, was engineered by the Transport Corporation of India (TCI), the owners, to close the unit and develop the land. The production facilities occupied 2 ha (5 acres). The Aggarwals, who own TCI, claimed they were losing Rs 5-8 lakh a month from the time they acquired the mill in 1975 and decided that it was not viable to restart it after the strike ended in 1983. A decade later, its accumulated losses were put at nearly Rs 9.5 crore. 49 Datta Samant organized a protest of some 10,000 workers against the closure of Mukesh (as well as a unit of Mafatlal and some silk and woollen mills) in 1983. He alleged that the owners were seeking to put up a five-star hotel on 4 ha, very near the renowned Taj Mahal hotel (five-star hotels and hospitals are entitled to an FSI of 2.5, nearly twice the prevailing 1.33). The state government promised a CID enquiry into the closure of the mill, but nothing came of this. 50 The Aggarwals were reported to have taken a Rs 1.8 crore loan from the IDBI, ICICI and Industrial Finance Corporation of 49 Gurbir Singh, 'Stunts at Mukesh Mills Get Locals in Fight Scene', Economic Times, 20 Oct 1995. 50 'Datta Samant Sweeps Credit Society Polls', Free Press Journal,7 Dec 1983.

6

Recycling Mill Land For over a hundred years now, the mills have throbbed in Central Mumbai, processing and producing cloth and providing employment for thousands of workers . . . We are handing over, as it were, a part of our heritage that once formed the heart of our city. How do we revitalize this heart so that it re-throbs with new life and energises the centre of our city again?* —David Cardoz, conservation architect No other metropolitan city i n the world, n o t New York, n o t Los Angeles, has the opportunity, as you have in Bombay, to do something historic as the key to development/ —Sir Bernard Feilden, British conservation expert

'Every city has to recycle its land, particularly when an industry is no longer viable/ said an unidentified member of the Charles Correa committee, who appears to be none other than the architect himself. 1 Correa went on record to Outlook magazine: 'My interest in the city is much more than the mill land. Since independence, only two cities in the country have seen planned improvement — Delhi and Bhopal. We have created nothing in any other city of the country. Look at the way Mumbai has grown —from almost two *An extract from the 'Report of the Correa Committee, 1996'. 1 As quoted in the Bombay Times, 12 Jan 1996. 1 Milind Kokje, 'Mill Land Becomes Bone of Contention', Times of India, 30 Sep 1996.

186 Ripping the Fabric

blowroom departments of the mill. The fire was caused by the explosion of gas cylinders, which caused panic in Colaba. The Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, which authored Murder of the Mills, alleged that it was arson to drive the workers and their families out. It drew attention to the fact that nearly 200 cars belonging to had been moved out only a the TCI-owned Wheels-Rent-A-Car day before and no film-shooting shifts had been fixed on the night of the incident. The curtain finally closed on Mukesh Mills in March 1999 when the remaining 107 workers and the management came to an outunder which each worker would receive Rs of-court-settlement, 6.5 lakh and in return, would agree to vacate the chawls once they ceased being employees. The management had originally offered Rs 5.5 lakh, but this was raised following the intervention of the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, K.H. Holambe-Patil, in whose court the cases were pending. The settlement is significant not only because it was the highest ever paid in a mill, which reflects the price of its real estate, but indicates what could be construed as a fair settlement. Since it was rumoured that the TCI wanted to put up a hotel there, this could apply equally to NTC's India United No 6, better known as Indu Dye Works, on the sea front at Cadell Road, which it also wanted developed as a hotel or hospital. 52 According to the political activist Sanjiv Chimbulkar, the total area occupied by private mills was almost 28 lakh sq m which, if developed as apartment buildings, could fetch a total of Rs 14,900 crore. He arrived at this figure by taking the areas submitted by mills for exemption as industries under the ULC Act or permitted for development by the state government. This revenue was to be compared with the dues payable to the workers, estimated at Rs 600 crore, calculated by paying each of the estimated 60,000 workers Rs 1 lakh. He submitted that the excess vacant land was not handed over to the state, as provided under the Act, and therefore ought to be transferred to the state to create jobs for the textile workers. He also alleged that the RMMS earned 5 per cent of the compensation paid to workers, which encouraged it to come to an understanding with owners to close down a mill. He implied a high degree of collusion between mill owners and the government, which appears somewhat far-fetched. 52

'107 Workers of a Defunct Mill Agree to Vacate Land', Times of India, 1 Apr 1999.

&

Recycling Mill Land 189

the statutory dues. Maharashtra Chief Minister Manohar Joshi, however, demurred: 'Personally, I feel that the proposal should not be accepted as it will be difficult for my government to run the chronically sick mills/ he said. 'Secondly, it was improper on the p a r t of the Centre to shift its responsibility to the state governments.' 3 Unlike the private mills, there could be no sleight of hand in selling off land under the guise of rehabilitating the mill, without doing anything of the kind, which is why state governments baulked at the proposal. According to the Central Board of Direct Taxes, the NTC's surplus land nationwide was valued at Rs 2389 crore and the sale of machinery was expected to fetch another Rs 124 crore. Out of the sale of land, as much as Rs 1,904 crore was to be raised from Mumbai. This constituted 80 per cent of the total potential proceeds, from 54 ha (134 acres) and seven buildings. 4 Within the NTC family, the six India United Mills, which we have referred to earlier as once being property of the illustrious Bagdhadi Jewish family of the Sassoons, were the jewel in the crown, so to speak. This was particularly true of India United No. 1, occupying 8 ha (20 acres) on Ambedkar Road, near Bharat Mata cinema in Parel and No 6, popularly known as Indu Dye Works, located on 4.8 ha (12 acres) along the sea front at Prabhadevi, to both of which this author was granted access. No. 1 was the quintessential sprawling composite mill premises, with every department represented and some living quarters. The big buildings were quite decrepit, and looked bombed-out; forlorn-looking workers peered at intruders from the broken window panes. No. 6, was sandwiched between Veer Savarkar Marg, better known as Cadell Road, the main traffic artery on the western seaboard, and the sea. It was, like Mukesh in Colaba (described in the previous chapter), a spectacular site. All the grey cloth produced in the remaining five India United Mills is processed here. 5 3

'State May Reject Centre's Proposal on 35 NTC Mills', Indian Express, 13 Sep 1997. 4 'Centre Seeks State Amendment of Law to Facilitate NTC Mills' Land Sale', Financial Express, 21 Nov 1997. 5 'Case Study of Surplus Land of India Dye-House, Mumbai', June 1996, paper presented by NTC (Maharashtra North) at seminar on Land & Laws, Coimbatore.

188 Ripping the Fabric to over 11 million now. Way back in million after independence the concept 1962 when yet another committee had recommended of New Bombay, the government had projected a population of 9 million. Yet nothing was done. Given this pattern of Mumbai, you have to increase the supply of land, which is not a mean task considering the geographical constraints it faces.' 2 As it so happens, the national capital —which is generally bereft of large traditional industries as a modem, planned metropolis — did witness a controversy over the redevelopment of land belonging to Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM), owned by the Bharat Ram family. This was located at Bara Hindu Rao, close to the old city of Delhi. It had extended over as much as 30 ha (75 acres) in the heart of the most congested precinct of the capital. The mill was reported to have lost its economic viability since the plant and machinery had become obsolete. DCM, one of the oldest textile brands in India, went to develop a through a tortuous process to obtain permission housing estate and DCM Techno Plaza, reportedly the single largest redevelopment of derelict industrial land in the country. The average price per sq ft in this commercial complex in 1997 was Rs 7000 —less than half the price at Connaught Place, just 4 km away. (Some 6000 workers were paid six years' wages which, if kept in a fixed deposit, would have yielded Rs 6000 a month. Up to Rs 16,000 was paid to each worker to vacate his house. The compensation package cost DCM Rs 120 crore.) mills could In the nation as a whole, while privately-owned wangle the sale of their land by hook or crook, the nationalized mills had to go by the official (read complicated) route. By 1997, their accumulated losses had mounted to Rs 4600 crore. As many as 35 of the 120 sick mills with the NTC were located in Maharashtra and 24 of them in Mumbai itself with 28,000 mill hands. There were statutory dues of Rs 122 crore owing to 1,07,000 workers in the country. It was always evident that the Union Textile Ministry was counting on the sale of the mill land in Mumbai to clear all or most of the debts. In an effort to break the impasse over the NTC mills, the Minister, R.L. Jalappa, offered to 'gift' these mills to their loans even while waiving outstanding respective governments, worth Rs 4000 crore, while the central government would pay off 2

Shekhar Ghosh, 'Correa Committee Report: An Unceremonious Burial?', Outlook,11 Dec 1996.

Recycling Mill Land 191

the politician took precedence over the professional architect and tenant activist. At a seminar on Land Resource: A Remedy to Textile Sickness in Mumbai in November 1997, he elaborated on the theme. 'Mumbai is slowly becoming a global centre for business,' he observed. 'With Hong Kong taken over by China, we have a good chance of making Mumbai the commercial capital of Asia [once again, as we have seen in Chapter 2, that impossible dream]. If we want to take care of the necessary requirements of a global business establishment, we n e e d s e v e r a l convention centres. The requirements of a state-of-the-art convention centre of international repute, if followed as per the ISO 9000 norms, would be a special attraction, not only as a convention centre, but also as an exclusive club for the most elite businessmen all over the world.'6 He believed that the cost of constructing such a convention centre by top companies which had built them in Chicago, Hong Kong or Singapore would not exceed Rs 50 crore. The NTC, Textiles Ministry, MHADA and Maharashtra government should form an 'International Convention Centre Authority' for the city. 'The India United Mills Dyeing Unit is an ideal location to start off with,' he stated. 'This could be a pilot scheme for optimum utilization of land, as it would be the only sea-touching site in the island city of Mumbai with five-star deluxe comfort rooms and a state-of-theart Convention Centre. '"Obviously, most observers had failed to take notice of the location of Mukesh Mills simply because it remained in private hands; it was smack in the middle of the CBD to boot. To facilitate the entire transaction, with NTC as one of the promoters, Prabhu suggested that it 'can always say that this is not a sale but a scheme for effective utilization of land. The efficiency of the scheme can certainly be enhanced if we ask for additional FSI from the Government and this can be justified as it would be a unique centre of world trade.' At the seminar, Prabhu mentioned how he collaborated with a representative of the architects' firm of Charles Moore (of postmodernism fame) and Karan Grover on an 18-month-long study of the reuse of Mumbai mill land, as was referred to in the previous chapter. The McCormick group had built a convention centre complex in Chicago which could accommodate more than 2,00,000 6

Chandrashekhar Prabhu, 'Revitalization of Textile Mills', paper delivered at seminar on Land Resource: A Remedy to Textile Sickness, Textile Association of India (Mumbai unit), Nov 1997

190 Ripping the Fabric It was a freehold site and, in the NTC's own case study, 'The locality is predominantly residential, having a number of multistoreyed residential buildings around the property.' It was only 12 km from the airport —unlike offices in the CBD—and was also walking distance from Dadar station. According to the Development Plan, the West Island Freeway, a 42-metre-wide artery along the sea, was proposed abutting the property. Unlike private mill owners, the NTC management was scrupulously honest enough to admit publicly that the vacant land belonging to Indu Dye Works was in excess of the 500 sq m and thus the provisions of the ULC Act were applicable. However, it preferred to go the BIFR route and opt for the application of the DC rules, claiming Transfer of Development Rights (TDRs) on the land surrendered to the MMC and MHADA to be used on plots in the suburbs outside the island city, beyond Bandra. The management referred to Charles Correa's official visit to the mill in May 1996. It noted that in this specific case, it was part of six United India Mills and the excess land belonging to all could be pooled, making it possible to develop all Indu's surplus for residential or commercial purposes. According to the proposal, 'There are certain provisions in the Development Control Regulations which can be beneficially exploited in order to have higher realization from surplus land. This factor is still more important considering the ideal location of India United Dye House in the heart of the city of Mumbai . . . The location . . . is considered most ideal for setting up a five-star hotel due to its location, abutting the sea shore/ The FSI permissible was 1.33, but there was an additional 50 per cent due for starred hotels, in which case it went up to 1.995. There was also need for hospital complexes. Under the DC rules, these were entitled to double the FSI, totalling 2.66. There was no mention of the fact the Hinduja Hospital is almost walking distance away. Yet another potential use was for an international convention centre, for which Maharashtra extended special facilities. 'In the new era of liberalization, the proposals of this nature are likely to attract special attention and the realization of land based on its use can vary considerably,' the proposal concluded. Whether by accident or arrangement, this idea found an unexpected proponent in Chandrasekhar Prabhu, the former MLA and MHADA Chairman who, as we have seen in a previous chapter, was once one of the foremost critics of mill land sale. Obviously, in his person,

Recycling Mill Land 193

Rs 222 crore if it was used to build a hospital complex. These proceeds are estimated under the assumption that stamp duty (10 per cent) and capital gains (12 per cent) would be waived. If they were not, the proceeds would be reduced by one-fifth. At the very however, that the view taken of same time, it also demonstrates, of mill land by a public or private mill owner is the redevelopment quite different from that of a planner who takes into account what would be desirable for the city as a whole. Thus, in the case of Indu Dye Works, even if one agrees that a hospital or convention centre is required, there is no thought given to the fact that there were comparable facilities at Veer Savarkar Marg and Bandra-Kurla respectively. The Correa committee took a much broader view of how the could prove beneficial to the public even while redevelopment compensating the owner. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the committee was compelled to look only at NTC mills, to which they were allowed access. The author accompanied conservation architects Vikas Dilawari, David Cardoz and Sandhya Savant during an inspection of some of these mills: they were part of the team assembled by Correa under the supervision of Sen Kapadia, Principal of the Raheja College of Architecture in the Juhu-Parle to enter these crumbling scheme. It was quite an eye-opener structures, with cobwebs festooned over rusting and silent spinning machines. The cavernous galas or sheds, with their north lightfacing windows, immediately recommended themselves for re-use as assembly lines for some labour-intensive occupations, like manufacturing garments. Alternatively, they could even be refashioned into TV studios since their roofs were high enough to accommodate lights and sets. Indeed, it was possible to intensify some assembly line production or office occupation by building mezzanine floors; in any case, each worker would require much less than the average 39 sq m which the Correa committee estimated for textile workers, which works out to only 258 workers per hectare. In his interview with Amanat, the newsletter of INTACH's Mumbai chapter, Correa said: The private mills (for reasons best known to them) refused to let the committee enter the premises. So we first concentrated on those sick mills which are being managed by the government. These were 26 altogether, covering an area of 110 hectares (out of a total of 280 hectares for all the mills). We had teams of engineers, architects and conservationists prepare

192 Ripping the Fabric

people. Other such centres included the Sheraton in Singapore and Asteroid in San Francisco. In Mumbai, such centres could be built at an expenditure of Rs 300-350 crore in the mills' vacant land, while retaining all the existing structures, which seems an impossibility. He cited how Reliance Industries was offering to develop such a site. In Bandra-Kurla, global tenders had been floated for such a facility. There had been offers of Rs 1685 crore for one site; the Taj group of hotels had bid Rs 1250 crore. Allowing his imagination to run riot, he said that the facility could have a club house, fashion centre, an International Textile Centre, an International Centre for Building Technology etc. He even offered to broker such deals and spoke of a Harvard University proposal to set up an International Health Policy Research Centre. NTC worked out the proceeds of the sale of mill land in Indu Dye Works, depending on what use the land was put to. See Table 6.1. Table 6.1 Proposed Sale of Mill Land in India United Mills No. 6 Category

Under DC rules: Area for res/ comm use For MMC ForMHADA TOTAL:

Rate (Rs/sq m)

Estimated proceeds (Rs cr)

Remarks

7406

60,000

44.44

6110 4999

20,000 20,000

12.22 10.00

Area for BMC/ MHADA considered as TDR under rules

Area (sqm)

66.65

18,515

Exemption from 18,515 DC rules:

60,000

111.09

27,772

60,000

166.63

Either exemption or amendment on basis of ownership of several mills FSI 2.00

37,030

60,000

222.18

FSI 2.66

For five-star hotels Hospital Complexes

Source: Case Study of India Dye-House, NTC (Maharashtra North), June 1996.

This clearly indicates how, even going strictly by the rules, land belonging to a single mill could fetch a maximum of as much as

Recycling Mill Land 195

quoting at great length what he recorded as his impressions of the mill structures: For over a hundred years now, the mills have throbbed in Central Mumbai, processing and producing cloth and providing employment for thousands of workers. But over the past four years they have, for the most part, fallen silent. It no longer is economical to keep them running and it seems inevitable now that they must go. But they leave a legacy of space and structures which still stand . . . though the mills are standing still! We are being handed over, as it were, a part of our heritage that once formed the heart of our city. How do we revitalise this heart so that it rethrobs with new life and energises the centre of our city again? The survey of the mills reveals certain typical features. The holdings are all vast (the smallest covering over 30,000 sq m) and they consequently span entire city blocks with access from two or three streets. This offers the possibility of new linkages in a redevelopment scheme. The buildings which cover the major portion of the land within a mill Can be categorized into four types: the first type are the ground floor sheds for weaving and processing, spanning vast areas, having a saw-tooth profile side elevation, lit by north-light glazing with south-sloping roofs supported by trusses and columns. In the earliest mills (over a hundred years old), the trusses and columns are of wood and the roofs of Mangalore tiles over wooden boarding and battens . . . Most of these sheds are sturdy, well-lit and with minor modifications could be adapted for new uses, such as studios or market places. Their south-facing roofs, quite incidentally, form ideal slopes for solar panel arrays. Internally, these sheds have a good height below the truss that could be exploited by creating mezzanine spaces to offset the floor coverage. However, maintenance cost of these sheds are likely to be high and this should be taken into consideration if the sheds are to be adaptively reused. In the event they have to go, their component parts could provide ready-made building component stock for fresh construction, thereby ensuring reuse and cost saving. The second type of building is, typically, a solid rectangular block of ground and 2- or 3-storeyed construction, mainly used for the spinning of yarn. The periphery walls of this structure are load-bearing . . . The internal space is divided into equally spaced bays by cast-iron columns which support brick jack-arch floors above . . . These storeyed blocks were all solidly built and despite the years of harsh usage, have weathered exceedingly well.. Their modular construction, good floor to ceiling heights and capacity to withstand heavy loading allow for a variety of uses. Light, non-polluting industrial spaces would perhaps work best and would help create job opportunities to replace those lost by the closure of the mills. Video studios would also work ideally in these spaces . . . The worth of

194 Ripping the Fabric survey reports on each one of these mills, so as to identify the various land-uses within each compound, the age and health of the structures, a n d so forth. This helped determine w hic h structures should be preserved—either because they had historic value or were sufficiently robust to be re-cycled. 7

The detailed surveys conducted by architects David Cardoz and Sandhya Savant for the Correa study group do not appear in the final report. They wrote: The mills have been an extremely important part of the history of Mumbai. In fact, they have been the backbone of the growth of the city. The cotton mills in particular are important historically, as well as sociologically, as the economy they have generated during the cotton boom is what led to the growth and development of the city of Bombay. They helped establish Bombay as the commercial capital of the country. To completely wipe them off the fabric of the city would be like blanking off completely a n important era of the history. This fabric, though architecturally of no great value, represents an important era in the development of this metropolis. The present economic forces make it unviable for the mills to continue running within the city. Also the high technology machines, with high speeds, may make the buildings quite obsolete, as they can't withstand the vibrations caused by these new machines. Also the large volumes and larger windows do not allow the humidity to be controlled well as required by the new weaving technology. However, these buildings are strong edifice's, capable of serving many more years of life if maintained well. The fact that the mills are located on now what is a very highly priced inner city property makes it subject to a number of economic and political forces. While other areas of Bombay have been covered by the Heritage Regulations, listing the buildings of architectural or historical value, the mills have certainly been overlooked. The fact that the mills are significant from both a historical as well as sociological perspective makes it imperative that the conservation status of the building must be considered before defining a re-use plan for the mill lands. However, protecting buildings without any re-use possibilities is dangerous, as they become white elephants siphoning off large funds for their maintenance. 8

Cardoz personally was visibly excited at the prospect of the challenge posed by the redevelopment of the mills. It is worth 7

Interview with Charles Correa, Amanat, July 1998. David Cardoz and Sandhya Savant, 1996 The Conservation Status of the Cotton Textile Mills in Mumbai, unpublished. 8

Recycling Mill Land 197 and categorise this equipment and preserve specific pieces to be housed in a future Textile Museum.9

The two architects, along with the third, Vikas Dilawari, and students, surveyed some 27 mills in the short space of just 20 days. Their brief was to do a preliminary visual survey of the buildings to inspect the structural condition, appraise their architectural quality and evaluate the re-use possibilities and potential. Only three private mills were inspected, since the rest refused. They observed that the private mills, unlike those of the NTC, had been radically altered to enable them to adapt to the new machines. An average mill spread over 2.8 ha (7 acres). In many areas where there was a cluster, they defined the character of the street and the vicinity as a whole. This is why the architects advocated that the recycling of these lands should be looked at as a larger precinct rather than as individual buildings —exactly the opposite of what is occurring with the private mills. They divided the mills into three categories, as we have seen in Chapter 4, reflecting: The conservation status of the building after appraising the architectural quality, the historicity as apparent from the existing condition, and the reuse potential. The cultural significance of the mills is also noted with reference to its architectural, townscape or ensemble value. A note was also made if it was important for its constructional technology, or as industrial archaeology. Category A: This category reflected buildings of good architectural quality, reflecting a typology of construction specifically used in the earliest mill buildings. They are buildings which are structurally quite sound, maybe in need of some maintenance and general repair. Mostly sound buildings, of special architectural or structural merit, which could be quite viable to re-use. They must be maintained as they are. Category B: Buildings structurally sound, revealing architectural character or structural system specific to the early mills. Mostly buildings which would not be viable to reuse in the state they are in at present without interventions, to restructure them for the new use. Generally these are structures like the Weaving Sheds, or the Engineers Office, which are squat structures occupying large plots of land. They could possibly be moved or restructured for new uses. Category C: Mill buildings with not a particularly interesting character, or not of the early construction style; in some cases not structurally too 9

Cardoz David A Report to Correa Committee on the Survey of the Cotton Mills of Central Mumbai, 1996.

196 Ripping the Fabric these buildings is particularly evident in mills which have modern-day RCC additions, which more often than not are in a far worse condition than their older counterparts . . . In fact, ironically, the older the structure, the better it seems to have survived and consequently the stronger the case for its reuse . . . The third type of structure are the tower blocks and chimneys, structures that form the visual critical elements of the mills. They are usually located alongside the main storeyed spinning block and complement its horizontal bulk profile with their verticality. The tower block is actually the dust chimney, a small rectangular or square room in plan, hollow from within and rising vertically upward without any openings until it projects out over the roofs of the main block it adjoins . . . The chimney of any mill is without any doubt its most visible and recognisable feature. The mill chimneys, even today, form reference points in Central Mumbai. Both tower block and chimney form essential components of the mill ensemble. Their small footprint and their role as visual beacons make a strong case for their retention, event though their adaptive reuse is limited . . . In the final category come the ancillary structures that surround the main buildings . . . Every mill has to have water for its reprocessing. This water is often stored in an open surface reservoir. These water bodies surrounded by trees and greenery form spots of natural beauty. They must be preserved and recreation spaces developed around them. They have served a useful role for fighting fires both in the mills and the immediate vicinity and could continue to provide this public service. Almost every mill has a number of large trees that are often as old as the mills themselves. They are valuable both for their beauty and their ability to cool and freshen the environment. Their location should be noted and every attempt be made to preserve and integrate them into the new development. Pathways between buildings, particularly in the older mills, are paved over in cobblestones or flagstones, useful material for use in redevelopment or heritage restoration. Presently the mills, not realising their worth, actually pay transport operators to get rid of this material. Salvage of this valuable resource material for reuse is vital. A similar attempt must be made to salvage old historic building material when structures are required to be dismantled to make way for fresh development. Their worth is often undervalued and they are sold off as scrap. Such material could be commissioned for use in redevelopment or restoration within the site itself or for specific restoration projects in the city. Finally, a word about the equipment within the mills. Many of these ancient pieces are now outdated and uncompetitive but represent innovative processes for their time. An attempt should be made to identify

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The India United group was known earlier as the Sassoon mills, a prime example of early industrial architecture in Mumbai. 'They may not be marvels of architecture like VT or Rajabai tower but they have a certain historical relevance/ s a i d a committee member. 12 These noble structures would in fact be of interest to architectural historians who study industrialization throughout the world: these 'dark, Satanic mills' were redolent of Dickensian times, an era which has all but vanished without trace in the industrial world. According to a former urban development official, 'the conservation committee could even start a separate survey based on the Correa group findings. The government is willing to augment the heritage list.' A Correa committee member added: 'Indeed, there should be a separate heritage category for the Parel mill buildings because they have a character of their own.' 13 Savant mentioned the fresh water tanks, which were a fascinating feature of many of the old textile mills. These tanks existed over a century ago and this is why the mills were probably located near them in the first place; this was before water was piped in Bombay to industries. Many mills the author visited —India United No. 1 and 6; Kohinoor 1, 2 and 3 and Elphinstone —had a tank within its premises, which would be the dream of any landscape architect. For those mills which were parting with one-third of the land for public parks, the tanks would form a unique amenity —for ornamental fish and so on. The small unit, Kohinoor 3, bang opposite the headquarters of the Shiv Sena in Dadar, in fact, was completely closed, with the handful of workers paid for doing nothing. But the unit swung into operation sporadically during the day when the watchmen opened the gates for the tankers which would trundle in to draw water from the tank to sell to the public. This was the only source of revenue for the unit. The Correa committee analysed how parts of India United No. 1 should be retained, could be retained and could be demolished, but was to be retained by NTC in toto. It stretched over 8 ha (20 acres) and had 1870 workers on its rolls. By contrast, the entire area of India United No. 6 was to be developed. Correa himself had always drawn public attention to the fact that Mumbai was that most wondrous of things: a city by the sea, its most prized asset. However, the public increasingly was being denied access to 12 13

ibid. ibid.

198 Ripping the Fabric sound. Also buildings which might have been some of the earliest mill structures, but have transformed quite radically since then by the interventions introduced, making them unworthy of conservation.

The only private mill that Savant surveyed was Great Eastern, which was one of the case-studies in the previous chapter. She found that it would provide a good insight into what other mills would be like. 'The India United Mills were probably built almost at the same period, and by the same architect, as the buildings are almost identical and so are the chimneys/ she reported. 'India United No. 1 was designed by architect W. Chambers and built for E.D. Sassoon. No clues to the dates could be ascertained. The India United Mill could be reserved for use as a Museum of Textiles, as it has one of the best ensembles of the mill complex.' According to two unnamed members of the Correa committee, 'Given that it is simply not possible to retain every mill building in the area and that mill compounds are inevitably going to change in form, the museum would be a symbol of Parel in its heyday. The museum could have machines gathered from defunct mills, photographs of the old mills, working models of the innovative processes used in textile making, samples of the textiles produced down the decades, and perhaps a section on the lifestyle of mill-owners and workers and the growth of the trade union movement in the textile industry. 10 'There is enough material here to make it a well-equipped museum,' the three architects continued. 'Moreover, Parel is Mumbai's original heart. We owe it to the city to retain some of its which found its way past for the future.' This recommendation, into the Correa report, raised the hackles of many mill workers, because it appeared to consign their beloved machines and buildings into the realm of history, when they were living and working very much in the present, and hoped for a happy future. The same insensitivity was evident in the remarks of a Correa committee member: 'Local chawls could be used as homes as well as artists' studios too. Our group has not yet really looked at chawl buildings because they have been located outside the mill compounds. We will, however, give our suggestions on chawls during the second phase of our survey [Author's note: which never took place], keeping in mind the needs of both the old-time workers and the new-comers.' 11 10

Gunvanthi Balaram, 'Parel's Old Cotton Mills Can House a Textile Museum, Says Panel', Times of India, 13 Oct 1996. 11 ibid.

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that asset by reclamation, high-rise buildings, encroachments by slum dwellers, commercial interests, etc. As the report stated: 'Mumbai island has a waterfront only at three points —Marine Drive, Worli and Mahim. In between, the road runs through an asphalt jungle. For instance, travelling through Cadell Road, one does not realise that the water front is less than 200 metres away. This is why the site is such an unique opportunity to have a new waterfront of 48,414 sq m, which will be as vibrant to the city as Chowpatty/ A sketch shows the stunning visual impact of removing the high stone mill wall: with mill structures on either side, the public would be able to walk to the sea face. This would be the closest western sea front for the congested areas of Parel-Lalbaug and Dadar. As a conservation architect stated, "A public garden and a club for water sports could be established here. God knows, the city is crying out for more open spaces and sports facilities/ 14 This highlights the basic difference between a planner's approach and an owner's to the redevelopment of the cotton mill lands. While the NTC wanted to sell the excess land to the highest bidder, as it were —for a convention centre, hospital complex or five-star hotel, in that descending order— the Correa committee was able to take a holistic view of the use of this precious land. It was not looked upon as real estate but as an asset meant to be put to the best public purpose. By clubbing land, rather than selling it for any commercial or residential purpose to the highest bidder, it could be put to the best use for the city as a whole, even while protecting the interests of the owner, state and workers. A highly venal state government and pliant municipal officials —not to mention the corrupt RMMS — would instead prefer to observe the letter of the DC rules, at least in part, rather than see the totality of the picture. The sale of mill land —and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, the potential availability of Mumbai Port Trust land —presents an opportunity for meeting the various social needs of the city such as may never present itself again. As we have noted, since there are already several restrictions on the sale of mill land due to the protection afforded to the working class, these were huge chunks of land —280 ha in mills and 730 ha (1800 acres) in the port —which will never be up for redevelopment en masse ever again. The three Kohinoor Mills, which largely stopped functioning during the textile strike, again present themselves as an opportunity 14

ibid.

Redevelopment

of NTC Mills: India United Mill No. 6

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almost a microcosm of a city with spaces within that suggest streets and squares . . . The present condition of the site and building evokes the feeling of a state of "post-industrial" decay. While most of the structural fabric of the buildings is in relatively sound condition (including the oldest ones) the deterioration . . . that has taken place after the mill stopped functioning over a decade ago is immense . . . Most of the buildings still have their machinery within, while many of the open areas are also littered with junk, scrap and defunct machinery. The vast warehouse and shed spaces provide immense flexibility, already suggesting directions for future re-use and re-adaptation. Many of the old buildings urgently require restoration and renovation. The weather, which often penetrates the buildings, and vegetation on site are damaging the structures and destroying their physical condition.'

Large Warehouse for Storing Cotton Which can be Reused for Other Purposes

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to plan holistically, rather than permit piecemeal redevelopment. Dilawari had visited them and reported on the first two: 'Both mills are located very close to Dadar T.T. and they flank the main arterial road, ie Babasaheb Ambedkar Marg. The mills, as we were told, are exactly 100 years old, ie 1896. They are relatively poorly maintained and in some cases, the top floors have been demolished. Interestingly, about 75 per cent of the workers reside in the vicinity.' He suggested that certain structures were very significant from a conservation viewpoint and should in all circumstances be protected and adaptively re-used. He singled out the chimney. 'Since the chimneys are elegantly designed, it is wise to retain its base and keep the chimney till you can scoop out a room 10 ft wide in its circumference with a cover tank above . . . Due to their excellent location, the mills will require a careful adaptive re-use, which will consider the movement, activity in and around the area and typology of the building in mind.' In their pilot study on Mumbai mills, Karan Grover, the Baroda architect, and his American collaborator, also chose Kohinoor. In general, they found: The configuration of uses of the mill buildings makes them suitable for a broad range of new uses. There are multi-storey buildings as well as singlestorey ones. The single-storey structures have magnificent north-facing glazed roofs, designed to provide even daylighting in an era before electricity. Today, they would be well-suited to house shopping arcades, convention centres, sports facilities and restaurants. The multi-storey buildings are well suited to housing, hotels and office buildings, as well as the sorts of industrial uses, both manufacturing and research, that they were originally designed for. In addition to new uses, it is important to understand that there remains a functioning textile industry, and even the NTC plan calls for continued use of the mill sites for textile manufacture. With the technological upgrading of the facilities, the industry can regain its previous strength. Thus this alternative proposal has the participation of the mill workers both in the continuing textile jobs as well as new jobs created by the new commercial uses. 15

Regarding Kohinoor 1 and 2, these architects reported that the oldest building sat on the western edge and the different buildings were distinctive, 'reflecting the architectural attitudes and expressions of the related periods of their construction. The structure of the overall built form that evolved incrementally is 15

'Revitalizing Bombay's Textile Mills: A Pilot Study' unpublished, Karan Grover, Moore, Ruble, Yudell, 1995.

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railway station (Elphinstone Road, on the Western Railway) to a that major traffic artery (Senapati Bapat Marg), it recommended there could be a commercial pedestrian plaza which originated in the railway station and led to the main thoroughfare along a shopping a r c a d e . Two other mills —Jupiter and Mumbai (Seksaria) —would be fully or partly converted into public parks. In the former, the existing structures, which had a heritage value, could be converted into a City Museum, focusing on the history of Mumbai and of Parel in particular. In their joint report, Cardoz and Savant stressed that the reuse and revitalization of mill lands was feasible only when 'the total area covered by the various mills are considered and not the isolated would be economically parcels of each mill land; revitalization viable only when the buildings are actively and sensitively adapted for reuse; introduction of service or non-polluting industries would be a good socio-economic revitalization policy.' It also suggested be reviewed by the state government's that their recommendations Heritage Committee before including any mill in the existing list. Mills could be cited as a separate category, since they could not easily be compared with other old buildings. Since Parel had to be revitalized as a whole, the approach to these structures would be different from individual, scattered sites. Furthermore, a salvage management programme ought to be formulated to take stock of the materials removed from the mills and these should be distributed or sold at a subsidized rate for conservation projects elsewhere in the city. They concluded: Old cities have always been interesting because of the layering of the history their physical form manifests. The existence of the old with the new, where both hold importance in the service they provide is what generates the genius loci (spirit of the place) of these cities. It is only the physical presence of these structures that conveys the history of the growth of the city, and imparts to the spirit of the city. To wipe out the fabric of the city's history would be quite an insensitive approach. In a third world city like Mumbai, even if the sky-high land prices argue for capitalizing land, the cost saved by recycling buildings cannot be ignored. Hence one can make a strong case for conserving these sturdy buildings into MHADA housing or government institutions or even commercial uses, hence conserving an important layer of the city's history, while continuing the development process. 16 16

David Cardoz and Sandhya Savant, 'The Conservation Status of the Cotton Textile Mills in Mumbai', unpublished report, 1996.

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According to a conservation architect, 'Parel offers a rare chance for scientific urban renewal in the city. It is important that every renovation and new construction in Parel reflects its special context/ The Correa report stated that 'while assuring full FSI benefits and flexibility of design to the developer, it is desirable to provide an urban design framework of development to ensure a cohesive built form. An additional set of guidelines therefore needs to be introduced to ensure a horizontal continuous streetscape, with features like arcades, uniform height on street fronts, restricted facade, treatments and street furniture.' Grover and his collaborators conducted extensive site surveys and analysis of the Kohinoor sites. They suggested that there could be a shopping arcade at one end of the plot and a commercial centre on a sound structure at the opposite end. In between, they envisaged a public plaza, as well as outdoor restaurants. At a presentation by Prabhu to Bombay First, at which the Grover and Chandrashekhar author was also present, they cited how the open area shaded by a large banyan tree outside the mill canteen would lend itself to cafes. Such suggestions rankled in conversion to boulevard-style the minds of union activists, since they represented the 'yuppification' of an area which they held almost sacrosanct as traditional, hereditary workplaces. While these heritage and conventional architects could be accused of looking too closely at the structures and not at their alternative uses —'missing the mill land for the stones' —the Correa committee took a broader view of the three Kohinoor units. It suggested that the Asiad bus stand which now functions on Babasaheb Ambedkar Marg, impeding the flow of traffic on this main north-south artery, could be shifted to within the mill plot. This could provide a full-fledged inter-city or inter-state bus terminal, similar to those in other state capitals. Interestingly, from the viewpoint of adaptive re-use, it advocated the transformation of the weaving sheds into bus depots. The remainder could be used for commercial development, since it was in the heart of Dadar, in m i d - t o w n Mumbai. A s for the third unit, the committee that the entire area, 10,250 sq m, be devoted to the recommended creation of a shopping plaza. This new development would be set back so as to create a major complex facing Sena Bhavan. The Correa committee adopted quite a different approach towards Elphinstone Mills, which has a small pond just inside its main entrance. Since it was one of the two mill sites connecting a

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owned by the Mafatlals on Senapati Bapat Marg, was a unit which went through the one-third official formula laid down under the DC rules. The management complained to the author that due to the interminable delays in obtaining permissions, the price of real estate had dropped somuch that it had badly disturbed the earlier calculations regarding the revenue from the sale of luxury flats, with a swimming pool. Another of the high-rises is the 39-storey Kalpataru Heights, on the Thackersey-owned Hindoostan Mills' land just off Jacob's Circle in Mahalaxmi. This towering edifice can be seen for thousands of metres around, and enjoys a commanding view to its west of the race course and the Haji Ali bay. Gushed India Today, which listed security as its Unique Selling Proposition (USP): 'Remote-controlled gates lead to a car park with electronic steel shutters. Every flat has imported burglar alarms and a closed-circuit TV . . . the entire building is earthquake resistant. Says architect Hafeez Contractor: "Today most real estate developers have to resort to gimmicks to sell their products." ' 19 Literally across the street is the tallest of the towers —40-storey Belvedere Court —being developed by the Great Eastern Shipping Co. on land belonging to the project's promoter, Modem Mills. 20 The news magazine dubbed it 'the tallest residence in south Asia. . . nearly kissing the clouds. Splicing the outer wall is a glass elevator that wafts like a bubble to the duplex penthouse, offering a heart-stopping view of Mumbai. For those with less time, a high-speed elevator shoots up the 40 storeys in 60 seconds flat. Below is a split-level car park for over 200 vehicles and a huge covered swimming pool.' By January 2001, a hotel chain was contemplating erecting a 57-storey apartment hotel complex — the tallest skyscraper in the country —on derelict land once belonging to Crompton Greaves, the engineering giant. 21 Early in 2000, the Reliance-group, which had made its name in synthetic textiles originally, became the city's biggest housing stock owner in the private sector, with assets potentially worth Rs 700 crore. It achieved this status by targeting textile mills and acquiring development rights in three mills —Shakti, Svadeshi and Victoria. 19

'Superiority Complexes', India Today, 23 Aug 1999. Namita D e v id a y al , ' C i t y ' s Industrial Underbelly is Set for Gentrification', Times of India, 25 May 1997. 21 Gurbir Singh, 'India's Tallest Building in Site: a 57-storey Skyscraper', Economic Times, 30 Dec 2000. 20

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It is clear that different architects and planners, within and outside the Correa committee, had their own ideas about what to do with the Parel precinct. As we have seen in Chapter 1, many thought it was ideally placed to become another central business district. Newspapers describe sources close to the Correa study group, which sound suspiciously like the eminent architect himself, as saying: ‘ A city centre can be put up here, similar to the Fort area, which is also a triangle. This will be a better location than Nariman Point because of its proximity to rail transport. Presently the area is under-utilized. But once it is developed, the tax base of the city will change.' The anonymous member also thought that the additional FSI would provide benefits in the form of large public spaces like Azad Maidan in the dense heart of the city. Besides, a cluster of tall buildings would create a landmark. 'It will become a marker on the horizon to identify a new growth centre in the city, a new heart of the city/ he believed. 17 (The desire of Mumbai architects to make such statements appears very strong: Harshad Bhatia, who is active in the Indian Heritage Society, claimed that the Rs 400 crore Bandra-Worli sea bridge would be important for establishing Mumbai's global identity, adding for good measure that those opposing it would change their views later. He recalled how Claude Batley, the outstanding designer of many prominent Mumbai buildings, had called Marine Drive an eyesore when it came up, but it is today a prominent landmark. 18 ) As we have seen, the Correa committee was unable to visit the private mills which form the bare majority in Mumbai. While the NTC mills have been frozen in time, the owners of private mills have surreptitiously been parcelling out chunks of land for redevelopment, either by themselves or by sale or lease to builders. One of the earliest such mills to be converted into commercial and later residential use was Phoenix, owned by the Ruia family on Senapati Bapat Marg, cited in Chapter 3. It houses the 28-storey Phoenix Towers —ironically enough, it may be said to rise from the ashes of derelict industrial sites. In the Phoenix Mills' annexe, now entirely given up for commercial exploitation, there is a ritzy bowling alley and a number of upmarket facilities. Matulya Mills, 17

Milind Kokje, 'Mill Land Becomes Bone of Contention', Times of India, 30 Sep 1996. 18 Vidyadhar Date, 'Workhorse or White Elephant Debate Rages Over Bandra-Worli Sea Link', Times of India, 25 June 1999.

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prospect. 'What we are seeing is a revitalized precinct right in the heart of Mumbai/ noted Kekoo Colah, General Manager of Knight Frank, a multinational real estate consultancy. The going rates in 1997 were between Rs 7000 and Rs 10,000 per sq ft, which was obviously only within the reach of the very rich. At the same time, he believed that it would take a lot more vision than merely a random sprinkling of upmarket buildings to change the face of this precinct. Sharda Dwivedi, the local historian who has collaborated with Mehrotra on the latest biography of Mumbai and other books on the city, confirmed that 'the character of that place is changing once again; this time, it is because of the mills closing'. However, new occupants were at pains to distance themselves from the blue-collar culture of Parel, calling their working address Worli east. Builders also added to the distortion by offering would-be buyers an 'unrestricted view of the race course and coast', firmly turning their backs on the grimy chimneys of the mills.

Up for Redevelopment The redevelopment of the cotton textile mill lands captured the imagination of many foreign architects and conservationists as well. Sir Bernard Feilden, a well-known restoration expert from York in Britain, who has visited India several times, stated, after seeing the mill area: 'No other metropolitan city in the world, not New York, not Los Angeles, has the opportunity, as you have in Bombay, to do something historic as the key to development.' (Feilden had set a cat among the archaeological pigeons some years ago when he was so appalled to find a youth sitting astride a stone sculpture at the Elephanta caves to have his picture taken that he threatened to write to UNESCO, asking it to remove the site from the World Heritage list.) 'Conservation and development can be partners. I'd often driven past the walls that bound the mill areas but I had absolutely no idea what lay behind them.' He was excited by the huge vaulted structures in a vast area, and realized their strategic importance. 25 As a man who had spent his lifetime devising ways and means of preserving stone and other structures, he wanted to reuse existing material wherever possible. Regarding the mills, he believed that: 'if it has good foundations, good walls, sound floors, you may just 25

Sherna Gandhy, 'Mills Can be a Boon', Bombay Times, 12 Jan 1996.

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Its satellite corporate centre is already located in Shree Ram Mill at Worli. Shakti is an artificial silk unit under liquidation and Reliance entered into an agreement with the Neelkanth group, a consortium of well-known builders, to develop the 2 ha property adjoining Mahalaxmi railway station and the Race Course. This will bring some 3 lakh sq ft into the property market —in a prime area close to Peddar Road and the Haji Ali commercial precinct. According to the Economic Times, at Rs 9000 per sq ft, this real estate would be worth Rs 270 crore. 22 The 114-year-old Svadeshi in Kurla belongs to the Tatas (the author's father-in-law happened to be its General Manager in the 1960-70s) and the sale of surplus land covering would supposedly fund a rehabilitation package. At one stage, negotiations were on between Reliance and the Govani brothers to jointly acquire its rights for 2.6 lakh sq ft. According to builders, the marketable area would be closer to 9 lakh sq ft—half developed within the mill premises and the balance under various reservations sold as TDR. This deal was reportedly worth Rs 120 crore, with Reliance having in advance bought several apartments in the complex for its executives. In 2001, a Svadeshi worker committed suicide after the 2800 workers had not been paid for eight months; other workers were threatening to follow suit in relay. 23 The management proposed to sell 48 acres worth Rs 150 crore to the state government to set up an IT complex. 24 Reliance has entered into another agreement with the Govanis over Victoria Mills —one of the eight contiguous mills which could alternately form the large open public space as a 'Golden Triangle' recommended b y the Correa committee. Its share would be 1.25 lakh sq ft and was expected to fetch the group Rs 30 crore. According to Rahul Mehrotra, the gentrification of ParelLalbaug had set in: 'This is the first time a low-income district is seeing a completely different strata move in. Right now, things are piecemeal. A skyscraper, here, slum there, some industry left in between.' Property developers were highly enthused at the 22

Gurbir Singh, 'Size Matters for RIL, Even in Realty', Economic Times, 1 Feb 2000. 23 'Svadeshi Mill Unit Sealed, Worker Commits Suicide', Indian Express, 20 Mar 2001. 24 'Svadeshi Mill Proposes Sale of Land Worth Rs 150 crore', Times of India, 30 Mar 2001.

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or a regular series of programmes focusing on the unique culture of the mill area —its stirring history, the contribution of the textile mills and their workers to the city's growth, its literary and trade union movements and their heroes, its culinary tradition. 'It is vital that the programme is sensitively planned and involves the local mill-workers, who have done so much for the city/ Adarkar stressed. 'It should make them feel that they still have a stake in Mumbai/ It was thought that such a project might raise the morale of the local unemployed population and perhaps bring in some opportunities to supplement their meagre incomes by running food or book stalls. However, he cautioned that Parel was a complex, problematic district where there were no ground rules — it was not formally declared a heritage precinct or governed by proper recycling of land and industrial structures and labour rehabilitation policies. 'The government should support such an endeavour because it will help the people and precinct/ thought Gerson da Cunha, the former chief executive of Bombay First. 'It is also high time that it formalized the ground rules for die redevelopment and rejuvenation of the area. After all, Parel is acknowledged as being among the world's greatest industrial heritage areas by historians and heritage experts. Cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, where such industrial and mill tracts have similarly waned in importance in recent decades, have devised rules for the adaptive reuse of these areas to promote their economic revival. As the renowned conservationist, Sir Bernard Feilden, pointed out, Mumbai would do well to follow suit.' Local historians were keen to open up areas like Cotton Green, the warehousing area belonging to the Mumbai Port Trust, for walks as well as opening up an entirely new waterfront along the docks by demolishing a few old structures. ' God knows, our exploding population needs more open spaces and recreation grounds,' they stressed. A student from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, M.A. Bravishwar, supervised by the well-known conservation architect Nalini Thakur, did a project on the adaptive reuse — a catch phrase —of Mumbai mills. On such reuse in general, he quoted the British author, Sherban Cantacuzino, author of New Uses For Old Buildings, who has also visited Mumbai: 'Because their structures tend to outlive their function, b u i l d i n g s have continuously been adapted to new uses —a fact which has enabled generation after generation to derive a sense of continuity and

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need to add a new roof, but you have rehabilitated two-thirds of the cost. You also save on the cost of demolition, carting away all the rubble and the traffic problems that the trucks will create.' He appealed that the city ought not to let this incredible opportunity slip through. He envisaged open markets, pedestrian plazas, housing and office space, all of it using the magnificent old buildings which were being destroyed in the name of development. He advocated the formation of a specially constituted authority with a permanent chairman to document and evaluate the structures. that employs architects and planners, 'Establish a commission divide the project into different sectors and give these to different 'I did it myself in Chesterfield. teams to execute/ he recommended. The town centre was to be redesigned and the commercial interests wanted to sweep away the existing structures. We talked to the citizens and finally 84 per cent voted for our plan.' With a rapidly growing consciousness about the need to preserve Mumbai's old buildings and heritage, as symbolized in the preservation of the Fort area by Rahul Mehrotra of the Urban Research Institute (UDRI), and the holding of the Development Kala Ghoda festival in the very heart of the CBD, local experts were equally enthused about the p r o s p e c t s of change in Parel. like Cyrus Guzder and Shyam Chainani believed Conservationists that the Kala Ghoda model —this compact area houses the museum and all major art galleries within a stone's throw of each other — could be emulated elsewhere in the metropolis to rejuvenate areas. The architect-activist Arvind Adarkar, who has worked on an alternative to the Correa committee report along with RK. Das, which we have referred to in Chapter 3, was more cautious. 'These places have their own characteristics and highlights, problems and potential, and the programmes will need to be drawn up after assessing the assets and requirements of each area. The programme does not necessarily have to be a cultural festival. It could be a walk, a citizens' initiative, a food festival, or all of these/ 26 According to Mehrotra, 'The idea is to find the contemporary engine that will drive the physical and civic improvement of the district in question. In the case of Kala Ghoda, we found that art and culture were the engine that could get this process of rejuvenation rolling.' In Parel, architects felt, there could be a festival 26

Gunvanthi Balaram, 'City Arts Festival Holds Lessons for Revival of Heritage Districts', Times of India, 7 Feb 1999.

Recycling Mill Land 213 wanted it vetted by a group of Mumbai architects and the Raheja College, which had conducted the studies on behalf of the Correa committee, offered a classroom for a presentation. Gray's idea was to use the north-facing roof structures to go in for hydroponics, where former mill workers or their families would collect rain water during the three-month monsoon and direct these supplies to a settling tank on the ground. This would then be pumped up to irrigate high-value flowering plants like orchids growing on the roof and would then filter down through reed beds and be cleansed in the process. The flowers would be exported —an unconventional proposition for rooftop floriculture in Mumbai. The scheme had the following advantages: it would use the existing structure, rather than demolish it; re-employ textile families, with a minimum of training, in the same precinct; be eco-friendly by placing the minimum demands on natural resources and help to green a 'rustbelt'. Even if the physics was in some doubt (the energy required to pump water), as well as the know-how (such flowers are extremely sensitive to contaminants and might not withstand the objectives were laudable. It the polluted Parel environment), certainly pointed in the right direction by preserving the mill structures and finding a viable source of alternative employment even while greening a part of the city. Despite such lack of details, the British school passed him.

Mill Towns in the West In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville described Manchester, the city of 'half-daylight', in terms which eulogized the mighty yet degrading in these famous words: power of industrialization from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world, from this filthy sewer pure gold flows29 Jane Jacobs, the visionary and path-breaking author in the 1960s of The Death and Life of American Cities:The Failure of Town Planning,30 cited in a subsequent book how Marx and Engels based much of their analysis of capitalism and class struggle on Manchester, the textile centre in the country where the Industrial Revolution was bom. They saw it as a prophetic city, but ominous rather than 29 30

cited in The Economist millennium issue, 31 Dec 1999. Random House, New York,1961.

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stability from their physical surroundings.' As a rule of thumb, Bravishwar cited how the test of reuse was whether the total cost did not exceed a third of the cost of a new construction at the site for the same purpose. 'Interestingly, more and more business houses are adapting historic buildings to their use as they see it as an imageenhancement measure/ he observed. 27 In November 1996, a group of students from the Architectural Association, the London architecture school better known by its acronym, AA, visited Mumbai with one of their teachers, Pierre d'Avoine, who was bom in the city. The attempt was 'inspired by a desire to explore beyond the familiar urban environment of the West, and to develop an understanding of a vast post-colonial city and its infrastructure, subject to a dramatic rate of growth, in the context of changing global economics.' d'Avoine suggested that the author give the students a talk on his ongoing research on the redevelopment of mill land. The task they set themselves —the AA is regarded as one of the most free-thinking, if not radical, schools anywhere in the world —was, in the words of its newsletter: 'undertaking research and design projects for Mumbai and London at varying scales, examining conditions that are emblematic of human activities and beliefs. Their intention has been to identify the characteristics of occupation through the observation of the everyday, documenting neighbourhoods of the city which may serve as an index to the whole. 28 'The consideration of the site beyond its perimeter, establishing cross-connections that will allow its disparate parts to engage in a dialogue with the surrounding environment, is central to the unit's approach, as is their attempt to discern the impact of place upon person, climate upon culture, and the uncovering of the relationship between architecture and everyday life.' The same newsletter quoted this author from the talk he gave them at the Kamla Raheja college: 'The question is whether any city is created by its developers, including architects and designers, as well as the rich and powerful, or as much by the common people who inhabit it?' Several months later, the author was contacted by one of the students, Russell D. Gray, who had worked on an alternative development plan for a mill site as his diploma project. He had 27

M.A. Bravishwar, 'Adaptive Reuse of Redundant Mills in Bombay', draft synopsis, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, 1997. 28 Pierre d'Avoine and John Glew, AA News, London, Spring 1997.

Recycling Mill Land 215 Wrote Jacobs: 'Even those observers and commentators, and there were many of them, who were appalled b y the sordid living conditions and terrible death rates of Manchester, and those who saw, as Marx and Engels did, how immense and ominous was the social and economic gulf between the few mill owners and their poor find hopeless masses of workers, even they believed that the terrible efficiency of Manchester was a portent of the cities of the future — if not all cities, at least capitalist cities/ 34 However, it was the very excessive dependence on one industry alone that spelled its ruin. The over-specialization portended stagnation and a profoundly obsolescent city. As The Economist commented in 1998: The reasons for the decline in Manchester's significance are not hard to grasp. The city was not just the first to experience the industrial revolution, it was also one of the very first to experience post-industrial decline [emphases added]. The rise of foreign competition and the dislocation of markets during the first World War meant that as early as 1918 the cotton industry, on which Manchester had built its greatness, was in trouble. The industry's decline accelerated sharply after the second World War and began to affect associated businesses, like engineering and metal-bashing; then the recession of the early 1980s applied the coup de grace to much of the industry that remained, driving unemployment in the city to over 20 per cent. The effects of all this are still visible just a couple of blocks from the town's main station. The Ancoats district is full of abandoned mills and warehouses—grand red-brick structures with broken windows and collapsing roofs on banks of fetid, neglected canals. The ravages of deindustrialization were compounded by some peculiarly stupid decisions by the local government. In the post-war years, when the city still enjoyed full employment, the town council took to compulsorily purchasing buildings in Ancoats for redevelopment. Many going businesses were closed in the process, but precious little redevelopment took place . . . By the early 1980s Manchester was left with an ugly business and shopping district, surrounded by industrial dereliction, giving way to inner-city public housing projects.35 Unfortunately, Manchester now seems to be converting, in the words of the influential weekly, from Cottonopolis to clubland as it undergoes gentrification with a vengeance. There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are more focused on cafe-bars and condominiums than on cotton mills. One such converted an 34 35

Jacobs, 1969, p. 87. Economist,1 Aug 1998.

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grand in its prophecy. 31 A s The Economist reported 150 years later, in 1998: 'There was a time when Manchester was the most dynamic city not just in Britain, but in the world. As the first city of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester attracted curious visitors from all over the world. Both the dominant political philosophies of this century have their roots deep in contemporary reactions to the rise of industrial capitalism in Manchester: free-trade liberalism of the "Manchester school" was proclaimed and elaborated by local men like Richard Cobden and John Bright; communism drew much of its inspiration from E n g e l s ' s observations of Manchester, elaborated in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. ' 32 Jacobs quotes a character in a Disraeli novel: 'Certainly, Manchester is the most wonderful city of modern times. It is the philosopher alone who can conceive of the grandeur of Manchester and the immensity of its future.' There was the stunning efficiency of the immense textile mills, which the hoi polloi held in wonderment. By the 1840s, textiles dominated the city completely, although the condition of workers was appalling. In his chapter on 'The Great Towns' in The Condition of the Working Class Engels observed: Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to state that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world [emphases added]. If anyone wishes to see in how little air—and such air!—he can breathe, how little of civilization he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither . . . Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have long since been abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter . . . 33 31

Jane Jacobs, The Economy Of Cities, Random House, New York, 1969,

p. 86. 32

'Britain's Provincial Cities': In London's Shadow', Economist , 1 Aug

1998. 33

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England,1845 extracted in The City Reader, Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (eds), Routledge, London, 1996, p. 53.

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National Heritage are placed in one of three grades to give an indication of their relative importance. About 500,000 buildings are protected in Britain by listing. About 2 per cent are in Grade I, 4 per cent in Grade II* and the remainder in Grade II. In listing a building, the Secretary of State considers only whether a building is of special architectural or historic interest. The purpose of listing a building is to ensure that care is taken over decisions affecting its future. Proposals for demolition, alteration or expansion in a way which might affect the character of the building require building consent. The Department of National Heritage in London announced in November 1996 that it had listed 30 historic mills in Greater Manchester, which date from the golden age of the textile industry. This followed comprehensive research on the architectural and technological development of the textile industry undertaken by the NGO called English Heritage. The research drew on the expertise of national and local bodies, including the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. Local people could also express their views. Heritage Minister Lord Inglewood, addressing the twentieth anniversary conference of the Architectural Heritage Fund in Manchester in 1996, said: The Manchester area was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, and the textile industry —and particularly the cotton mills —deft an indelible mark on the urban landscape and the lives of generations of local people. The mill buildings were at the forefront of the technology of the day. The changing shape, size and appearance of the mills over the years shows us how major technical problems were tackled and overcome. There were around 2400 mills in the Greater Manchester area. Yet by 1992, nearly half of those buildings had been demolished. It is important that we act now to identify the most significant survivors and preserve them for the benefit of future generations. Around 60 mill buildings are already listed, including two spot-listed . . . because they were under threat. In listing 30 more of these majestic and splendid buildings, the Government is recognizing the considerable contribution they have made to the history of the area, and to the lives of those who have worked in them and lived around them. The Government is committed to preserving the best of our built heritage. Listing does not mean a building cannot be altered, but it is a signpost to its importance. The best way to preserve a historic building is to keep it in regular use and many historic mills buildings in Manchester are fully in use and in good repair. When changes are needed, listing helps find a modern, suitable and appropriate new use to replace the original purpose. These textile mills tend to be strongly built, with large,

216 Ripping the Fabric abandoned warehouse into offices and identified his clients as 'artyfarty types'. An award- winning property developer 'makes urban regeneration sound like the battle of Stalingrad. The city, he says, will have to be "taken back block by block". By converting one block of abandoned buildings into loft apartments or shops, he can provoke interest in the next area. Five years ago, only 200 people lived in the whole of central Manchester. But a rash of imaginative conversions of old warehouses into new apartments, along with the development of the cafe and club scene...is bringing back residents into town. There are now over 4000 people living in the centre of the city and new conversions are sprouting up all over.' The magazine noted that like in America, the city had no idea how to deal with the ring doughnut of depressed inner-city areas that lie between the flourishing downtown areas and the prosperous suburbs. It concluded: The combination of drugs, clubs, guns, gang culture and unemployment has made inner-city Manchester fairly notorious. Yet, oddly, even this notoriety is reminiscent of the city's heyday. For every 19 th-century observer who hymned the praise of the booming new industries of Manchester, there were others who were shocked by the squalor and misery that flourished alongside the mills. Indeed, with its modern-day mixture of civic pride, entrepreneurship and seemingly intractable social problems, Manchester has recovered much of the mix that once made it the most commented-upon city in their world. However, there were more sensitive adaptive reuses for the Manchester mills. At a talk at Raheja college in 1997, Mumbai's well-known British biographer, Gillian Tindall —whose City Of Gold first aroused the interest of many Mumbaikars to its local history — cited that there were great areas of conservation interest in the clusters of cotton towns in Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire. There were once 2400 mills of different kinds in the Greater Manchester area alone; by 1992, half had been demolished. The mills were strongly built and lent themselves for conversion and adaptation, she observed. She referred to the black basalt stone and teak roofs of Sitaram Mills, good as the day it was built. The major difference between Britain and Mumbai was that in the latter, the land constituted valuable real estate. 'We don't have to look for such uses in the UK', she noted. 'Any use is better than no use there'. She later sent the author material on Manchester and other towns in Britain. Historic buildings listed by the Secretary of State for

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At this nascent stage of the cotton textile industry, mill buildings had features not dissimilar to present-day Mumbai structures: Although the various processes in the production of yarn were often located on several floors, looms were normally found in single-storey weaving sheds. With solid foundations, these buildings were designed to cut out vibration, and to provide better ventilation and uniformity in temperature and humidity than could be obtained in several-storeyed buildings. Weaving sheds are easily spotted because of the distinctive shape of their roofs. They were given 'saw edged' roofs with the north side standing at an angle of about 60 degrees . . . The industrial landscape which existed in the late 1800s has not remained unchanged. Many of Rossendale's mills and chimneys have been swept away; others stand empty and derelict. A landscape of prosperity has become a landscape of decline. The long decline of the Rossendale cotton industry began in the early years of the present century. During the First World War countries such as Japan and India, which had previously depended on Britain to supply their textile needs, found that they had to develop their own industries because British shipping was diverted to the import and export of more essential goods. Often these industries used machinery supplied by Lancashire manufacturers . . . 39

A site in Britain which has undergone major adaptive reuse is Dean Clough in the historic town of Halifax, also in Yorkshire. Sixteen mills were built between 1840 and 1870 by the Crossley family to house one of the world's largest carpet factories. They ceased production in 1982. This complex occupies one million sq ft and stretches three quarters of a mile from end to end. Sir Ernest Hall bought the mills when they were empty and derelict in 1983, and with his son spent the next 15 years transforming the site into what he termed a practical utopia. Dean Clough is now a centre for business, arts, design and education, a thriving complex of commerce and creativity. There are over a hundred companies and organizations operating from there, employing more than 3000 people. On the ashes of these mills have risen new art studios and galleries. As a company hand-out states: 'The artistic community is made up of more than 20 painters, sculptors and printmakers, working in on-site studios. There is a stunning network of galleries which show a range of contemporary art and design. The galleries have an ongoing programme of talks and workshops alongside the 39

ibid.

218 Ripping the Fabric open floorspaces and generous levels of natural lighting. They lend themselves to conversion and adaptation . . . I urge local planning authorities to consider sympathetically proposals to breathe new life into historic buildings which have become disused; to take full account of the environmental and economic benefits which alteration and conversion can bring; and to remember that if these buildings are not permitted to adapt and evolve, their future will be prejudiced. I look forward to the historic buildings listed today playing an important part in the future of the area.36

Elsewhere in the city, the old cotton exchange has been converted into a theatre erected symbolically within the vast space of 'the old temple of cotton' itself. A textile warehouse has become a highstatus hotel. The abandoned Central Station has been turned into a commercial exhibition centre, while a large decaying station hotel has been rehabilitated as an up-market hotel complex. 37 Of course, the woollen industry predated cotton in the first country to industrialize. In Rossendale, Lancashire, for example, the long association with wool made it easier for the town to switch to cotton. Conservationists there have a credo: 'Everywhere industry influences our lives in some way, if only in the view from our windows. The legacy of the past is all around us—stone built mills, tall chimneys . . .' The new' spinning machines in the late spinning jenny, Richard eighteenth century —James Hargreaves' Arkwright's water frame and Samuel Crompton's mule —required water power to operate; Rossendale's damp climate provided suitable streams and helped cotton fibres to cling together (an advantage much more readily at hand in humid Mumbai). The entrepreneurs, who were often millworkers themselves, began in the early nineteenth century to become the Cotton Lords. Some such were described in 1868 in the following terms: 'Men almost, sometimes wholly, illiterate, have risen to prodigious wealth and indulge in a profuse luxury which strangely contrast with the primitive simplicity of their own manners. A millionaire has cousins and even brothers among the operatives, and is socially on a level with his own workpeople, to whose class he belonged a year or two before.'38 36

Press Note, Department of National Heritage, London, 5 Nov 1996. Brian Robson, 'Premature Obituaries: Change and Adaptation in the Great Cities' in The Rise and Fall of Great Cities, Richard Lawton (ed), Belhaven Press, London and NY, 1989, pp. 50-1. 38 The Changing Faces of Rossendale,Rossendale Groundwork Trust and Rossendale Borough Council, Lancashire. 37

Recycling Mill Land 221 plentiful. In each case, it was the combination of traditional forms with natural materials —stones, slates, bricks, tiles—and punctuation of the large expanses of walling by window of Georgian proportions which has made their assimilation with the urban"fabric possible . . . At Wiltshire, the false ceilings, which conceal the floor structure, were required by the fire department. Because the standards expected by fire officers today are quite different from the standards imposed on mill workers in the past, the rough stone walls have been plastered and the coarse-grained timber floor carpeted. Multiple divisions, required for conversion into flats or houses, is more acceptable in the early timber structures. Once cast-iron columns come into use, especially with brick segmental arches forming a fire-proof floor, subdivisions could be disharmonious with the structure. This is not the case with the Yorkshire mill where infrequent divisions and less intensive cosmetic treatment have resulted in preserving an authenticity. 40

In 2000, Colin Cunningham, an architectural historian who was formerly a lecturer at The Open University in Cambridge, met the author and mentioned how he was about to embark on an extensive comparison of British and Mumbai/ Ahmedabad mills. In his research proposal, he cited how much had been published on the architecture of British mills, industrial structures and the like, but there had been no detailed study of the total architectural enterprise of entire mills and their related facilities. 'Equally important/ he noted, 'there has been no comparison between the British and Indian situations, although the industries were parallel, reached a parallel state of technical development by the end of the 19 th century, and were often in direct competition.' These included mills in Manchester and Halifax (Copley and Dean Clough). In Mumbai, he proposed to study Ruby, United, Elphinstone, Goldmohur and Mafatlal. Back the following year, he made a case for preserving mills in Mumbai on the lines of Helmshore Mills, which had been taken over by the Lancashire County Council and turned into a museum. On the other hand, when Salt Mills in Bradford ceased to be the great social statement of the industrial age, it was converted into an address for profitable ends; the mill and adjoining model industrial village of Saltaire are now the address of many upmarket firms, art galleries and eateries. He made out a case for converting many of the cavernous engine houses in Mumbai mills into 40

Bravishwar. See footnote 27.

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exhibitions. Dean Clough itself has a permanent art collection of more than 600 items —much of it hanging in corridors and offices throughout the site/ Several theatre companies are located there too. On the education front is Design Dimension, a national education trust which aims to raise awareness, particularly in schools. In 1995, the Royal 'Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce established its first centre outside London at Dean Clough. While such redevelopment may have been feasible in Thatcherite England, it is not clear whether any of these economic and cultural activities catered to the needs of those families who were rendered unemployed when the mills downed their shutters in 1982. Indeed, Dean Clough boasted of the Design House Restaurant, where the s t a r chef c r e a t e s m o d e r n international cuisine in stylish surroundings. This gentrification of a very proletarian building site raises many disturbing questions, which have their echo in Mumbai. Rahul Mehrotra has very sensitively redesigned a shed in the controversial Shree Ram Mills as the Sakshi art gallery. At the opening, many artists and critics were very hopeful of this setting a new trend in revitalizing the entire precinct. Meili Gobhai, a Mumbai artist, even went so far as to compare it with New York's SoHo. More than arts, it is likely that yuppie pursuits will get a fillip in Parel-Lalbaug, with the new class of employees in advertising and other service industries moving in. With an ethnic seafood restaurant and bowling alley in Phoenix Mills, the trend has already begun. By contrast, there is a famous proletarian Mumbai institution known as the khanawali, which truly flourished during the mills' hey-day, where women catered inexpensive yet nutritious meals for the mill workers. The Delhi architecture student, M.A. Bravishwar, cites two other case studies of mills which have been redeveloped: the Abbey mill in Wiltshire and Moorside mills in Yorkshire. He writes: Both these mills belong to the late 19 th century, right about the time when mills sprouted everywhere, due to the 'cotton boom', in Bombay. While the mill at Wiltshire was built when the local industry was in decline and hence became redundant soon, the mill at Yorkshire continued to be used until even the 1970s. Like their Georgian predecessors, both these mills are large multi-storeys and industrial in character. Just as the earlier mills were assimilated into the landscape when the need for power kept them in rural surroundings of river valleys, so they were assimilated into an urban setting after their move to towns, where the supply of labour was

Recycling Mill Land 223

answer was: Lowell. In his American Notes: A Journey, he noted the great difference between this town and those great haunts of misery in his own country. 43 The city continued to grow, its booming economy fuelled by wave after wave of European immigrants. 44 Lowell's cotton mills have often been seen as a shining example of American industry and their impact on various areas has been much studied. However, some US scholars paint a different picture of the town. Laurence E Gross, formerly Chief Curator of the Museum of American Textile History, alleges that owners would refuse to reinvest profits; there was increasing inefficiency; the machinery was so antiquated that workers' safety became an issue; ultimately, the industry began its flight southwards, all of which are all-too-familiar trends in the Mumbai mills.45 (Even the migration southwards has in a sense taken place, with the emergence of Coimbatore as a leading textile town and Tirupur, a garment manufacturing centre.) And Jane Jacobs writes that in the middle of the twentieth century, Boston did not lack capital but did not employ it productively: 'some of it was poured into old and moribund mills . . . that were being run aground b y incompetents or milked by respectable scoundrels'. 46 Once again, the parallel with Mumbai is too close for comfort. Lowell's golden age as America's First Industrial City was shortlived. Like other New England textile cities, Lowell began to decline after the First World War. By the mid-1970s, it had lost about a third of its peak population and was 'decayed, depressed and depressing'. It was transformed from a Yankee mill town, with its burgeoning mill labour force, to a diverse working-class city. In the late 1990s, it had an 18 per cent poverty rate, with a quarter of its citizens minorities, and high unemployment. However, attempts were made to arrest this downward trend. Under a $200,000 'Brownfields' pilot project— an American term referring to former 43

cited in 'Revitalizing the Industrial City', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sage, Newbury Park, Calif., Nov 1986. 44 William A. Davis, 'Lowell Restores Historic Mills', Boston Globe, Boston, 30 May 1982. 45 Laurence F. Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts 1835-1955, Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 46 Jacobs, 1969, p. 204.

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community halls: their structures were in good shape, thanks to the liberal use of steel. 41 Dundee in Scotland was the centre of the jute textile industry in the nineteenth century, where wealthy mill owners made packing material from the fibre imported from India. Wolfgang Jabs, who teaches architecture in the city, wrote to the author: 'The wealthiest people in Europe lived here for a while, and built big houses. The money earned from the textile mills was invested into the American railroads and hence Dundee supported American development. There were more textile mills here than anywhere else; the biggest mill in the world was built here in the 1880-90s. All that is gone. Dundee also developed weaving machines to replace labour— formerly cheap, but having become too expensive to survive in the markets with cheapest products. Mechanization worked for a while but then the machines themselves became a means of earning money. They were sold to Calcutta where Indians promptly started making jute products cheaper than Dundee did. The city went out of business. It has declined ever since, but for the shift to education. Dundee now has several tertiary educational institutions and two universities. The mills have either been removed or redeveloped, mostly into housing/ 42

Back in the USA The American textile industry has also had its share of ups and downs. The town of Lowell in Massachusetts, 30 miles from Boston, has been known, if not as the cradle, as the high school and college of the Industrial Revolution in New England. In 1822, a group of merchants set up the Boston Manufacturing Co, besides a waterfall on the Merrimac river there. It was called Lowell after the founder who, after a tour of British textile factories—shades of J.N. Tata with his foray into steel —returned home 'with both the design of an improved power loom and the concept of a utopian industrial town in his head', according to the Boston Globe. Within a decade, it was known as 'Spindle City' with 17,000 people. When Charles Dickens arrived in the US for the first time in 1842 and was asked which of America's wonders he wanted most to see, the immediate 41

Vidyadhar Date, 'Presefve Textile Mill Areas in Mumbai, says British Historian', Times of India, 5 Apr 2001. 42 personal communication

Recycling Mill Land 225

Another New England textile town that has seen redevelopment is Lewiston, in Maine. Since the Civil War, when the Bates Mill there helped outfit an army, this mill had been the anchor of western Maine, serving as the state's single largest employer till the early 1960s. The decline of the legendary New England textile industry left Bates Mill with nearly 1.2 million sq ft of space unoccupied and available for a wide variety of mixed-use commercial, industrial, retail, recreational and service sector businesses. Just as the establishment of the mill transformed the farming villages around it into tum-of-the-century urban industrial centres, so too do the promoters of the new-look Bates Mill feel it is 'leading the way to the post-industrial age at the turn of the next century'. Bates Mill combines nineteenth century architecture and solid construction with access to twenty-first century technology, financing and opportunity. A complex of a dozen buildings covering nearly 6 acres, which dominates downtown Lewiston, it retains access to the river and canals which provided the original source of power. Lewiston considers this property the single most important component of the city's redevelopment efforts and has identified sources of grant funding designated specifically for the 'build-out' of this space and as incentives to businesses. It houses the Creative Photographic Arts Centre of Maine and a Business Information Centre. New tenants include government services, educational enterprises, retail stories and food support services to support an on-site workforce. ★ As a postscript, one can cite how jute has had an even sorrier demise than cotton. The jute mills of West Bengal are in a worse plight than Mumbai's cotton mills, ever since artificial substitutes were developed for this traditional packaging material. The Indo-Scottish connection is very strong here, with Dundee being the 'Jutopolis' of the world. In Scotland, there has been some attempt to restore its industrial history. For instance, Verdant Works in Dundee, which started in 1793 and faded out by 1889, was one of the 61 spinning and powerloom jute mills in that city. In 1991, the Dundee Heritage Trust announced that it had taken over the mill and declared its intention to restore the mill and give Dundonians and others a living history museum where working machinery would bring back

224 Ripping the Fabric

industrial sites which are derelict and damaged —funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), three former textile mills (and an ash dumping yard) have been redeveloped. By leveraging funds from educational, employment and home investment programmes, Lowell has seen the rejuvenation of a 1.6-mile Federal Enterprise area. An 8000-seat arena was created on the first of the three mills redeveloped, which provided 341 full- and part-time jobs (one can see the vast disparity in job creation required in the US as compared to India). The EPA chose Lowell as one of 16 Showcase Communities under the agency's Brownfields project. It was chosen from more than 230 applicants and will receive further funding for sites with redevelopment potential. 47 Lowell was one old city that bounced back, renewing and revitalizing itself, according to the Globe. Since 1978, it is the headquarters of Wang Laboratories, the international computer manufacturing giant, which was persuaded to relocate there with 12,000 new jobs. In the early 1980s, Lowell celebrated the completion of a $12 million Market Mills project, which restored one of the largest and most visible mill complexes in the city. Historically known as the Lowell Manufacturing Co., the two-storey brick structure lay across the Lowell National Historic Park and contained the Lowell Museum exhibits. The Park is the first in the US and the surrounding historic preservation district are the core of the city's successful downtown renewal programme. The tours focus on different aspects of Lowell history and architecture, as well as the daily life of the mill girls —pioneers in both trade unionism and feminism. (It is interesting that many cities are looking at museums as a vehicle for economic regeneration. For example, Dallas, which has always waged a battle with Houston, hopes to create 30,000 jobs through its Museum of Arts, Arts District and the Lone Star Project with a $1.6 billion investment. The Massachusetts Museum of Modem Art, which recently opened to the public, reused derelict mill land in the small industrial town of North Adams to create a 400,000 sq ft 28-building complex to salvage the town's declining fortunes and create some new jobs. The fund-raisers hoped to generate $72 million for the scheme. 48 ) 47

Manisha Agarwal, 'The Dialectic Between Policies, Spatial Form and Social Processes: A Reading of the Mill Area', CEPT thesis, Ahmedabad. 48 Achyut Kantawala, 'A Cultural Centre: Reinventing the Wheel', proposal for Harvard University thesis, 1999.

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who were the most badly affected by unemployment, and could be said to be somewhat in the same boat as Mumbai mill workers. The draft Mumbai Region Development plan clearly envisages the revision of the industrial location policy 'to recycle existing land and structures occupied by sick and obsolescent industries, encourage and foster industries which are essential to Mumbai's economy and for which Mumbai is an appropriate location'. However, the ongoing so-called rehabilitation of cotton textile mills, the city's erstwhile leading industry, does not amount to such recycling because they are not even being replaced by other industries which the environment-friendly employment-intensive, plan advocates. This is the first major opportunity lost to rejuvenate the mill precinct. The trend has extremely serious s o c i a l repercussions for the country's industrial capital: the replacement of a blue collar workforce by white-collar workers in the service sector, the proletariat by a salariat, will irretrievably alter the social fabric of this area. Besides, with the dilution of zoning laws, following the economic liberalization in 1991, the areas previously designated as industrial in central Mumbai will gradually make When mills were way for office and residential accommodation. originally built, there was sufficient land around them to contain any nuisance they might cause to nearby residents. With the sale of such land, the mills —or whatever remains of them —will soon be seen as polluters by new residents. The visible manifestation of such a policy is already evident with high-rise apartment and office blocks, with outlandish names such as Phoenix Towers, Falcon's Castle and Belvedere Court sprouting cheek by jowl with mill chimneys. This is the second and related of opportunity which is being lost by haphazard redevelopment the textile mill lands. Never again will Mumbai's planners be presented with so much land —280 hectares —being put up for reuse en bloc. The question arises: who has the first claim to such land? Is it the mill owners who have been given countless concessions over the years to run their industries there? Or the workers, whom some consider a privileged class in a city where up to 55 per cent of the population does not even have a roof over its head, let alone a permanent job to go to every day? Or the public at large, which is reeling under the acute shortage of open space, one of the lowest in the world, as well as of affordable housing? Contradictory though it may sound, the best policy would be to However, safeguard the interests of all these three stakeholders.

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memories of the city's long and intimate connections with the spinning of flax and jute, for which it was so famous. 49 This followed a trend which had started already in 1982, when it was reported that the A&S Henry works were to be vacated and industrial material stored there dispersed. Members of the local Abertay Historical Society quickly formed a working party and determined that important aspects of Dundee's past should not be lost. Soon after, Dundee College of Technology decided to dispose of a unique collection of scaled-down jute processing machinery; the purchase of some of this equipment provided a collection to form the basis of a textile museum. In 1985, the Dundee Heritage Trust was formed and was in a position to seek a permanent home for the collection. An offer for a mill was made, but the deal collapsed and it took a long time to find alternatives. There were several historically important works left in the city, but most were not suitable for an industrial museum. By 1988, it was considered that Verdant Works, in the heart of one of the city's main textile areas, offered the best opportunity to create a working museum —a last chance while Dundee's jute history was still within living memory. In a speech, Lord Thomson of Monifieth, former Labour MP for Dundee East and Minister of State, Foreign Office, stated: 'It would be untrue to claim that history has treated Dundee's superb position kindly. The industrial revolution filled the steep slopes with more than their share of "dark Satanic mills" and darker, dismal slums in as the United Kingdom jute industry became over-concentrated the city . . . In the present generation, there has been a change of mood. Dundee has become proud of its heritage. In the City Square the civic fathers have let a thousand flowers bloom. The jute mills have been converted to homes and art galleries and other good uses. Down below, stands Captain Scott's ship the Discovery [in which he sailed to the Antarctic], the city's symbol for all the change.'

Mumbai's Recyling Potential It is evident that the Western experience in the reuse of old textile mill sites has limited, if any, relevance to the Indian situation. In the British cases, these appeared to amount to gentrification with a vengeance; in the US, they did not appear to address the problems of mass unemployment and the condition of the black minorities 49

website:

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garment manufacture, although union activists believe that it is not suitable for millhands whose average age is 40 and cannot easily pick up new skills. The one intervention that may meet such objections is to offer a mill worker the choice of assigning a job in a new industry to his child instead, who is more likely to possess the basic education and language skills required for it. Some part of the mill land —either existing galas or sheds, many of which are structurally strong —could be turned over for such occupations, with the state or private sector or joint ventures running them. Some argue that it may be feasible to site such occupations outside the But city altogether, with the guarantee of decent accommodation. it would be unfair to expect youth who have been brought up in Mumbai to bid good-bye to the city, even if there is the possibility of employment. They have every right to live as near their homes as possible, rather than make way for a new white-collar brigade, with its attendant gentrification of Parel-Lalbaug. Planners will have therefore to address the question of whether to locate such employment on the mill premises or elsewhere. On the one hand, apart from the desirability of being employed near where people have been living for some decades, the possibility of converting some of the existing mill structures into new workplaces is appealing for another reason. It will preserve the skyline and architectural features of this part of Mumbai and thereby establish a link with the past. The north-facing skylights and chimneys will serve as a reminder of this heritage of the city, rather than obliterating all vestiges of the city's history. All over the industrial and post-industrial world, planners are doing all they can to retain such features: indeed, they tend to enhance the value of a commercial or shopping site, as the architects working on the Charles Correa committee have pointed out. On the other hand, because of the high value of real estate, it may make more economic sense to raze the structures to the ground and concentrate the new workplaces in a higher density. As the Correa committee observes, in the mills, each worker occupies 39 sq m of space (258 workers per hectare). It may be more efficient to build a new structure vertically, with new facilities—particularly if there is much electronics and other hi-tech involved —vacating the area for other development. The dilemma in the case of Mumbai is that with the price of real estate being so astronomically high, the cost of demolition and reconstruction is minuscule compared to the value of the land occupied, unlike in the West, and this always

2,28 Ripping the Fabric

who is given a priority over others is obviously a political decision. The problem with the one-third formula embodied in the DC rules is that it gives short shrift to the workers. It assumes that the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) is an adequate instrument of compensation. This sum, amounting to around Rs 1.7 lakh, would yield them at 15 per cent interest Rs 25,500 a year, or around Rs 2000 a month, which is only around their basic salary without overtime and other benefits. The problem is with the very first letter of the acronym: is it really voluntary in these circumstances? It is highly unlikely that given a choice between continuing in employment, and being given a lump sum which meets their bare needs, the majority of workers would opt for the latter. The opportunity to work is central to a person's sense of identity; he should not be deprived of this right against his will. What is more, a job in a textile mill —as, indeed, in other major manufacturing industries —was hereditary, which gave entire generations an association with a particular mill; that link has also been snapped. It cannot be anyone's case that owners should continue to run every department of a composite mill even if it is losing money. But the owners' first responsibility, which the state and financial institutions should monitor, is to modernize a t least some departments which can continue to make a profit. Where both the owners and the state could intervene effectively is to provide opportunities for re-employment for those workers who cannot be absorbed instead of offering them VRS. The most obvious way to do this would be to hand over looms to those in the weaving department, encourage them to form co-operatives, ensure that they obtain yam and a fixed price for the cloth they produce. They would then be continuing in an occupation with which they are familiar, albeit in a changed set of circumstances. As we have seen in the Shree Ram case, rehabilitated mills are in any case giving out weaving (and processing) to outside parties and there is no reason why they cannot enter into contract with their former employees to do likewise. If for some reason this is not feasible, the state could consider running other labour-intensive industries within the mill compound —if necessary, instead on the one-fourth of the vacant land which may be handed over to workers if the state government amends its one-third policy. It is important not just to create more jobs but to ensure that decent wage levels are maintained: failure to ensure that will only lead to 'deskilling'. One obvious option is

Recycling Mill Land 231

compel private owners to grant the committee access to its mills so that various possibilities regarding the consolidation of land and meaningful redevelopment could be recommended. The Correa committee was expected to examine the overall development of mill land: piecemeal disposal thwarts the very object of the exercise. Central government institutions like the BIFR will have to take a proactive role and if it sanctions a revival scheme, ensure that it monitors its implementation. All financial institutions ought to also make the owners accountable for loans they have taken for the specific purpose of modernizing a mill. Urban planners should put their minds to exploring ways and means of recycling this land for the best possible use. This opportunity to breathe life into a dying part of Mumbai should not be squandered for mercenary gain.

230 Ripping the Fabric

acts as an incentive for developers to raze structures and rebuild on the sites. The NTC mills provide an interesting comparison. The Correa committee finds that their total developable area is 5,67,718 sq m. If, as it suggests, the TDR on two-thirds of the land which the mills have to give up for public purposes is usable in situ instead of being sold for commercial use in the suburbs, and assuming that half the area for commercial exploitation is for residential purposes and the other half for offices, clean industries and other commercial activities, something like 25,000 jobs could be created. In addition, there would be around 3400 household jobs in the residences that would come up in the area, giving a total of 29,000 jobs. Between 25 and 30 per cent of these jobs would be semi-skilled, where some mill workers could find employment. In contrast, the NTC mills have only 18,000 workers on their rolls (which is subsequently believed to have come down to 7000). The committee believes that half of these workers may opt for VRS but the other half would expect to be retrained for new occupations. When it comes to the third stakeholder, the public, the recommendations of the Correa committee are valid. While the committee was restricted to NTC units, what it has advocated for these 25 mills can broadly be applied to the private owners. In essence, the report seeks to take a holistic view of the vacant lands so that they can be clubbed for their different uses— commercial, social and public. It is precisely in the absence of such a policy, aided and abetted by the venal political system which has a stake in controlling development permissions, that Parel-Lalbaug has witnessed case-by-case, piecemeal growth, which results in haphazard construction and economic activity. Instead, the land belonging to different mills could be clubbed, so that in a particular area, it could be put to the best possible use. To reconcile the three generally conflicting interests of the owners, workers and public is by no means easy to accomplish. It will call for a great deal of transparency. The first need is to freeze any further sale of land before formulating a comprehensive policy on it. As a token of its intentions, the state government should publish the Correa report and initiate an open debate on its findings. All parties involved, not least the workers, should voice their views on this vital issue. Ironically, V.Y. Tamhane, the Secretary General of the Millowners Association had not even read a copy a couple of years after it was completed. The state should simultaneously

Mumbai City in the Dock 233

★ Gerald Aungier, who transferred the headquarters of the East India Company from Surat —where the British first landed —to Bombay and was its Governor in the latter half of the seventeenth century, offered this description of the port: 'The great bay or port is certainly the fairest, largest and securest in all these parts of India, where a hundred sail of tall ships may ride all the year safe with good anchorage.' 1 Pankaj Joshi, a city architect who wrote his M. A. thesis on Mumbai port at York University in 1998, recorded: In the mid-seventeenth century, Bombay island, lying on the Konkan coast. . .was just one of the several coastal ports. But within half a century, from 1650 to 1707, it became one of the trading stations of the British East India Company on the west coast of India. The phase to follow, from 1707 to 1815, brought about a major growth in its trading activities, transforming this trading station to a major western sea port. The third phase, from 1815-1850, changed this chief western sea port to a political power centre. In this period, British political power expanded far beyond the political boundaries of the tiny island of Bombay to most of Western India, which was thereafter organized into a province called Bombay Presidency. The fourth phase, from 1851 to 1931, is the period in which Bombay entered the industrial era, becoming the cotton mill centre of India and an important node in the new railway network.2

As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam in Britain in the eighteenth century, Indian textiles were no longer in demand there and Bombay started to export the raw cotton of Gujarat and its neighbouring regions to the new cotton mills in Manchester. As the port closest to the cotton-growing areas of India —Calcutta had served the same function for jute, used throughout the world as packing material —Bombay was the main export centre and flourished with this t r a d e . The shifting of the East India headquarters and steep decline in indigenous textile centres of Gujarat led to the precipitous decline of Surat and emergence of Bombay. Another young city architect, Shalaka Pradhan, noted in her dissertation on the port, 'The docks were built as a response to mounting pressure against the high rate of pilfering and 1

The Port of Bombay: A Brief History, (mimeo), compiled for centenary of Bombay Port Trust , 1973, p. 25 2 Pankaj Joshi, 'An Introduction to Urban Regeneration of the Harbour of Mumbai', unpublished dissertation at the University of York, 1998.

7

Mumbai City in the Dock London Docklands displays more acutely and extensively than any other area in England, the physical decline of the inner city and the need for urban regeneration. It presents a major opportunity for the development that London needs over the last twenty years of the twentieth century: new housing, new environment, new industrial development, new facilities for recreation, new commercial development, new architecture; all calculated to bring these barren areas back into valuable use.* —Michael Heseltine, UK Secretary of State for Environment

As we have seen in the second chapter, it was the port that gave Mumbai its initial impetus and opened a window to the outside world —a world which it is now assiduously wooing with renewed vigour in the globalized era. Its natural harbour, extending over some 18,000 ha, had attracted seafarers in the past —the Portuguese, followed by the British. This is what led to the emergence of Mumbai as one of the important trading centres of the world, well before it began to industrialize with the cotton textile mills. However, there is a parallel in that, like textiles, the port also began to decline and issues can equally be raised about the land it occupies, right from the central business district to the eastern coast in mid-town Mumbai, where the docks lie cheek by jowl with the mill belt.

*An extract from James Bentley, East of the City: The London Docklands Story, Pavilion Books, London, 1997, p. 50.

Mumbai City in the Dock 235 educational, communications and other industrial, administrative, functions. This concentration of functions was a typically colonial phenomenon as the early indigenous cities tended to specialise in one or two major functions. Bombay however combined all major of its favoured status as the original functions in consequence colonial stronghold. Such centralization of functions was common at port cities in the other regions of India, as well as other colonial port cities elsewhere in the world.'5 At the turn of the century, when the Suez Canal was deepened to 9 metres, the Alexandra Dock began to be constructed. Bombay experienced intensive reclamation in this early phase of the twentieth century, extending almost through the entire length of the eastern foreshore from Colaba to Sewri. This resulted in a number of docks and bunders, which formed the Port Trust land. By 1929, this covered 1180 acres of land-—a staggering one-eighth of the island city. According to Joshi, the three major sections were the Colaba bunders and Sassoon docks in the south (alongside the CBD), Apollo reclamations in the centre and Mazagaon-Sewri reclamations towards the north. The Apollo reclamation near the Gateway of India fanned into three wet docks (Alexandra, Victoria and Prince's), along with a number of dry docks and basins. The Mazagaon-Sewri reclamations comprised the major bunders, named mainly after the produce they handled (Lakri, Coal, Tank, Hay); a series of depots (Grain, Cotton, Manganese ores, Coal, Charcoal, Bulk oil deposits), and two timber ponds. In 1915, the Port Trust opened its own dedicated railway line. By the early 1920s, Bombay was handling 41 per cent of India's imports and 38 per cent of its exports. In the post-independence era, the authorities reassessed the needs of ports throughout the country and launched schemes not only for their rehabilitation but a l s o for expansion and These long-term projects dovetailed with the fiveimodemization. year plans beginning in 1951 . In Mumbai, the authorities embarked upon a major expansion for importing crude oil; the oil refineries in Trombay, along the eastern coast of the island, and the petrochemical complexes that followed in their wake, were the major stimulus for growth, after heavy engineering. After the mid-1960s, however, the port traffic began to decline, with the establishment of oil refineries elsewhere in the country, a fall in iron and steel 5

ibid, p. 19.

234 Ripping the Fabric

overcrowding of the quays close to the city . . . After a short slump, technological change gave a boost to a further round of dock building to cater to steam ships and larger vessels. It was the builders and speculators who benefited in the earlier stages, setting a precedent that w a s to b e repeated in the later stages of development. Alongside the docks grew related industries, such as shipbuilding and repair, refining and processing.' 3 (Incidentally, dock gangs gave rise in the 1970s to the late Haji Mastan, one of Mumbai's most notorious smugglers.) It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that Bombay truly came into its own, with the British government taking over charge of territories formerly managed by the East India Company in 1858. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Bombay enjoyed a boom during the American Civil War (1861-5), when the supply of American cotton to British mills was cut off and western India emerged as the alternative source. As Joshi writes: 'This sudden demand and the soaring profits accruing from it had an electrifying effect on Bombay and triggered financial speculation on a gigantic scale. The inevitable crash at the end of the war notwithstanding, the cotton boom had a positive and long-lasting effect on the city in terms of investment in various city improvement schemes, land reclamation schemes, and imposing buildings.' 4 The phase also marked the city's entry into the era of modem technology, with the construction of textile mills and railways. Initially, the port was in private hands, of which the largest was the Elphinstone Land and Press Co. which reclaimed land near where the Victoria and Prince's Dock were later built. Bunders or open wharves were constructed to service vessels anchored further offshore. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Bombay the most accessible Indian port to Europe, the 'Gateway of India'. In 1873, the Sassoons, who also had considerable investments in cotton mills, as we have seen, constructed the first wet dock, known after the family to this date —a landmark in Colaba. The Bombay Port Trust was constituted the same year. 'By the last quarter of the 19 th century,' Joshi observes, 'Bombay's dominance on the urban scene in western India was firmly established. It was the multi-functional primate city of the region, with the concentration of commercial, 3

Shalaka Paradkar, Bombay's Obsolete Docklands—Planning for an Urban Renaissance, April 1996. 4 Joshi 1998, p. 17.

Mumbai City in the Dock 237

6700 workers. MPT, which handles 13 per cent of India's maritime trade and a third of its containerized cargo, dealt with only 32 million tonnes in 1997-8. 7 In April 1999, the MPT reported a 15 per cent fall in traffic—this was only the second time in its 125-yearold history that such a drop was recorded. 8 It suffered an operating loss of Rs 40 crore for the first time ever, mainly due to the fall in petroleum products.9 By September 1999, the year's traffic was estimated to decline to 30 million tonnes. 10 In an interview with the author in 1997, the MPT Chairman, Sharad Kale, a former Municipal Commissioner, pointed out how in the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the country expected to handle 227 million tonnes per year, which would double by 2002. MPT was operating at a very high capacity—its berth utilization was 85 per cent. The waiting period for ships had almost been done away with, he claimed. Other ports were registering increases in tonnage because they all imported coal; Mumbai handled high value cargo — mainly oil and related products. Ships which were avoiding the port would head for Colombo or even Singapore (which had a cluster of 11 ports). The administration was hampered by the multiplicity of agencies involved, including the navy and defence installations, dredging operations and the like. 'All these impose restrictions on the MPT,' he said. What Kale steadfastly refused to countenance was the stiff competition posed by the country's youngest and most modem port established in 1989 at Nhava Sheva, on the mainland, across the harbour. Named the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), it was designed to divert traffic away from the crowded and antiquated MPT and serve as a hub port for the region, being specially equipped to handle containers. Since much of the imports are not meant for Mumbai, it makes much more sense to receive such cargo on the mainland and despatch it to other centres in the country. This port is spread over 2500 hectares (6170 acres)— three times larger than MPT —and was set up with loans from MPT, the central government 7

'MPT: Still to Change with Time', interview with R.R. Sinha, Business Standard supplement on Ports and Shipping, 30 Sep 1998. 8 'Mumbai Port has to Scale Down Personnel Cost for Survival', Financial Express, 26 Apr 1999. 9 'Mumbai Port Registers Sharp Decline in Surplus, Financial Express, 23 Apr 1999. 1(1 'Mumbai Port Traffic May Decline to 30 Million Tonnes in 19992000', Financial Express, 24 Sep 1999.

236 Ripping the Fabric

imports and of foodgrams in the wake of the Green Revolution. Exports of iron ore virtually disappeared as a result of the development of other ports. Even so, by the early 1970s, oil products (or P.O.L.—petrol, oil, lubricants) constituted more them half the port's imports. In 1972, mainly at the initiative of S.R. Kulkami, the veteran port workers' union leader (and a Port Trust trustee representing labour), Alexandra Dock was renamed 'Indira Dock', following Indira Gandhi's victory in the Indo-Pak war over Bangladesh the previous year. Indira Dock, incidentally, is the only one running at a profit in recent years. The official history of the Mumbai Port Trust (MPT) cites how 'port workers all over the world have traditionally been in the forefront of the trade union movement'. The first union was formed in 1920; the largest representative body, the Transport & Dock Workers' Union, was set up in 1954 by Placid D'Mello, after.whom the main north-south arterial road along the docks is named today. In 1958, there was an all-India strike by dockers. The MPT is one of the largest employers in the city, with 32,000 on its rolls. It has constructed 4500 residential units for its employees, of which 3500 were built after Independence. It planned to house at least four out of every ten of its staff in the early 1970s; nearly 800 were housed in dormitories. In many ways, the history of the port over the last three decades parallels that of the cotton textile mill industry — from stable fortunes and secure employment to a gradual downturn, culminating in a crisis. According to Joshi, 'The changes in shipping activity, including’ the physical size and deeper draught needed for modem ships, the resistance to modern handling mechanisms due to an inexhaustible supply of labour, the lack of back-up space in the operational areas have accentuated the partial dereliction in the last three decades.' 6 With a draught of just 10 metres, it was obvious that MPT could no longer attract sufficient shipping towards the close of the twentieth century. Besides, with the worldwide move towards containerization, MPT was not competitive in the movement of goods for lack of storage space in and around the docks, not to mention the interminable delays of trucks getting into and out of the congested dock area in the island city. A comparison with some Asian ports is revealing. Singapore —with which, as we have noted, Mumbaikars always want to compare themselves — deals with some 2407 million tonnes of cargo per year, with only 6

ibid, p . 27.

Mumbai City in the Dock 239 JNPT has already received Rs 2000 crore from private operators. It is evident that, like in the textile industry, the liberalization of the ports posed a severe challenge to entrenched interests. As R. Vasudevan, an earlier JNPT Chairman, stressed: 'The ports are not run as profit-making bodies. This has to change and the introduction of a modem culture would go a long way in improving the functioning of ports as a commercial venture. Of course, there would be problems like in valuation of assets, labour problems etc. Autonomy of ports is most important to meet the challenges that are bound to arise in the next century. Privatization is a must these days. Ports should now only handle core activities and other functions should be fanned out to private parties.'15 The same theme was echoed by Pinto: 'The private sector has a crucial role in port development in the country. More and more it is being realized that the entire infrastructure needs of the country cannot be met without having recourse to private sector investment and management. Nor is this only a matter of a shortage of investible funds. The customer is best served when there is healthy competition among different persons or entities providing services. This can best be achieved when both private investors and stateowned ports offer service to the customer. The customer then has a choice and is not at the mercy of a single supplier. In this sense, as much as for the investible funds that a private party will bring, they will have a crucial role to play in port development in the future.' 16 Foreign shipping companies like American President Lines, P&O Nedlloyd, Maersk and Sea-Land have deserted the 126-year old port for faster turnaround —two days instead of four —and better service at JNPT. This would cost MPT Re 1 crore in revenue every day. In February 2000, the Department of Shipping in New Delhi announced that JNPT would be fully corporatized by June. 17 Private ports are also coming up elsewhere in the region: Gujarat Pipavav Port is already operational, while the foundation stone of Adani Ports, also in Gujarat, was laid early in 2000 (P&O's proposed 15

'We are a User-friendly Port', interview in Business Standard supplement on Indian ports, 26 May 1998. 16 Interview in Business Standard supplement on Ports and Shipping, 30 Sep 1998. 17 'JNPT to be Completely Corporatized by June', Business Standard,18 Feb 2000.

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and World Bank. Containerized cargo constitutes a third of the total cargo of Indian ports; with increasing globalization of trade, exports from India were estimated to grow by 20 per cent per year. JNPT handles two-thirds of the country's containerized cargo. According to succeeding Chairman, M.P. Pinto, it started with 60,000 containers in the first year of operation; within eight years, it was handling over 6 million.11 It improved its performance in 1998-9 by registering 6.69 lakh teus (twenty feet equivalent units, a container volume measure)—a third more than the previous year; the net surplus rose to Rs 320 crore. This was notched up in some of the worst years for the shipping industry due to productivity gains — both of men and machines. A curious feature is that its main export is cars. In 1999, Pinto announced that it was launching four expansion projects together worth Rs 2635 crore. 12 Another innovation at JNPT, falling in line with the liberalization of the economy as a whole after 1991, was its privatization and corporatization plan. While JNPT has one container terminal with three berths, P&O Ports (Australia) is building another with two. The port is also building a Rs 2000 crore terminal for chemical imports on 240 hectares of reclaimed land with P&O Ports (Australia), and a Malaysian company, its first venture with private Regional participation. As Jimmy Sarbh, P&O's Mumbai-based Director for South-east Asia, said: 'For the first time, customers in India can choose between a private terminal and a governmentrun port.' He believed this would offer more competitive rates to Indian exporters and importers. 13 The Major Port Trusts Act of 1963 was sought to be amended in 1998 to permit corporatization, but was held up by the change in government the following year. Talks were held with shippers and leaders of trade unions to arrive at a consensus. Cornell consultants from the US had been hired by the Asian Development Bank to work out the financial and technical parameters, including equity participation. In 2000, the central government announced that JNPT would be fully corporatized. 14 11

'JNPT Chemical Terminal No Threat to Environment', interview with M.P. Pinto, Sunday Observer,13 June 1999. 12 'JNPT Plans 4 Projects Worth Rs 2,635 crore', Indian Express,13 Aug 1999. 13 'Sealand, Maersk Cast Adrift from JNPT, Anchor at Nhava Sheva', Financial Express,12 Mar 1999. 14 'Private Sector Role in Port Privatisation Finalised', Business Standard, 24 Feb 2000.

Mumbai City in the Dock 241 The world over, ports after giving birth to thriving metropolises, have had to move on [emphases added]. Take, for example, the Sydney and London ports. Policy makers believed that Mumbai would have to go the same way. Far from letting that happen, the new decision is aimed at ensuring that the port survives. If finally approved, this will be the single largest investment made in the last 100 years. In doing so, the government will aggravate the conditions which call for port facilities to be moved to a new site in the first place. Evacuation of cargo, which is possible only in the two-hour window each day when suburban rail traffic stops, has increased the cost of transportation to a point where competitiveness of the exporter has come under severe pressure. Despite three being a dedicated road corridor, evacuation has taken days on occasion. Besides, by causing environmental pollution, the cargo has further choked an already suffocating city. The new facility will add pressure to a system which has been on the brink of collapse for some years now . . . But there is no need to add to the existing facilities, when there is a strong case to close it down. As one business dies, another takes its place. A seafront to which the entire city has access creates a host of new business opportunities for the hospitality and leisure industry. Essentially, polluting industries— and a port is one —gives way to cleaner service industry—an inevitable transition that densely populated cities have to make. London is a classic example of this. A large labour force and a militant union leadership, with powerful political backing, is usually the reason why these decisions have been deferred. But ports all over the world have had the same problem. And yet, the logistics of transportation and the need for competitive exports have forced governments to take this decision. 21

Overmanning, as we have noted, was the major obstacle towards restructuring. As much as 80 per cent of MPT's revenue is spent on wages; overtime accounts for Rs 50 crore annually. As Mago put it, 'The issue is manning scales. This has been under discussion for some time. At the national level, also we have broached the issue from the management. We have told the unions that the scales have to be rationalized. Once this is done, we will have an idea of where there is excess labour. Then comes the issue of whether we can redeploy them or have to give them a VRS. The situation at Mumbai port is clear to everyone, even the unions. We account for 30 per cent of the total workforce of major ports and handle only 12 per cent of the traffic. This is not a workable situation by any standards. The unions realise this. But these issues have their sensitivity.' 22 In April 1999, Mago announced that a VRS scheme was likely to be 21 22

Financial Express editorial, 8 Feb 1998. Interview in Financial Express, 26 Apr 1999.

240 Ripping the Fabric

massive port at Vadhawan near Dahanu, in Maharashtra, just south of the Gujarat border, was called off after fierce opposition from farmers, fisherfolk and environmentalists). The winds of privatization have blown through the musty corridors of the staid MPT office building in Ballard Estate too. In 1998, it proposed privatizing its dry docks, which have declined due to competition from China, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Dubai. 18 The container terminal, which was on a two-year lease, was proposed to be leased for 20 years to Indian companies, several of which were negotiating for it. MPT hired the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA)to do a consultancy report on how the port could b e made viable in the twenty-first century. JICA recommended that there should be three off-shore deep-draught berths to accommodate bigger ships, which would cost Rs 3000 crore. With a 12.5-metre draught, located 800 metres from the shore, this would enable the port to handle 1 million teus. Furthermore, by 2017—a 20-year projection — MPT ought to handle only cargo bound for Mumbai, not that meant for the hinterland —comprising parts of Maharashtra, Gujarat, MP and Rajasthan. As minor ports came up in the region, they were bound to compete for such traffic, and it made more sense from the logistical viewpoint for MPT to concentrate on city-bound cargo. 19 According to the Chairman, Arun K. Mago, most of the new projects would be in the private sector. In early 1999, MPT awarded a Rs 240 crore contract to Hyundai of South Korea to replace its submarine pipelines. He cited projections that the hinterland for MPT and JNPT together would require nearly 6 million teus by 2017, which would leave 1 million teus for Mumbai, rendering it viable. 'If we can improve our facilities in terms of equipment, business practices, labour practices, private sector involvement, which will improve overall inefficiency, then we will survive/ he pointed out. 20 In an editorial titled 'Conflicting Signals', The Financial Express commented: The MPT's decision to consider an investment of Rs 3000 crore in a new terminal has sent out conflicting signals. More than a decade ago, when JNPT was established, the idea was to let Mumbai port die a natural death. 18

'MPT Likely to Privatise Dry Docks', Economic Times, 18 Aug 1998. 'Mumbai Port Should Handle Only City Cargo: Report', Business Standard,15 Sep 1997. 20 Interview in Financial Express, 26 Apr 1999. 19

Mumbai City in the Dock 243

In January 2001, Mago confirmed that a VRS scheme was to be implemented to halve the work force. The MPT deficit had gone up to Rs 400 crore and all employees in the 40-plus age group with more than ten years of service were expected to opt for it. It would offer 45 days of salary for every year of service, amounting to an average of Rs 5 lakh per employee. The undertaking would spend Rs 700 crore on the scheme. 'With revenues dropping drastically, we can't run the show with the existing manpower,' he said. 'We have tried to create an atmosphere conducive to the VRS and are trying to convince the union not to oppose it.' The unions had scuttled the previous attempt. 25 Calcutta too, surprisingly enough, was trying to give its waterfront a facelift. A modest Rs 3 crore project was initially meant only to beautify it but later comprised the extension of the commercial district. The public sector was roped in for sponsorship. An expanse of 20 ha (51 acres) between the two Howrah bridges was open for development. The authorities intended to relieve the congestion in Dalhousie, the central business district, by building a gigantic mutiplex, described in undisguised hype as 'a post-modern architectural marvel complementing the industrial resurgence of the state'. Two freeways would be built to the area. The Indian Chamber of Commerce believed that a new commercial hub was both financially viable and environmentally sustainable. The British Deputy High Commission brought a team of experts for a firsthand experience of riverfront development and a UK-based multilateral agency was said to be interested in funding the project. 26

MPT's Vacant Land The issue that arises in the case of Mumbai's port, as that of the textile mills, is what use should its land be put to, since it occupies 753 ha (1860 acres) and straddles one-eighth of the island city, some of the most expensive real estate in the world (see Fig. 7.1). Around 445 ha of these are reclaimed. The total is three and a half times bigger than the land occupied by textile mills. Nearly one-third of the land is occupied by usage which has nothing to do with the 25

'Mumbai Port Trust Set to Halve its Staff Via VRS', Economic Times, 19 Jan 19, 2001. 26 'Calcutta's Waterfront Dream Takes Millennial Hue', Economic Times, 22 Aug 1999.

242 Ripping the Fabric introduced in 6-8 months. A final decision would be made after a task force constituted attributed the decline of all ports to high manning levels, despite a change in technology and cargo packaging. 'We are also looking at various options, such as redeploying the labour in other segments where we think more manpower would be required in future/ he added. 23 In March 1999, thousands of dock workers demonstrated against the government's proposed privatization of port facilities, in line with similar protests at the other ten major ports in the country. Shanti Patel, President of the Mumbai Port Trust, Dock & General Employees' Union, claimed: 'This is an exploitative policy. There of work. will be reduction of the work force due to sub-contracting JNPT is one of the best ports in the world and MPT has a reserve of over Rs 2700 crore. Only if the ports were in trouble would the move be understandable.' The workers were specially agitated about the impending privatization of eight berths in Indira Docks (MPT's only profit centre). Tenders had already been floated for four cargo berths and an equal number of container berths, which were proposed to be leased to private companies, including In June, talks on wage revisions for Class II & IV multinationals. employees in major ports broke down, with disagreements between managements and labour on virtually every issue, including basic pay. While the port authorities were prepared to offer a 28 per cent hike on current wages, this was rejected. The traffic in all these ports, incidentally, was lower than anticipated. Workers also protested against MPT's move to hand over its 110km railway track to the Central Railway, which would render 900 people jobless. Although the operation was losing revenue— the accumulated losses amounted to Rs 40 crore —it was halted because of the labour opposition to it. 24 Indian Railways was interested in the proposal because of the additional land available on both sides of the track. However, motorists and planners have long argued in favour of using both the rail and the road links within the port area for regular traffic, which would serve as valuable north-south transport arteries, particularly in emergencies. This would have helped in planning the second phase of the World Bank-funded Mumbai Urban Transport Project, which relies heavily on its commuter rail component. 23

'Mumbai Port Plans VRS in 6-8 months', Financial Express, 22 Apr

1999. 24

'Move to Transfer Mumbai's Port Rail Line Held up', Business Standard, 26 Mar 1999.

Mumbai City in the Dock 245

port, and is subject to extreme traffic congestion and pollution. However, when questioned by the author when he was MPT Chairman, Sharad Kale denied that there was a single square metre of surplus land with the port, indicating that he was a parsimonious landlord to the core. Shalaka Pradhan calculates that the docks proper account for 95 ha and their operational area is slightly bigger, while the estates spread over 330 ha. 27 As Pankaj Joshi points out, 'The partial dereliction of portions of operational docks has resulted in large portions of the port land being encroached by squatters and slums. The encroachments have spread from roadside pavements and vacant land within the port to the once-operational bunder areas . . Z28 There are roughly 1,20,000 hutment dwellers. The MPT estates are administratively divided into 15 zones. Pradhan observes: 'The eastern shore of Bombay is a belt of land which evokes no images. It is anchored at the southern end by the commercial precinct of Ballard Estate and the northern end is lost in the swampy salt pans of Sewri- Wadala. Much of the eastern edge, particularly along the docks and wharves, is what Kevin Lynch terms ' a fragmented edge' —continuous in the abstract, but visualised at only discrete points. The sense of water cannot be experienced, because it is hidden from view by the numerous structures and docks' related paraphernalia. 'The eastern edge is defined by P. D' Mello Road and the Harbour Line of the Railways. The belt of land rapidly deteriorates in terms quality as one moves north. While Ballard Estate of environmental is a visual delight and a wonderfully efficient district, Wadala salt p a n s (owned b y the S a l t C o m m i s s i o n e r ) are the site for unauthorized reclamation by garbage dumping and the largest slum pocket on BPT Estates. The areas around the main docks are visually chaotic, although the plan depicts gridded, orderly lots along streets bearing the names of small ports along the western coast (Mangalore Street, Karwar Street . . .) or towns of the hinterland (Kalyan Street, Kurla Street . . .).' 29 At the southernmost tip of the city lies Sassoon Dock, right next to Mukesh Mills. It caters to small fishing vessels. The Apollo Reclamation Estate, a little distance away, is one of the city's most prized, with late nineteenth and early twentieth century listed 27 28 29

Pradhan, op cit, Part III: Morphology. Joshi, 1998, p. 32. Pradhan, see footnote 3.

INDIAN

OCEAN

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Greater Mumbai: Dock Area

Mumbai City in the Dock 247

Siltation, lack of modern handling equipment and surplus labour accounts for three-quarters of MPT's operational income. By contrast, Nhava Sheva has 3400 ha of back-up space. Kale, delivering his lecture on the verge of the 1 25 th anniversary of MPT, showed many slides of heritage structures within the docks. The existing transit shed in Indira Docks was a surviving example of early twentieth century construction, with galleries along the whole western length for unloading goods. The Clock Warehouse was a late nineteenth century building at the junction of Prince's and Victoria Docks in blue basalt and listed as Grade II. Records Joshi: 'The warehouses, transit sheds, granite-clad quays and dock equipment, including locks . . . and hydraulic cranes are reminders of nineteenth century shipping activities.'32 In general, Kale regretted that there was a price to be paid for not realizing the significance of conservation. Certain warehouses which had been demolished on Reay Road were not listed. While some had to go — 'containers don't need warehouses' —others could have been retained for adaptive reuse. Joshi cites how the sixteenth century Sewri fort, under the jurisdiction of the State Department of Archaeology, is in a state of acute disrepair, with parts of the roof having caved in. It lacks access, rendering it vulnerable to vandalism and misuse. As in the case of the textile mills, these invaluable relics of Mumbai's past are in danger of being obliterated, with nobody to write their epitaph. At the same time, Pradhan cautions that while dockland renewal schemes throughout the world 'traditionally mine the rich vein of maritime history and the romance of the sea . . . Perhaps in the Indian context, such nostalgia would not be able to provide the key to unlock the future of the precinct'. MPT also possesses 74 ha of marshy salt pan land at Wadala, 50 ha of which it is looking to develop commercially and earmark 18 ha as greenbelts. It also saw the potential of this area 'to decongest South Mumbai and maintain the environmental balance of the port areas'. It actually wanted to shift the troublesome long-term tenants who were occupying its property at various bunders and elsewhere to the salt pans and 'release important back-up areas near the docks and on waterfronts'. Furthermore, by placing restrictions on the number of environmentally-damaging trucks entering the docks and diverting them to the truck terminal set up by MMRDA near the Wadala salt pans, such traffic could be curtailed. While planning 32

ibid, p. 36.

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buildings, including the Grade I listed and world-renowned Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gateway of India. Ballard Estate (and the adjoining Mody Bay Estate), to which we have referred in the previous chapter for its more people-friendly footprint, presents, according to Joshi, 'one of the most efficiently planned twentieth century business districts of Mumbai. The business district houses many leading corporate houses and includes the MPT head office, New Custom House, offices of clearing and forwarding agents and many shipping companies. Ballard Estate offers an effective model for office development in Mumbai and hence needs to be effectively conserved.'30 It is seldom recognized that cities by the sea have their dock areas as the front or visage which they present to the outside world. Mumbai is no exception in that the Gateway of India is simply what its name suggests. However, the main operational docks (as distinct from ceremonial, as in the Gateway's case) are hidden from public sight and, hence, of mind. The Indira, Prince's and Victoria Docks are enclosed, together covering an enormous water area of 46 ha (114 acres) and a quay length of 7.7 km. Prince's, constructed in 1880 (contemporaneous with many cotton textile mills), covers 12 ha. In his 1997 Indian Heritage Society lecture, Kale mentioned how when it was being excavated, the engineers unearthed 380 fossilized logs, indicating that it must once have been the site of a wooded valley. In boom times in Bombay, Prince's Dock was found inadequate in just 18 months and Victoria, covering 10 ha, was completed eight years later. Indira (originally Alexandra, 1914) covers 24 ha and has the deepest draught at 10 metres, but restricted access confines it to 9 metres. The first two are worked to only 60 per cent of their capacity and the third to 80 per cent. The depot for containers is 10 km away at Wadala, which restricts functioning considerably. The lack of back-up space at less than 760 ha has to be compared with 12,000 ha in Rotterdam, arguably the biggest port in the world, Antwerp with 11,000 and 10,000 in Hamburg. According to Joshi: 'With modem mechanization in goods handling and distribution, the port of Rotterdam deals with more than 300 million tonnes, with a labour force of less than 10,000, whereas the port of Mumbai employs 30,000 people handling about 30 million tonnes of commodities.' 31 30 31

Joshi 1998, p. 34-35. ibid, p. 35.

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Joshi's harbour regeneration scheme envisages a mix of proposals to house 5,00,000 people and provide a minimum of 60,000 jobs, including those displaced in the docks (half this number). These jobs would be in manufacturing and services, businesses, offices, growth in retail, leisure and recreation. With a complementary public sector employment (health, education transport, utilities and social services) and a long-term construction programme, this will have, in his opinion, a multiplier effect in the local economy. He advocates a specialized agency dedicated to such regeneration, whether it is an Urban Development Corporation, as in the case of Liverpool, Cardiff or Rotterdam, or a city council development partnership, like Kingston upon Hull City Vision Ltd. The approach calls for land acquisition, the restructuring of existing land and infrastructure (for example, the reintroduction of tramways in the regenerated areas would provide an inexpensive and environmental-friendly mass transit system), and a land use and planning policy. He has a slide of the chimney of Mukesh Mills towering over the small fishing boats at Sassoon Dock, reiterating 'the complementary role of other land-sharing options'. His proposal is necessarily somewhat broad and idealistic and restricted more to physical planning. He has obviously not been able to flesh out the practical details. At the same time, he points to the perils in opting for market-led regeneration which has led, in the British experience, to funding from public sources to be largely available to support private sector development, leading to a significant neglect of social housing and welfare. By contrast, in the Netherlands and continental Europe, investment in social housing has emerged as a major sector of the economy. 34 Pradhan too makes a similar point: 'But entrusting the future of this waterfront solely to the market will again make it inaccessible to the weaker sections of society.' 35 Unlike the textile mills, which have been very much a matter of debate and analysis by a wide range of experts and activists, the dock area has been shrouded in obscurity, mainly because they are literally and metaphorically out of bounds. Even if one has a permit to visit the precinct, photography is forbidden. There is need for much greater examination of the uses to which this potentially 34 35

ibid, pp. 96-111. Pradhan, see footnote 3.

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experts would see this as yet another expansionist move, oblivious to the fact that the port is staring dereliction in the face, environmentalists would be unhappy with the cavalier manner in which foreshore land, with mangroves, are being developed, with only a token cognizance of their ecological value. As Joshi recognizes, the land-use planning report by a consultants' consortium formed by Kirloskar in Pune and Keskar-Keswani in Mumbai comprises development of public reservation areas, residential quarters for employees and godowns on the mud flats, which totally ignore the actual issues for the port and the city. Elsewhere in the port area, reservation of areas for green belts is fraught with danger. As the MPT's own report on its Master Plan warns, 'the small sizes, locality and their scattered nature makes them unsuitable for any recreation garden use'. The time-consuming and expensive litigation involved in recovering plots from tenancies would be wasted because these always run the risk of encroachment, in the absence of effective monitoring. Argues Joshi: 'This dereliction and obsolescence in the majority of the dock land and the subsequent encroachment of vacated areas by slums are strong pointers that the historic docks and their related areas have outlived their useful life and their role needs to be handed over to the new and more efficient docks on the mainland. . . Space is an extremely vital resource for the city of Mumbai and infrastructure is its lifeline. The obsolescence of land by the port with its (planned) East Island Freeway and dedicated Port Trust railway network is a sheer disregard of the needs and problems of the city. The need of the hour is the relocation of the port activities with the area of the old docks undergoing a comprehensive and sustainable process of regeneration to forge a new relationship with the city.' 33 There are certain close similarities with the port situation and that of the textile mills: outdated technology; a large number of surplus labour; a modicum of state protection being under the government as in NTC mills; the land required for badly-needed infrastructure. However, the major difference is that port activity is highly site-specific, unlike the mills which can if necessary be relocated outside the city. This requires in some ways even more imaginative interventions to decide how to reuse the land or, more accurately, space occupied. 33

ibid, p. 43.

Mumbai City in the Dock 251

theme of European urbanism over the past decade. Following on from the success of waterfront restoration in cities in the United States such as Baltimore and Boston, many European maritime centres sought the regeneration of their docklands as a major plank of government policy during the 1980s. The methods adopted from city to city have varied enormously, but nowhere in Europe has followed such a free market philosophy of urban renewal as London Docklands. In a mere decade, London's redundant Docklands have been transformed from nine square miles of wilderness and dereliction into the third major economic node in the capital.' 37 In some ways, therefore, it parallels, though on a very much bigger scale, the attempt to convert Parel-Lalbaug into a finance centre. Indeed, Rohin Shah of Meghraj Properties in Mumbai has claimed that Bandra-Kurla was comparable to London Docklands. As we have seen in the first chapter, Mumbai's planners earlier took their cue from London's in trying to divert growth away from the metropolis to satellite towns (New Mumbai, in this case). They also followed suit when London gave this policy up. However, not even when London Docklands came up for redevelopment, the most die-hard free marketeers could have been prepared for of centralized planning itself. This was the virtual abandonment done at the behest of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher under her New Right policies. According to Edwards, 'London Docklands is perhaps the most market-led regeneration programme of redundant docklands anywhere in the world, and it also represents the greatest relaxation of municipal planning powers.' 38 He records how the main vehicle employed by the Conservative government to achieve such a transformation was the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), established in 1981 and promoted by Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for Environment. Brownill believes that this was 'the flagship of the radical right's attempts to "regenerate" inner city areas by minimizing public sector involvement and maximizing the private sector's. The market-led planning regime broke the consensus on which previous post-war planning policies had rested.' 39 An elected member of 37

Brian Edwards, London Docklands: Urban Design in an Age of Deregulation, Butterworth Architecture, Oxford, 1992, p. xi. 3 °ibid, p. 32. 39 Brownill 1990, p. 1.

250 Ripping the Fabric

available stretch of land can be put. The planning of the SewriNhava Sheva road (and possibly, rail) trans-harbour link will accentuate its importance and in a sense, open up the docks to public view. Much of the work by young architecture students has been on creating landmarks for the city within the area by designing vital buildings, like a passenger ferry terminal or seafront recreation and arts centres. No one has looked at a holistic plan, to be seen in of the textile mill lands, which tandem with the redevelopment together offer considerable promise for Mumbai. One might also of the huge mention in this context the possible redevelopment Aarey Milk Colony, in the north-western suburbs. This occupies a massive 1,280 ha (3160 acres) and is a no-development zone, consisting of land which was acquired from the tribals who lived institutions like there in 1948. Various state government-backed the Film City have already been allotted chunks of this land. Although it is essential that such areas are kept green, rather them built upon, the dairy operation can probably be shifted, since it is no longer necessary to produce milk in such proximity t o consumers. There could certainly be better public uses to which this stretch could be put.

London Docklands is Rising Up . . . As it happens, the biggest and probably the most controversial redevelopment of a derelict industrial site anywhere in the world is the case of the London Docklands, which has many pointers for the potential reuse of textile mill lands in India as well. It has been 'at the forefront of the analyses and practice of urban policy (in Britain) for the past 20 years', in the words of one of its severest critics, Sue Brownill, author in 1990 of Developing London's Docklands: Another Great Planning Disaster?36 Economic and technological changes had led to dock closures and industrial decline from the late 1960s. The area of 22 sq km or 9 sq miles of redundant space— with 88 km (55 miles) of waterfront —became known as the largest area of western Europe, or hyped to be the greatest redevelopment opportunity since the Fire of London. As another, more temperate, author, Brian Edwards, observes, 'The reclamation of redundant dockland areas has been a recurring 36

Sue Brownill, Developing London Docklands: Another Great Planning Disaster?, Paul Chapman, London, 1990, p . 1.

Mumbai City in the Dock 253

as a world financial centre. 42 The East India Docks were the first to go in 1967; West India followed in 1980. The processes of restructuring were replicated in other industries in the area. Between 1961 and 1971, five boroughs in the Dockland area lost 83,000 jobs. In one area, Canning Town, multinational companies were responsible for three-quarters of the 18,000 jobs lost. The decline was accentuated by the government policy of diverting industries out of London. Unemployment was accompanied by deskilling and casualization of work, particularly among women. As in the Mumbai mill areas, there was migration outwards in search of better opportunities. The population dropped to 39,000; new schools were needed and the precinct had a very sorry image. In the 1970s, studies came up with some far-fetched ideas for redevelopment, with grandiose titles such as Europa and Venice and a safari park on the site of the Victoria dock. Local residents began to protest: at the opening of the Tower Hotel in St Katherine's Dock in Tower Hamlets, reported a local newspaper: 'While guests inside sipped champagne they watched outside as men and women paraded posters with the slogans "Homes before Hotels" and "People before Profits'". 43 Later, in what is described as the second phase of Docklands planning in the pre-Thatcher era, there was a partial shift back to local control, which reflected the needs of the locality. Two key areas w e r e employment and transport infrastructure. Instead of assuming, as it was done earlier, that new office and service sector jobs would arrest the area's decline, the planners argued in favour of stabilizing industrial jobs and attracting new industries; services were a secondary contributor. However, land acquisition and the lack of finance put paid to these proposals. In the early 1980s, the LDDC was entrusted with the task of regenerating Docklands. As Brownill comments, this was 'a process and policy (which) invoked images suggesting that what went before was dead and what came after was vital, new and respectable'. 44 It was meant to upgrade the image through physical works; leverage private investment through its limited resources; acquire land; improve housing; set up a transport network; and wind up the corporation as soon as Docklands became selfsufficient. On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, 42 43 44

Brownill 1990, p. 15. ibid, p. 23. ibid, p. 38.

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the Greater London Council (since abolished) from Bermondsey believed that the creation of a democratically unaccountable authority was 'the beginning of a process which we are now seeing driven to a bitter conclusion, with the capital city itself plunged back into its mid-19 th century condition, fragmented, controlled not by a unified elected government but by a muddle of quangos [quasi-non-govemmental organizations] and joint boards'. 40 Amazingly, Docklands was redeveloped without an overall master plan. ★ In the late eighteenth century, workers from the north of England, m a d e redundant in the cotton and woollen industries b y technological developments, like the spinning jenny and flying shuttle, migrated south to seek employment. They found work in and around the docks. By the 1850s, it was claimed that if the Thames was closed to traffic, 20,000 workers would lose their jobs. 41 A whole century later, the area's decline could be traced to forces operating in the national and international economy, which were accentuated by the local situation. In 1967, just before the first dock closure, there were under 23,000 registered dock workers. By 1980, this had fallen to just 4100; the following year, the last upstream docks were ordered to close. As in Mumbai, containerization had taken its toll, and the trucks could no longer trundle through the narrow streets; there was a general decline in world shipping (with a spurt in air freight); and the size of ships increased. Interestingly enough, the very first London dock owed its origin to the trade with India and was known as the West India Dock, the foundation of which was laid by Prime Minister William Pitt in 1800. Brownill underlines that the inscription on the stone referred to 'the undertaking which, under the favour of God, shall contribute stability, increase and ornament to British Commerce'. Prime Minister Thatcher opened her election campaign in 1987 on Canary Wharf, the south quay of the West India Dock and the site of a speculative high-rise office development which was hailed, in somewhat the same vein as Pitt, as ensuring the future of London 40

George Nicholson quoted in James Bentley, East of the City: The London Docklands Story, Pavilion Books, London, 1997. 41 Bentley 1997, p. 100.

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Edwards cites how 75,000 new jobs had been promised; the modem blocks and skyscrapers on an American scale conveyed a feeling of unprecedented growth. The property boom of the 1980s saw the emergence of a new generation of high specification commercial buildings. The info-tech revolution promised to lead to urban decentralization. Docklands provided the City of Westminster with a complementary hi-tech centre; it also allowed London to retain its pre-eminence within world money markets. He points out that without the extensive floor space available on the Isle of Dogs, London might well have been upstaged by Frankfurt or Paris as the European centre of finance —an obsession which sounds all too familiar with Mumbai's planners in Chapter 2. 'Docklands is undoubtedly the victim of its own success,' believes Edwards, 'but it also demonstrates the shortcomings of New Right policies for the inner city.' He argues that if the LDDC was to meet the criticism that it was not meeting its social obligations in providing community services and education, it ought to have been freed of its responsibility for transport, which the state would normally provide. 47 Overall, Edwards asserts that the Docklands presented a landscape of opportunity. His criticism, which is very muted, relates mainly to design and overall planning. The traditional view of the city was violated: there were no civic squares, public buildings or parks. There was an uncomfortable relationship between transport and development. The architecture was meretricious, with a high degree of stylistic competition rather than social concern. Spaces between public buildings were relegated to car parks or enclosed into private squares. In sum, there was a placelessness about the area. He writes: If design has aided the regeneration of Docklands, it has not greatly benefited ordinary people. The housing is generally beyond the reach of the indigenous population, and the jobs within the offices are inaccessible through want of skills. Design has therefore only indirectly helped local people, and here mostly through enhancing their own property values. The next decade may see the so-called trickle effect of benefit flowing downwards, but in the meantime resentment against the LDDC, and all the building it has generated, has led to a measure of distrust regarding design. Graffiti and billboards in the area produced by residents' groups have on occasion attacked design with almost as much vehemence as they 47

Edwards 1992, p. 9.

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Edwards saw this as the 'bravest experiment since the demise of the new towns in the early 1970s'. The regeneration of the eastern corridor of London, using free market policies and energies, was in contrast to the sense of municipal endeavour displayed in the earlier formation of new towns, such as Milton Keynes. It was to cut the Gordian knot of planning controls through property-led regeneration, an attempt to bring the skills of the market place to worn-out inner city areas by a combination of fiscal incentives and planning. He saw it as fortunate in the timing of 'the economic collapse of the traditional industries of shipping and warehousing, and in the rise of the new economy of financial services, design and information technology fostered b y the Thatcher government'. 45 Initially, the LDDC's achievements were remarkable. One billion pounds sterling spent in 10 years attracted £ 10 billion of investment; an enterprise zone was set up in the Isle of Dogs; international investment poured in —notably the Canary Wharf commercial complex by the firm Olympia and York. Even Brownill cites how 17,000 dwellings were built or started; up to 20,000 jobs and 0.81 sq m (8.7 million sq ft) of floorspace had materialized by 1989 which could in principle accommodate 2,00,000 jobs. As much as 1.9 million sq m (20 million sq ft) of commercial space and 30,000 dwellings were 'confidently expected', in LDDC's words. Writes Brownill: 'The area now bristles with mirror glass and tubular steel [shades of the National Stock Exchange in Girangaon]. A futuristic light railway runs along its computer controlled elevated track above the docks. By the riverside, warehouses converted into luxury flats [reminiscent of Boston's waterfront —author] mingle with new blocks which mimic the originals. On Canary Wharf, "Wall Street on Water" is taking shape, at 1 million sq m (10 million sq ft), one of the largest single commercial office developments in Europe [emphases added]. Travel east to the Royal Docks where among the now-empty docks the planes from London City Airport take off and land. This is the image of the bright shiny new Docklands that has been relentlessly marketed over recent years. As a result, the LDDC is held up as the jewel in the crown of arguments for what can happen when burdensome red tape and recalcitrant local authorities are swept out of the way. It is the spatial expression of the 1980s enterprise culture, and the planning regime to accompany it.' 46 45 46

Edwards 1992, p. 135. Brownill 1990, pp. 1-3.

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tendencies; market criteria dominated decision-making rather than collective or community concerns. Secondly, there was authoritarian decentralism, where the centre appropriates p o w e r and decentralizes it to the market. Thirdly, there was a strong streak of anti-bureaucratic sentiment: the replacement of red tape with flexible planning procedures, backed up by law, which allowed the private sector room for manoeuvre. The entire process changed the relationship between central and local government: local were removed and it excluded interests opposed representatives to centralized government. It was the rolling back of the state.50 Anthony King, author of Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the of London, cites Docklands as Thatcher's attempt Internationalization to make the city 'unhooked from the state where it exists, its future decided by fortunes over which it has little control.' 51 National interest was seen to coincide with that of the transnational capitalist class, with no inherent contradiction. This can be seen in the broader from the context of the south of England declaring independence rest of the economy. This toxic trio—'leverage, lack of local democracy and flexible planning' —found its fullest expression in the Canary Wharf development on the Isle of Dogs in 1985. When LDDC completed a decade in 1991, it claimed that it was 'currently the largest of its kind in the world' and was located only 2.5 development miles from the Bank of England. 52 This Wall Street on water was planned in response to the rising rentals and shortage of suitable buildings in the City. There was to be 818,000 sq m (8.8 m sq ft) of offices, two hotels, servicing facilities, shops, restaurants and 8000 parking spaces. There were to be three 850-feet-high 60-storey offices in the line of view of Greenwich Park widely regarded as one of the most important and beautiful in London. The scheme was valued at £1.5 billion at the time (this figure almost quadrupled later). The promoters were a consortium of three American banks: Financiere Credit Suisse-First Boston, Morgan Stanley International Inc. and first Boston Docklands Associates. Writes Brownill: 'The 50

Brownill 1990, p . 31. Anthony King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1990; cited in World Cities in a World-System, Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (eds), CUP, Cambridge, 1995, p. 34. 52 LDDC, London Docklands: A Decade of Achievement: 1981-1991, London Docklands Development Corporation, London, 1991. 51

256 Ripping the Fabric decry other displays of wealth. If the LDDC has a challenge ahead, it is to re-establish the social dimension of design and to rescue the process from that merely of money-making. 48

He recalls how it was not as if under the earlier dispensation, h e r i t a g e had been better p r e s e r v e d . The Docklands Joint argued in 1976 Committee, which had residents' representatives, that the cost of converting warehouses made it 'irrelevant to the people in greatest need'. Some dock basins are now mere channels, treated as shallow canals for storm drainage and to create the pretence of a little Venice. 'The loss of historic warehouses is nearly matched by the loss of water itself, which is after all what makes the Docklands different from other parts of London.' He likens the infilling of docks to the demolition of warehouses or a church. 'Even today the constructing of buildings over the water is condoned, yet the relationship between water basins, dockside warehouses and quayside walks is the essence of Dockland character,' he points out. 'Sadly, heritage concerns in Docklands place less weight on industrial than architectural monuments, and is happy to preserve the latter when the former is what really constitutes cultural memory to most ordinary people.' 49 His comments apply in equal measure to Mumbai's cotton textile mill precinct, where developers, given half a chance, would love to erase all memory of the industrial architecture and create a brave new make-believe commercial world on its ruins. As we have noted earlier, any agency sensitive about the loss of cultural heritage in Mumbai would, for instance, be particularly concerned about the precinct in Colaba, where Mukesh Mills, lies right next to Sassoon the workers by paying docks. The mill, which has compensated them Rs 6.5 lakhs each, is in imminent danger of being converted into a five-star hotel (forgetting that the Taj Mahal hotel is hardly a stone's throw away), which is what the promoters who bought the mill more than two decades ago intended in the first place. The sites could serve as cultural and recreational centres for the city as a whole. Brownill is far more severe on the Docklands redevelopment. She points out how homelessness trebled in the area; local was twice the London average. Thatcherite neounemployment liberal policies placed excessive emphasis on individualistic 48 ibid, pp. 25-6. 49 ibid, p. 16.

Mumbai City in the Dock 259

project, albeit on a far more modest scale. By 1997, Bentley records, 80 per cent of Canary Wharf was let. There was a regeneration of the area, or more accurately, of the cultural values of a certain class, with food festivals, orchestras, and a fillip to tourism. As Michael Heseltine put it: 'The legacy of the LDDC has been new buildings, new infrastructure, new skills and new hope. They have killed the myth that east London has no future/ 55 However, there were many land-use, who argued that once a major critics of market-driven user or occupier was attracted to a specific site, that became the land-use fix, determining the nature of adjacent developments, which were allowed to grow around it in an organic manner. As far as housing was concerned, market-led planning has led to chronic instability in Docklands, as the real estate market boomed and slumped. By 1987, land prices had increased fivefold in less than 18 months. 56 This is highly volatile even by Mumbai standards. The LDDC wanted to create new housing which would upgrade the image of the area, attract commercial investors and a different population. However, Dockland boroughs had some of the worst housing conditions in Britain, which was not tackled by the LDDC. Local people have found the new prices unaffordable. The boroughs —local government institutions —wanted to use the land left vacant after the closure of the docks for new, mainly rented housing for local needs. Furthermore, they intended to re-house in the ill-conceived tower blocks built in the poor, accommodated the 1960s (one such, Ronan Point, was actually demolished as an experiment that failed). Originally, two- thirds of the land vested in the LDDC was earmarked for housing. The Department of Environment had wanted three-quarters of this housing to be private, but this was reduced to half, under pressure in the House of Lords, which imposed a condition that land was to be made available to the boroughs for housing. Thatcher's policies, however, encouraged the privatization of housing. In Docklands in 1981, only 5 per cent owned their own homes. In a trend which has a great deal of bearing on the attempt to convert Girangaori into Mumbai's new financial district —indeed, almost as its precursor —London did initially witness a burgeoning financial sector, as we have seen. Such employees wanted to live as The close to the City as possible in high-value accommodation. 55 56

ibid, p. 75. ibid, p. 81.

258 Ripping the Fabric

54

rationale behind the development was the so-called Big Bang caused by the deregulation of the UK financial markets. Although London is advantageously located, straddling time zones, it was argued that Britain needed Canary Wharf if it was to stay ahead in the world race to be a financial centre and to provide space for the expanded City.' These are clearly themes which have a very strong echo in Mumbai, referred to in Chapter 1. The 22 ha (55 acres) Canary Wharf scheme required no planning permission, no public inquiry or public discussion. 53 Despite extensive concessions, two of the original bankers moved out and a Canadian property company, Olympia & York, reputed to be the largest real estate company in the world with extensive holdings in New York and worldwide, stepped in. In 1988, Thatcher performed the ceremony of driving the first pile on the site for Olympia & York; world-renowned architects like I.M. Pei were commissioned to enhance the design aspects. The firm had over £ 100 million in reserves when it took over the project; even so, it was given a whopping subsidy of £1 billion —a quarter of the 1989 value. The Docklands strategy was based on London's existing City (financial district) which would grow indefinitely. It did expand between 1984 and 1987, with 51,000 new jobs, but the growth dropped to less than half after that year. At that stage, 42 per cent of the total office space in Canary Wharf was unlet and there were some 3000 empty flats. In 1992, following a stock market crash, Olympia & York, owned by the Canadian financier, Paul Reichmann, who lost 100 million pounds sterling of his own wealth, filed for bankruptcy, according to a later Docklands chronicler, James Bentley, in his East of the City. The company is estimated to have sunk £2.2 billion on the project. With this, the extension of the Jubilee underground line to the area, which was being partly funded by the company, floundered —a classic case where private gain interferes with public good. When Sue Brownill wrote her book in 1990, she could not have foreseen this collapse, which would have confirmed her worst fears about speculation being the prime mover in the Canary Wharf development. In 1993, banks re-financed the scheme; Paul Reichmann was included among a group of property developers involved in the 53 54

ibid, pp. 54-6. Bentley 1997, p. 65.

Mumbai City in the Dock 261

unacceptable cost/ Contrast this with a Thames official in 1943, claiming that: 'It [Docklands] presents unequalled opportunities for public enjoyment; it makes London the first port of Great Britain; as a great waterway, it provides a cheap means of freight transport and it is the backbone of London's industrial areas' [emphases added].58 By 1986, Lord Howie, a former trade unionist himself, blamed it is dockers for their own downfall. 'In opposing modernization, likely that the dockers' militancy was a factor in the decline and eventual death of London's docks/ he believed, a sentiment which would find favour with the Mill Owners' Association of Mumbai. What had taken 200 years to create, disintegrated in just 14, causing widespread dereliction. Half the land areas were disused. As an LDDC official stated: 'Historically and physically, the docks had been cut off from the mainstream of London life, hidden for centuries behind historic high brick walls and the area perceived by the achievements of as the backyard of London, overshadowed the adjacent City and neglected in the general tendency of cities to spread westwards.' An earlier 1976 official plan to replicate occupations of the p a s t — warehousing, ship repairs, heavy engineering and processing of raw food —calling for a public investment of £1.2 billion, with no private sector involvement, failed. All such ideas were swept away with Thatcher's broom. Heseltine exulted: 'It displays more acutely and extensively than any other area in England, the physical decline of the inner city and the need for urban regeneration. It presents a major opportunity that London needs over the last 20 years of for the development the 20 th century: new housing, new environment, new industrial development, new facilities for recreation, new commercial development, new architecture; all calculated to bring these barren areas back into valuable use.' 59 Although a 1984 LDDC document has noted that the task of reviving the Docklands economy is central to regeneration, the local economy was sacrificed to the interests of property developers. Much was made about the shifting of newspaper presses to the Docklands, but not only was this only a relocation of jobs rather than the creation of new ones, with the new printing technology employed, a high proportion of jobs were lost in the process. While the LDDC claimed that some 20,000 jobs were created between 1981 58 59

Quoted in Bentley 1997, p. 36. ibid, p. 50.

260 Ripping the Fabric

were thus made for each other. According to two developments Paribas, a French bank with an interest in the housing market, there were only 60 ha (150 acres) of land available for such housing in central London boroughs in 1988, as against 376 ha (930 acres) in Docklands. The LDDC argued that planning restricted the availability of housing land and thereby pushed up house prices, whereas others held that land prices largely reflect the demand for housing rather than the influence of the planning system. At any rate, Docklands saw the largest concentration of newly built housing activity in inner London and possibly Greater London. Some of the new warehouse conversions set a precedent for the Docklands y u p p i e i m a g e . Between 1985 and 1987, the a r e a became synonymous with London's housing boom. With inflated demand, prices went through the roof, leading residential development to supersede commercial on many sites. With the stock market crash in October 1987, however, the speculative bubble burst and prices crashed. According to Brownill, the benefits of this type of housing benefited private developers who had easy access to cheap land. As one told her: 'Docklands was a one-off chance for the piranha fish in the London market and they all went in.' Locals were left high and dry. 57 The same betrayal was evident when it came to jobs. With a decline in port activity and London's move towards service sector in the area reached very high levels. employment, unemployment It was 12 per cent in the boroughs of Southwark and Newham and 15 per cent in Tower Hamlets (which has a substantial Bangladeshi population), as compared to nearly 9 per cent in London as a whole in 1981. In Poplar and Bermondsey, 26-28 per cent were jobless. Even so, there were 27,000 existing jobs in the area, mainly in manufacturing, transport and construction. However, the entire LDDC philosophy was based on the London inner city policy. As a 1977 White Paper had stated: 'Many of the inner areas surrounding the centres of our cities suffer from economic decline, physical decay and adverse social conditions . . . The inner parts of our cities must not be left to decay. It would mean large numbers of people face a future of declining job opportunities, a squalid environment, deteriorating houses and declining public services . . . Some of the changes that have taken place are due to social and economic forces which could b e reversed only with great difficulty or at an 57

Brownill 1990, pp. 67-86.

Mumbai City in the Dock 263

of corporate wealth creation, not public welfare; and the main environmental assets of the area, such as water and heritage, have been secured for private gain. Deregulation has led to wealth creation and the building of several well-designed commercial enclaves, but it seems incapable of generating a broader canvas of civic well-being.63 In his 1986-7 Chairman's annual review of the LDDC, (later, Sir) Christopher Benson, who also headed MEPC, Britain's second largest property company, admitted that 'social regeneration — meeting people's needs —is more important than physically building the fabric'. The first sign of this policy turnaround was an agreement to spend almost £100 million on community capital projects, providing nearly 2000 homes and thousands of jobs and training places. Here too, however, there was a gap between precept and practice, and the private sector was the ultimate gainer. In the ultimate analysis, as Brownill concludes, the policy of inner city leverage an intervention was a failure: 'It failed in its own terms, it failed on the terms of the private sector and it failed from the point of view of the local residents who have paid the price for this failure . . . Far from being an example of privatizing the city, everything that happened was a result of the spending of large sums of public money and intervention by the public sector in the land and property markets. What has altered is accountability over how that money is spent and the interests and ends to which the expenditure and intervention has been aimed.' Urban space was allocated on what one observer termed the heavily subsidized private cheque book and deliberately attracting high-value uses. 64 The LDDC was wound up by an Act of parliament in March 1998 and ceased all operational activities thereafter. In the final analysis, whether the London Docklands experiment has succeeded to an extent depends on the predilections of the observer, but there is no doubt that it did not fulfil the high expectations it raised. Perhaps the unkindest remark of all was that of a Labour MP from the area who described the LDDC as 'a bejewelled harlot who provides instant attraction, but no long-term satisfaction'.65 By 2001, there were some signs of a turnaround. As the media reported, 'Champagne flowed freely as London landmark Canary 63 64 65

Edwards 1992, pp. 161-71. Brownill 1990, pp. 171-82. Bentley 1997, p. 94.

262 Ripping the Fabric

and 1987 in Docklands, 77 per cent of these were transfers. Local employers were also discriminated against and even profit-making ones had to move out. As a shop steward from one such firm complained: 'It's disgusting. I'm going to lose my job so that someone can live in a £85,000 flat. What's worse is that people who lose their jobs will be unable to find any employment in the area.' Almost half the Docklands work-force had lived locally, but this proportion fell by half with time. With the restructuring of labour markets, Docklands and inner city residents were pushed further into the secondary labour market, heightening the deskilling and casualization, with minorities and women bearing the brunt of this change. This is why, Brownill believes, despite the increased commercial floorspace and the expenditure of vast amounts of public money, levels of unemployment in the Docklands boroughs have remained around twice the London average over the lifetime of the LDDC. 60 Edwards asks whether Docklands presents a model of a postindustrial society which thrives not on products or even services but on ideas. 61 According to Brownill, Docklands was being called a great planning disaster and the LDDC 'a failure which has been rejected even by its own disciples'. 62 By 1991, Edwards points out: The ideological high ground of the New Right had been lost, London Docklands had proved less of a success than formerly claimed, and Margaret Thatcher was out of office. The moral supremacy 'of economic liberalism, authoritarian decentralism and anti-bureaucratic sentiment had given way to politics by consensus and urban renewal by partnership. The reorientation of municipal planning during the 1980s had not been accompanied by wholesale demolition of the development plan system as some predicted. Only in areas managed by urban development corporations did the market enjoy great development freedom, and here London Docklands is undoubtedly the fullest blossoming of the New Right's experiment in environmental deregulation . . . Because New Right thinking was particularly allied to the south-east of Britain and led to the emergence of a new young middle class, London Docklands became almost their area. It represents the quintessence of Thatcherism, not just because a certain type of person was attracted to the area, but because the buildings and spaces created closely reflected the new ideology. Urban community scarcely exists; civic building is the result 60 61 62

Brownill 1990, pp. 87-106. Edwards 1992, p. 166. Brownill 1990, p. 133.

Mumbai City in the Dock 265 It is difficult to believe that British planners ever confronted the radical issue of social land ownership, or that they could now engage in radical debates, for example on the sustainability or the redistribution of resources. While planning is confronted by a range of issues, the problem is to provide a penetrating analysis of the economic and political forces which shape planning and the urban structure. If the task is to create a realisable strategy, then that strategy must confront the logic of urban development and the power structures that pursue that logic in urban space. Docklands demonstrates that urban development generates profits for a raft of inter* related property and allied interests and that urban space is shaped, in part, by the economic logic of property development and investment. The invasion and exploitation of the development process by property interests is such that it is difficult to see how the concepts of consensus or 'planning gain' can deliver substantial improvements in urban development . . . The achievement of a valid planning system still depends on radical reassessment of land ownership and property rights and the need to challenge the profit function in the development processes. Given the existing system of development, it is difficult to see how provision can be made for social and environmental programmes, social housing, employment, and a range of other social objectives. 70

70

John Barnes, BobColenutt and Patrick Malone, 'London: Docklands and the State', in City, Capital and Water, Patrick Malone (ed), Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 33-4.

264 Ripping the Fabric

Wharf marked another chapter in its transformation from bankrupt estate to banking hotspot.' The celebrations were over the completion of two 42-storey office blocks, Britain's highest, at One Canada Square. These were to house the world headquarters of HSBC Bank and the European head office for Citigroup of Wall Street. 'The once desolate Docklands district increasingly resembles an east London version of Manhattan.' 66 There was even speculation that the London Stock Exchange would move to Canary Wharf, breaking with a 200-year-old tradition of being in the Square Mile of the City. 67 Prof Geoff Marsh, the London property analyst who was quoted in the first chapter for his comments on Mumbai, has cited how the ill-fated US energy multinational Enron was negotiating a pre-lease of 1.4 million sq ft at Canary Wharf, probably the biggest single office letting in London for all time. He drew a loose parallel with Enron's purchase of 100,000 sq ft at Bandr a~Kur la, also a marketdefining event. Just as Canary Wharf replicated the critical mass and prestige which was the preserve of the City of London, BandraKurla was emerging as Mumbai's office location of choice for efficiency, image and accessibility. He also referred to how occupiers were moving away from Nariman Point when they wanted large offices and mentioned a new entrant to India's insurance industry, Standard Life, acquiring 30,000 sq ft in the mill area. 68 In 2001, Enron leased an additional 100,000 sq ft in Kamla Mills at Rs 70 per sq ft per month, but the company was mired in controversy. 69 The lesson to be drawn from the Docklands experience, and one which has every relevance for mill lands, is the need for local, democratic accountability and participation in decision-making processes. Even more fundamentally, it points to the need for the application of social principles in urban development. The task is considerably complicated by the fact that planning in Britain has been downgraded (and in Mumbai, sidelined) and its political intervention reduced. As three British authors who have reviewed the Docklands saga conclude: 66

'Canary Wharf Entices Away London's Financial Biggies', Business Standard,16 Mar 2001. 67 'LSE May Move to Canary Wharf', Economic Times, 3 Apr 2001. 68 'Mumbai Pulls Up Its Stocks', Economic Times, 10 Dec 2000. 69 'A "Virtual" Revolution', Property Times, Times of India, 26 Jan 2001; 'Suburbs Boom as Corporate Invasion Continues', Times of India, 18 May 2001.

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 267 that no fighting worker will ever have to bend to breathe.* —Kishore Theckedath

As we saw at the beginning of this book, central to any examination of the direction in which a city is heading are the dreams and aspirations of its citizens. What vision do people have of its future? Unless planners address these all-important goals, they can scarcely hope to Satisfy the hopes of the people who inhabit the city. When the metropolis in question happens to be the industrial and commercial capital of the country, the questions assume an even greater urgency. The problem is that there is no consensus among the residents of any city as to what its future should hold. It all depends on the class interests at stake. For the elite, a broadly defined category which includes higher level officials in the private sector and bureaucracy, Mumbai should be catching up with other advanced cities, at least in Asia. Datta Isvalkar, the general secretary of the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, recalls how the Maharashtra Governor, EC. Alexander, who was the former High Commissioner in the UK, once suggested that Mumbai should emulate London's example. As we have seen in the first chapter, there is a constant refrain about Mumbai becoming a Singapore or Hong Kong. Singapore is, for this class, almost a synonym for all that is rich and clean and modem, even while it remains in Asia. Datta Samant, the union leader who was assassinated, once alleged: 'There is a conspiracy of the government, mill owners, builders and the RMMS to sell off mill land and make Bombay into a Singapore or a Hong Kong/ 1 Many people believe that if 'Singapore can do it, surely Mumbai can?' This is an impossible dream. The city-state of Singapore has only some 3.4 million inhabitants —about a quarter of Mumbai's. Furthermore, it has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at over $32,000. It handles much of the world's sea-borne * 'Breath', a poem in Kishore Theckedath, Change of Heart,Lokvangmaya Griha, Mumbai, 1988. 1 Murder of the Mills, Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, Mumbai, 1996, p. 60.

8

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? Meanwhile you trudged on Sun Mill Lane for thirty years and lined your lungs with soot as you took in the vapoured smoke from Dhanraj Mill. I remember later how you leaned against the table to breathe, and on walks your grip tightened on my shoulder that I might pause in your breathlessness. Now that you have quietly dissolved yourself in this turbid smoke and ride a wayward draft you will never more yearn for elusive oxygen. But I go scurrying around collecting funds for the textile strike and hope that things will turn out so

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 269

predictable that industrialists and businessmen would love a city it is strange that local politicians also managed Singapore-style, keep referring to this vision, without giving any thought to the realities on the ground and, more importantly, the very constituents who voted them to power in the first place. A city is as much a product of the workers who toil in it as any other class. This explains the importance of the textile workers, who formed a significant proportion of Mumbai's labour force— two-thirds in the 1930s —and have shaped not only its economic and social structure but also its proletarian and diverse culture. The existence of over 2 lakh workers in a single industry till the late 1970s determined the social and political contours of Mumbai. socialist trade unionist George This is where the once-militant Fernandes was dubbed 'George the Giant Killer' after vanquishing the conservative Congress party city boss, S.K. Patil in the 1967 parliamentary elections. This is where, as we have seen in Chapter III, the veteran unionist Datta Samant, who was asked to lead the abortive textile strike in the early 1980s, was voted to the Lok Sabha after suffering this crushing defeat. As we have observed, there is no other city in the world where there have been, in absolute terms, as many workers employed in a single industry. German steel workers, for example, are scattered over several cities in the Ruhr. The decline of the Mumbai textile industry for a host of reasons — none of them attributable to labour itself —should not in any way deprive this class from its due as citizens in their own right. These workers made Mumbai what it is, the industrial capital of the country, just as the dockers did for commerce some decades earlier. In other words, Mumbai was fashioned not only by the Sassoons, Tatas, Khataus, Ruias, Mafatlals and other industrialists but by the sweat of countless other millions who remain unnamed. As we have documented, the mill workers were for the most part badly served by the owners: right through the first half of the twentieth century, the owners tried to deny them their dues and even to cut their wages at the slightest opportunity. The record of many of these industrialists has been far from exemplary: they have huge sums outstanding as bank loans, electricity and water bills. A major reason why the Mumbai cotton textile industry failed to keep up with the times is that the owners did not plough back their profits to modernize their machinery but diverted these funds into other industries. By the time they realized that they would be left

268 Ripping the Fabric

cargo and is a major financial centre. As such, its experience is hardly relevant or applicable to Mumbai, which has a huge hinterland not only within the state of Maharashtra but attracts migrants from all over the country and even neighbours like Nepal and Bangladesh. Some 300 settlers enter the city every day. Singapore not only h a s strict anti-immigration laws b u t imposes its authoritarian rule on its citizens. They do not possess the democratic right to express themselves or to demonstrate; even the media is fettered. Mumbai's elite wistfully speculates about the desirability of such curbs in the city, particularly a ban on the entry of migrants. The chauvinist Shiv Sena party has openly endorsed such moves, although the Indian constitution forbids any discrimination of this nature against fellow nationals. Hong Kong, like Singapore, is seen as a shoppers' paradise and duty-free port. Its integration with China has only slightly dampened the ardour of those Indians who would like to emulate its experience. Mumbai's financial services sector is particularly enamoured of Hong Kong's role in leveraging funds for the entire mainland of China. It also happens to be a major garments producer. However, Mumbai cannot go the Hong Kong route because the latter was never an industrial centre and does not have to contend with thousands of factory workers who have been thrown out of their jobs. Despite migrants from China over the years, it does not have to cope with the utter poverty of the Indian countryside, which compels villagers to leave their homes in search of casual in the nearest town or city. Any comparison with employment Singapore and Hong Kong, therefore, is specious. As Mumbai mill unionists say, 'This should be Shramapura —a labourers' city — rather than Singapore.' It is not what idyllic vision the elite may harbour for Mumbai that is important, but also what is feasible. In the Indian context, the sheer p r e s s of numbers does not permit the growth of hermetically insulated enclaves which are cut off from the mainland of it. Even if theoretically, Mumbai and can prosper independently were to secede from the rest of the country, it would still struggle to cope with the joblessness and homelessness of the majority of its existing citizens, which it would not be able to tackle. A group like Bombay First, promoted by the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, ought to give up any delusions about the city becoming a regional finance centre, as if one could wish away the abysmal poverty within the metropolis and surrounding it. While it is somewhat

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 271

factory workers are seen as defending their sectarian interests, to the detriment of the much larger working population. This argument can be countered by pointing out that organized labour sets the minimum standards for all employment —in terms of security, wages, perquisites, bonus etc. In Mumbai, so-called 'informal' employment is growing, which can hardly be termed a real alternative for job security and well-being. Substituting regular employment by casual and part-time work —which is, incidentally, a global phenomenon —is hardly any solution. The future of the city depends on the security and well being of all its citizens. Workers in manufacturing have been deprived of their jobs but they need to be reabsorbed in other occupations. As we have seen, this is easier said than done in the textile industry because it is a fairly specialized operation. They are not very young and cannot be easily retrained to do something else. Being a hereditary occupation meant that one did not possess skills at the point of job entry but learned on the job. Four decades ago, Jane Jacobs, the visionary author of The Death and Life of American Cities, made a strong case for retaining the diverse character of New York's working class districts and for not destroying their social fibre irretrievably.

Global Urban Experience Sustainable development —meaning the capacity to grow without affecting the well-being of future generations— has come to be accepted as a universal principle, following the publication in 1987 of the report of the World Commission on Environment & headed by the former Norwegian Prime Minister, Development, Gro Harlem Brundtland, titled 'Our Common Future'. The theme was roundly endorsed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in see cities as a drain on 1992. Although many environmentalists resources, rather than generators of wealth, others like David Satterthwaite of the International Institute of Environment & Development in London point to the need to make cities sustainable as well, so that the needs of today's citizens can be met without compromising the needs of those in the future. Employment is central to such discussions on sustainability. The World Commission itself observed that one of the multiple goals of sustainable development as applied to cities was:

270 Ripping the Fabric

Scrapped Truck in a Derelict Mill Compound hopelessly outdated, unable to compete with other emerging textile cannot modernize their producers, it was too late. Managements plants overnight; they have to do so incrementally. Some critics have pointed out that textile and other workers are by no stretch of the imagination the worst off in the city: they can be said to constitute the labour aristocracy'. The really wretched are the more recent migrants who d o odd jobs a s casual or temporary labour. They are almost always the slum dwellers —as distinct from the mill workers who live in chawls. Such critics argue that by asserting their rights to employment and insisting that mills be run even at a loss merely to protect their jobs, organized labour was depriving other people of the employment that could be created if that investment was diverted to other industries instead. The

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 273 period, the city lost more than 350,000 jobs. The good news, according to The New York Times, is that 'Ultimately this remarkable innovation could help . . . increase [New York's] competitiveness in the intensifying battle for global markets.' The price for global success, however, is likely to be costly for New York's workforce. The city's former comptroller, Elizabeth Holtzman, painted the employment picture in stark contrasts. 'What we may be moving towards here,' she said, 'is a tale of two cities: growth in higher paying jobs and a shrinking in lower-paying jobs.' Holtzman warned that unless new low-skilled jobs can be found to fill the vacuum created by the new displacement technologies, the city will face 'turmoil— more social dislocation, more crime, more poverty.' 4

In a hard-hitting book titled The Assassination of New York, Robert Fitch records how New York had gone farther than other American cities in concentrating its employment in FIRE—finance, insurance and real estate. And yet, it earned itself the unenviable reputation as the unemployment capital of the US—having wrested this status from the automobile city of Detroit in the early 1990s. In January 1993, the official unemployment rate in the Big Apple was 13.4 per cent, about the same as that in the former East Germany at the time, and twice the national average. Less than half New Yorkers of working age were at work, as against 62 per cent in the rest of the country. 'The cyclical shock had exposed the structural fragility of New York's re-built post-industrial economy/ writes Fitch, '. . . it was now this FIRE structure —not the old manufacturing-based structure —that led urban America in job loss, unemployment and "non-work".' The inequality was also stark: only 44,000 families, the top 6 per cent, earned half the total incomes in Manhattan, possibly the most skewed in all of urban America. The housing market had completely collapsed, with the largest real estate firm and tax-payer, Olympia & York—of London Docklands' notoriety — going bankrupt. 5 According to Rifkin, employees are being replaced by software in the US. In 1992, productivity rose by nearly 3 per cent, the highest in two decades. But these giant strides spelled wholesale reductions in the work-force. Re-engineering typically accounts for between 4

Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era,Tarcher/ Putnam, New York, 1995, pp. 143-4. 5 Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York, Verso, London and New York, 1993, pp. 3-15.

272 Ripping the Fabric Economic needs —including] access to a n adequate livelihood or productive assets; also economic security when unemployed, ill, disabled or otherwise unable to secure a livelihood.2

Globalization puts new pressures on the capacity of countries to provide jobs for the majority of its population. Within countries, cities —particularly those which were major industrial centres — are finding it increasingly difficult in the current drive towards economic liberalization and privatization to employ the bulk of their citizens. This may prove die biggest stumbling block in making cities sustainable in the future. Specifically, the belief that the services sector can absorb those displaced in manufacturing is erroneous. When it comes to financial services in particular, the skills required become more and more specialized, leading to a small, highly trained and highly paid work-force and a mass of According people who are either unemployed or unemployable. to Saskia Sassen, even in global cities, the new urban elite makes up only one-fifth of the population. 3 In the ongoing euphoria over the spectacular growth of the information technology sector in India, as reflected in share values in stock exchanges in India and in the US, this may seem too conservative a view. But it is borne out by the experience of the world's leading financial centres. In his perceptive book titled The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin cites how New York bounded back in the 1990s and was growing despite burgeoning unemployment and poverty: Re-engineering [restructuring] and the new information technologies are transforming the nature of work in the premier service centre of the world. While service industries are experiencing rapid gains in productivity and profit, they are doing so with fewer workers. Nine out of ten jobs in New York City are in the service sector. Many of them are being lost as scores of New York employers—[he cites Merrill Lynch and Arthur Andersen, who are also functioning out of Mumbai]—are making 'quantum leaps in learning how to produce ever more work with ever fewer people.' From 1989 to 1993, productivity gains in industries like banking, insurance, accounting, law, communications, airlines, retailers and hotels surpassed the expectations of even the most bullish forecasters. In the same time 2

Diane Mitlin and David Satterthwaite, 'Sustainable Development and Cities' in Sustainability, the Environment and Urbanization,Cedric Pugh (ed) Earthscan Publications, London, 1996, pp. 30-1. 3 'Clouds in My Cappucino', interview with Saskia Sassen, The Irish Times, 18 Apr 2000.

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 275

Japan, which prided itself on its high employment levels, has shown high rates of joblessness, touching nearly 5 per cent in June 1999. Companies which used to guarantee lifelong employment can no longer do so. While these figures appear low by European standards, the official statistics underestimate the actual number: anyone who works more than one hour in the last week of a month is listed as possessing a job. Some experts believe that the actual proportion of joblessness is twice the official figure, which would make it comparable with European countries. Under pressure from the US and European powers, Japan is further liberalizing its economy, particularly of the heavily indebted banking and financial sectors. This includes removal of barriers to foreign competitors, both in goods and services, and end to the lifelong employment system and abolition of subsidies for services to rural areas. The cumulative impact of these measures will be to heighten social tensions. The suicide rate is the highest since 1947. Most shockingly, children and teenagers figure among these suicides. 8 If globalization —the process by which producers and investors treat the world economy as a single market and production area with regional or national subsectors, rather than a set of national economies linked by trade and investment flows—can cause such disruption in the most powerful economy in the world, one can well imagine what it does to other countries. Many policy-makers, economists in particular, downplay the social tensions triggered off by globalization and brand all opponents —like organized labour —as self-interested protectionists. Harvard professor Dani Rodrik, author of Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, believes that 'the most serious challenge for the world economy in the years ahead lies . . . in ensuring that international economic integration does not contribute to social Disintegration'. Globalization 'fundamentally transforms the employment relationship'. The labour of ordinary workers in one country can now more easily be substituted for the labour of workers in other countries. Owners of capital, highly skilled workers, and many professionals —fortunate in being able to take 'their resources where they are most in demand' —are not disturbed by this transformation, but most people are. As a result, workers have to pay a larger share of non-wage costs, such as workplace safety measures and benefits; their earnings and hours 8

'Japan's Economic Restructuring Hits New Hurdles as Jobless Rate Rises', Financial Express,17 Aug 1999.

274 Ripping the Fabric

40 and 75 per cent of the jobs in a company; middle management is particularly vulnerable. In the US as a whole, The Wall Street Journal estimates that restructuring could eliminate between 1 million and 2.5 million jobs a year during the foreseeable future. Experts can easily see where the jobs are being destroyed but have no idea where they will be created. Such reorganization of work could prove as massive and destabilizing as the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It could be the biggest social issue of the next 20 years, at least in industrial countries. Jacques Attali, a French minister and technology-consultant to former President Francois Mitterand, went so far as„to proclaim the end of the era of the working man and woman. 'Machines are the new proletariat/ he said, 'the working class is being given its marching orders.' One study by the International Metal Workers Federation in Geneva forecasts that within 30 years, only 2 per cent of the world's current labour force will be required to produce all the goods demanded. 6 In the US, as in India, governments claim an increase in employment following such restructuring of work but this masks the fact that it is of a casual, not permanent nature. The US administration announced that 1.23 million jobs had been created in the first half of 1993, but omitted to mention that 60 per cent of these were part-time and in low-wage service industries. The American worker has to contend with automation on the one hand and a global labour pool on the other. In 1979, the average weekly wage in the US was $387. By 1989, it had dropped to $335. This was in part attributable to the declining power of trade unions. Wage freezes and pay cuts were unheard of in the 1960s and 1970s. Following the 1981-2 recession, these began to take place. In the 1980s, manufacturers were able to save $13 million an hour in wages by eliminating more than 1.2 million jobs. What is more, they saved another $3.1 million per hour by lowering real hourly wage rates from $10.75 to $10.33. Overall, American workers were earning $22 million an hour less than a decade previously. The Census Bureau reported that in 1994, the percentage of Americans working full time but earning less than a poverty level income for a family of four —around $13,000 a year —rose by 50 per cent between 1979 and 1992. 7 6 7

Rifkin 1995, pp. 5-8. ibid, pp. 166-9.

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? T77

established a social floor. Globalization led to breaches in this social floor, with many people falling into them. 13 According to the government's Economic Survey 1997-8, the entire work force, straddling all sectors in agriculture and industry, consisted of 400 million people. The informalization of the economy had begun in real earnest much earlier. An Alternative Economic Survey for 1992-3 estimated that there were 40 million workers in the organized sector, but five times as many in the unorganized. The authoritative Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy shows that in the nation as a whole, the average worker in the organized sector earned Rs 10,851 per year in the late 1990s, less than Rs 1000 a month, while wage labour in the unorganized sector could expect to take home Rs 2482 a year—less than one-fourth as much. This puts the claims about Mumbai's mill workers being well off in the correct perspective.14 Many believed that industries were growing sick because there were surplus workers. R.L.N. Vijayanagar, former Secretary General of the Mill Owners Association in Mumbai, was quoted as saying: 'If you consider the unorganized sector as well, the textile industry, with 1.8 million people, is the largest labour-surplus industry.' The NTC was estimated to have 80,000 redundant workers. Next came coal mining, with some 50,000 workers. Comparisons were made between the public and private sector. Of the state transport undertakings, only four out of 58 were running at a profit. There were some 1 million workers in them —twice as many as in the private sector. The Tata Iron & Steel Co. with a capacity of 1.9 million tonnes, had 41,000 workers as against Essar Gujarat with 1.6 million tonnes and just 1700 workers (using modem technology). The public sector Steel Authority of India had 80,000 surplus workers. As Anupam Puri, a New York director of McKinsey, the consulting company, put it, 'By its very definition, liberalization means that inefficient firms will have to go; heads will roll, unemployment will go up. In the first few years of liberalization, real wages in Mexico fell by 55 per cent. Most of it was voluntary, though the government left no one in any doubt about its seriousness in implementing the programme.' 15 13

ILO Chief Stresses on Social Net, The Business Line, Chennai, 21 Feb 2000. 14 'Labour & Employment: The Role of the Voluntary Sector', Employment & Social Development, Vani, New Delhi, Dec 1998. 15 '"Cheap" Labour?', Business Today, 22 Apr 1993.

276 Ripping the Fabric

of work are more volatile due to changes in labour demand or labour productivity and their bargaining power has eroded, resulting in lower wages and benefits.9 At the beginning of 1999, according to the International Labour Organization, there were 150 million people fully unemployed and up to one billion underemployed —a third of the world's labour force. As ILO Director General Michel Hansenne put it: "The global employment situation is grim, and is getting grimmer.' In its 1996 World Employment Report, the ILO had predicted that a global economic revival would cut unemployment and underemployment. However, the 1996 figure of one billion remained the same two years later. As many as 10 million had become unemployed in 1998 alone due to the Asian financial crisis. 10

Jobless in India Regarding India, the ILO said: 'Although the trend of growth rate has been higher then earlier, it has not been sufficiently sustained for long enough to reduce significantly the existing high levels of underemployment and to absorb new job-seekers productively.' Employment grew by 2.4 per cent between 1987 and 1996. While the GDP grew by 6.9 per cent during 1993-7, real wages fell by 5.5 per cent during 1990-6. 11 According to Sudipto Mundle of the National Institute of Public Finance & Policy, if the World Bank's structural adjustment policies were followed, between 4 and 10 million people would lose their jobs between 1992 and 1994. If the Indian economy grew at the high rate of 3 per cent in 1992-3 and 5.7 p e r cent the following year, some 1 2 million would be unemployed. 12 In a lecture titled 'Decent Work' delivered in New Delhi in 2000, Juan Somavia, Director General of the ILO, mentioned that he was aware of the insecurity in Indian society. On the one hand, India w a s undergoing s t r u c t u r a l adjustment and globalization while on the other, it was trying to break international barriers and emerge a self-confident nation. It was important, he felt, to remember that decent work was an objective which 9

Cited in Human Rights for Workers Bulletin, vol. i, no. 7, 14 May 1997. Globalisation and Employment, Panos Briefing, no. 33, London, May 1999. 11 'South Asian Labour Scene to Worsen: ILO', Economic Times, 14 Oct 1998. 12 'Present Tense, Future Insecure', Business Today,6 June 1992. 10

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 279

admitted: 'There is no evidence that incomes are converging in the world as a whole . . . If anything, the income distribution of the world has become more uneven over time.' 18 In January 2000, the outgoing Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, criticized Russia's privatization programme, alleging that the system encouraged asset stripping that had seen billions and billions of dollars taken out of the country. 19 In 1999, UNCTAD warned that the backlash to globalization could come from the West, due to the whittling down of the middle class, the existence of 36 million jobless people there and heightened job and income security. This was amply borne out by the violent at the WTO summit in Seattle in November that demonstrations year. As evidence of this resistance, UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero cited French strikes at the end of 1995, electoral changes in Europe (presumably France and the UK) and a postal workers' strike in the US against part-time work. In his overview to the report, Ricupero said: 'The 1920s and 1930s provide a stark and disturbing reminder of just how quickly faith in markets and by political events.' Another sign openness can be overwhelmed of a backlash was xenophobia —reminiscent of the rise in Hindu in Mumbai, also due very largely to joblessness. fundamentalism According to UNCTAD, policies in industrialized countries (championed by the Bretton Woods twins, the IMF and the World Bank, along with the WTO) erroneously favoured financial orthodoxy instead of job creation and adequate pay. Financial liberalization in many countries had gone beyond the optimum, allowing money flows to turn hot, as The Wall Street Journal and short-term capital reported, seeking arbitrage opportunities gains instead of long-term productive investment. Further, had so far been lopsided, favouring products and liberalization services of industrial countries and denying trade advantages to developing countries in such areas as agriculture and textiles. 20 The UNCTAD report did not criticize globalization per se but warned against its adverse impacts, which could nullify its benefits. It found that the income gap between the rich and poor, between 18

ibid. 'Rich Nations Bank on the World, Ignore Poor', International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Asian Age, 29 Jan 2000. 20 'West is Warned of Globalization Backlash', Wall Street Journal, reprinted in Indian Express,17 Sep 1999. 19

278 Ripping the Fabric

By 2001, a senior Labour Ministry official attributed the stagnation in employment to the economic slowdown. 'The manufacturing sector is the biggest source of employment generation in the country/ he pointed out. 'After attaining a peak growth of 14.1 per cent in 1995-6, the manufacturing sector has shown a constant declining trend. The situation improved marginally in 1999-2000 when it stood at 7.1 per cent—almost half of what it was five years ago. But that is still not enough to generate enough employment.' 16

Lopsided Development Globalization has not left the wealthiest countries unscathed. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretary General Donald Johnston revealed that between 25 and 40 per cent in these super-rich countries were functionally illiterate, which meant they were not equipped with skills necessary to function in the modem work environment. In his words, 'they are effectively excluded from the advantages globalization offers'. Transnational companies, the main driving force behind globalization, which are responsible for 80 per cent of foreign direct investment, employed only 3 per cent of the world's labour force, less than half of these in the South (although the proportion may have grown since). 17 Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, 50 are MNCs. The convergence of wages theory, which states that globalization brings about a parity in wages among countries was partly borne out by the experience of the Asian Tigers. Workers in the South Korean clothing industry, for instance, saw their wages rise from 23 per cent at US levels in this industry in 1980 to 61 per cent in 1993. Hong Kong textile workers also rose from 38 to 57 at parallel US levels over the same period. However, the same has not held good for other countries, even those which opened themselves to globalization fully. Wages in Mexico and Chile in several sectors fell dramatically against US levels, as they did in India, Kenya, Morocco and Colombia. Concluded the UN Conference on Trade & Development (UNCTAD): 'Over the past two decades, most developing countries have experienced rising wage gaps with the North.' Even the World Trade Organization (WTO), which champions the globalization process, 16 17

'Work: A Generation Gap', Outlook, 7 May 2001. 'Globalization and Employment', Panos Briefing,1999.

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 281 admitted that its structural adjustment programmes have major adverse impacts on the urban poor, though it regards these as a short-term consequence of policies which will bring about longterm general benefits. It admits that the consequences on daily urban life include the "shifting demand for labour (thus contributing to unemployment)'. While the Bank considers this trend to be transitional unemployment, others believe that it is much more deep-seated. Asks the London-based organization Panos: 'If cities in the North with relatively low population growth and limited debts find it hard to create enough jobs, what chance is there for less well favoured cities in the South?' 23 In its interim report, the National Commission on Urbanization, headed by Charles Correa, rejected the alarmist view of the growth of cities, which advocated curbs on further expansion on the ground that existing amenities and services were being subjected to intolerable strain. Instead, it asserted that 'urban settlements are centres of non-agricultural productive activity, which absorb the population rendered surplus in the rural areas.' The Commission, which took the most comprehensive view of the different aspects of India's urbanization process, believed that it was inevitable, desirable and well distributed. Since agriculture was accounting for an ever-declining share of the GDP —only around a quarter at the turn of the century —these displaced from the land had to be accommodated in the cities. The Commission felt that 'urban India has a very positive role to play in the restructuring of the Indian economy over the next few decades.' By 2001, it had to absorb something like 150 million people, of which less than half would be due to natural increase. 24 According to the authoritative National Sample Survey for 1998, half of India's urban males were jobless and 43 per cent self-employed. 25 The Commission argued that the urbanization policy should not try to retain villagers in rural areas or to restrict the creation of jobs in urban areas. 'Job creation at an accelerated pace through sustained investments in viable urban centres is the key issue,' it stressed. It recommended that 4 lakh urban youth should be seleeteeL from poor households every year and trained in skills for which 23

Cities of the Future: Dream or Nightmare?, Panos Briefing, No. 34, London, Jun 1999. 24 Report of the National Commission on Urbanization, interim report, Jan 1987; Final Report: Summary of Recommendations of vol. n, Aug 1988. 25 'Little Change in Employment', Business Standard, 25 Jan 2000.

280 Ripping the Fabric

nations and within nations, was widening. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report of 1998 showed how 225 richest people in the world had a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's poor (who amounted to 2.5 billion people). The three richest individuals own assets that exceed the combined GDP of at least 49 least developed countries. The wealth of 32 wealthiest people exceeded the GDP of all of South Asia. The UN calculated that the additional cost of providing basic health, education, safe water and sanitation to poor countries was $40 billion per year— less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of these 225 Croesuses. 21 was mirrored in the US. Since the This lopsided development mid-1970s, the top 1 per cent of the households has doubled their share of the GDP and own more than the bottom 95 per cent together. This top 1 per cent owned 40 per cent of the GDP. The ownership of financial wealth was even more skewed: the 1 per cent controlled nearly half. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates by himself possessed more wealth than the bottom 45 per cent of American households combined. The boom for a few went hand in hand with a bust for the majority. The inflation-adjusted net worth of the median household fell from $54,600 in 1989 to $49,000 in 1997. Nearly one-fifth of families had more debts than assets. This was accompanied by soaring credit card indebtedness. Reports an officebearer of the Boston-based NGO called United for a Fair Economy, 'The wealth gap reinforces —and is reinforced by —widening disparities in education, economic opportunity, and quality of life.' 22

India's Cities If such tendencies are evident in the most global of all cities, the situation in other cities throughout the world, and more particularly in developing countries, is obviously far worse. At present, half the world's 6 billion people live in urban areas and most of the new growth in the future will be in Asia and Africa. Increasingly, the argument is that cities are necessary for a nation's economic well-being, the engines of economic growth. The World Bank has 21

UNDP, Human Development Report 1998, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 30. 22 R. Mokhiber and R. Weissman/ Perils of Growing Wealth Gap in US', Financial Express, 25 Aug 1999.

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 283 state of decline, some terminally so. We need to accept that factories —like human beings —are mortal. They too have life spans. There comes a time when technology will render an industry redundant or obsolete. When that happens, preferably before the consequences are felt, land must be allowed to be recycled to meet other more current needs. 27

The land can certainly be recycled, but the interests of all the stakeholders ought to be protected, beginning with the workers, who are the most badly affected in the short run. They have lost their jobs through no fault of their own and social justice demands that their needs are met first. In this book, we have accepted that the days of the composite mill, comprising spinning, weaving and processing, are over. But that does not mean that mills cannot modernize their spinning operations, leaving the powerlooms to handle the weaving. If the one-quarter formula for the division of surplus mill land is accepted, instead of trifurcating the land, the workers can decide what to do with their one-fourth of the land. They can either sell out altogether or provide housing for themselves, or workplaces, or a combination of both. An obvious solution would be to encourage workers to run looms as a cooperative within a mill, so that they continue to work in the same neighborhood. The mill owner can sell them looms at a concessional rate and provide them yam at fixed or subsidized prices. He can then undertake to buy back the cloth that is woven at a predetermined price —most mills are already getting their cloth woven elsewhere —and market it under his brand name. Alternatively, there could be some completely different industry or service in the mill premises. These Could consist of labourintensive occupations like garment manufacture. However, since most workers are too old and poorly skilled to switch to such trades, it would be better to train the workers' children to do such jobs instead. The children will be better educated. Instead of concentrating on jobs which are at the higher rungs of the ladder like financial services, media and advertising in the mill area, there could be greater diversification. Printing may be an activity which cedis for lower education levels. Again, since Mumbai is the home of the film and TV industry, the high-ceilinged sheds of textile mills could be converted into studios for shooting films. Some of these jobs could easily go to the residents of the locality, particularly if they start as apprentices. 27

ibid, vol. i, Aug 1988, p. 23.

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there was a demand. In its overview that:

of urban poverty, it found

The most demanding of urban challenges, unquestionably, is the challenge posed by poverty: the challenge of reducing exploitation, relieving misery and creating more humane conditions for working, living and growth for those disadvantaged people who have already made the city their home or are in the process of doing so . . . If the present trends persist in the coming decades, the urban landscape will continue to mirror, even more glaringly, the ills and contradictions of Indian society today: economic disparities, social inequalities, cultural alienation and increasing deprivation for a large number of people. In the cities, there will be more skyscrapers and in them more spacious and luxurious apartments for a privileged few; at the same time the number of those who 'squat in squalor and drink from the drains' will also increase. The poor and unskilled from the rural areas will continue to flock to big cities in the hope of employment and a better life, only to add to the growing number of unemployed and cause further deterioration in the quality of city life.26

Cotton Mill Land This is the global and national context in which one has to view the potential redevelopment of Mumbai's cotton mill land. It is a heaven-sent opportunity for a city which is bursting at the seams and one which should not be squandered in such a prodigal and mercenary manner. Mumbai represents more than only the industrial and financial capital of the country: in a sense, it is a microcosm of the entire nation's society because it draws to itself migrants from all other states (and neighbouring countries as well). No one can make a case for the status quo, where officially the land is not permitted to be sold and neither are the mills functioning adequately, but strips of it are surreptitiously parcelled out right under the authorities' nose. As the National Commission on Urbanization states: Land which has fallen into disuse (or inefficient use) through the passage of time must not be sc locked up but should be recycled for other, more efficient uses, responding to changing times. For instance, significant parts of our cities are occupied by industries which for years have been in a 26

Final Report of the National Commission on Urbanization, Part in, p. 174.

vol. n,

Whose Mumbai is it Anyway? 285

acres (1.62 ha) per 1,000 people. London has 4.84 acres, New York 5.33. Mumbai has an abysmal 0.03 acres. 28 The share of mill land allotted to the Municipal Corporation is one of the most valuable, as far as the city is concerned, but has received the least attention. This is where the letter of the law rather than the spirit has been observed, wherever mill owners have applied to sell their land under the one-third DC formula. The land to be kept open for public amenities —most often as a park —has been relegated to the very project, making it inaccessible, to the far end of a redevelopment to pool land and public. The Correa committee's recommendation make it available on a scale which makes it meaningful has to be strongly endorsed. The committee cited the 'Golden Triangle' between Paragon, Mumbai and Matulya, encompassing eight contiguous mills in all, occupying an area slightly larger than the triangle between Bori Bunder, Horniman Circle and Flora Fountain. If this triangle was largely kept open as a park, it would work wonders in a metropolis which has so little open space anywhere. What is more, this amenity would be provided in a congested, polluted area, where citizens find it difficult to breathe. Exactly the same principles could be, applied to land belonging to the port trust, which we have detailed in Chapter 7. This is more than three times the area occupied by the cotton mills and opens out to the east coast —a hitherto inaccessible waterfront for citizens. Together, the reuse of land belonging to the mills and port, both activities which have declined perceptibly, will provide the beleaguered city of Mumbai much-needed respite from its myriad problems —shrinking employment and shortages of housing and open space. In a sense, the possibilities of redeveloping port trust land are greater because it is owned by the government, though that has not prevented its successive managements from hanging on to these areas even in the face of unequal competition from the modem Jawaharlal Nehru Port across the harbour, which handles containers. The re-use of this land is too crucial to the well being of the city to be left in the hands of politicians, or bureaucrats, or planners, or architects or sundry dilettantes. The best move would be to freeze the sale and initiate a dialogue between all the stakeholders, so C Kishore Dwarkanath Pradhan, 'Bombay and Public Green Spaces', paper presented at Public Places workshop, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, Dec 1995. 28

284 Ripping the Fabric This would ensure that the area has a mixed, diverse occupancy, instead of becoming an enclave for the sunrise service sector and posh high-rise residential apartments, which would alter its character altogether. Parel is already being referred to by its wellto-do office-goers a s Worli East, to avoid its working-class connotations. The well-being of the city depends on this co-existence of different social classes. Just as Mumbai cannot secede from the rest of the country, as sundry politicians and members of the elite advocate from time to time, a small number of inhabitants of the city cannot attempt to exclude the vast majority and turn a blind eye to their plight. Since the city is a microcosm of Indian society itself, it is this ability to carry different sections and communities together that will give Mumbai a resilience which other cities lack. The question of whether to designate the mill area as a third business district, between south and north Mumbai, will then be resolved. As experts observed at the second UN Habitat conference in Istanbul in 1996, the old urban policy of designating central business districts is giving way to 'polynucleated' or many-centred cities where every area has a mix of activities—business, residential, entertainment, shopping and so on. Apart from other social and economic benefits, this reduces commuting considerably. The amendment of the Development Control rules to provide a one-fourth formula will reinforce this healthy mix. Public agencies will take care of housing for the middle class on a quarter of the land freed from the mills —around 70 ha. This ought to counter the imbalance in the city's property market where, despite a precipitous fall since 1994, prices controlled by builders are still beyond the reach of most except the very prosperous. Indeed, if rents are also decontrolled, these two developments would act as a muchneeded corrective to the overheated property market and make accommodation affordable to many more people to buy or lease. Mill owners would be free to develop or sell their share of the land — subject to the kind of controls that the Correa committee recommended, so that there is some overall design of such redevelopment, instead of the piecemeal, haphazard, high-rise growth currently taking place.

Vacant Land As we have noted, Mumbai possibly has the smallest ratio of open space among major cities of the world. The ideal is considered 4

Index Abid Hussain Committee 102 adaptive reuse 14, 113-115, 117, 119-25, 127-8, 130-4, 137-9, 141-8, 151, 157, 210 Adarkar Neera, Arvind 37, 148, 210-11 Adik, Govindrao 155, 158, 170, 180 Ahir, Sachin 90, 154-5, 158, 163, 165-6, 169 Ahmedabad 12, 17, 94, 115-6, 119, 157, 166 American Civil War 72, 234 Anubhai, Prafull 86, 90-2, 94, 100 Appellate Authority for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (AAIFR) 175-8, 181-2 Association of Engineering Workers (AEW) 6, 173 Backbay reclamation project 73 Ballard Estate 50, 130, 147, 245-6 Bandra-Kurla complex 25, 29, 40, '47, 50-2, 121, 142, 192, 264 Belvedere Court 183, 227 Bentley, James 258-9 Bidwai, Praful 85-6, 92 Birmingham 133, 211 Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) 6, 7, 67-

8, 89, 113-14, 117, 143, 152, 154, 160-62, 166, 170, 175, 179, 182, 231 Bombay Dyeing Mill 159 Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) 40, 45, 126 Bombay First 27, 30, 53, 93, 137, 204, 211, 268 Bombay Industrial Relations (BIR) Act 78, 80 Bombay Metropolitan Regional Planning Board 109 Bombay 9, 13, 23, 25, 39, 70-1 Boston 12, 16, 146-7, 222-3, 251 Bowling Co 134-5 Bravishwar, M.A. 211, 220 Brennan, Jan 17, 92 Brihanmumbai. Municipal Corporation (BMC) 45, 109, 124, 139, 144, 150, 148-9 Brownill, Sue 250, 251-53, 254, 256, 258, 260-2 Calcutta 18, 20, 115, 222-33, 243 Canary Wharf 252, 257-9, 263 Cardiff 247 Cardoz, David 186, 192-3, 203 Central Business District (CBD) 21, 47, 50, 122, 141, 188, 190, 208, 235

286 Ripping the Fabric

that everyone is aware of the interests at stake. Unlike with the Correa committee, where private mill owners did not cooperate, a new initiative ought to ensure not only that they represent their viewpoint but that opposing interests are also given a chance to do so. In the absence of a transparent process, it is evident that mill owners are colluding with the state and the building lobby in retaining control over the sale of land, so that it can be disposed of clandestinely. It is quite likely that builders do not wish to see this land put on the real estate market en masse because it would depress prices immediately. Ad hocism in the policy regarding the sale of land is not due to lethargy so much as cold calculation. process, the state As part of this transparent decision-making architectural award for the best ought to invite an international which accommodates the demands of proposal for redevelopment all four stakeholders to the maximum extent possible. Apart from keeping land vacant for public use, the transport needs of Mumbai ought to be given serious consideration. One major reason why the city can never hope to achieve global or regional status as a major financial centre is that its transport system is on the verge of breaking down. A person can take as much time to reach the central business district as he does to fly to the city from New Delhi. Instead of providing housing, for instance, part of this one-fourth share could possibly be made available for a city road terminal. Commuters could park their cars in the Mahalakshmi area —where some of the city's tallest residential blocks are instead rising up on mill land —and shuttle to south Mumbai by special buses. Indeed, it may make sense for the 60 ha (150 acres) race course to be shifted to the outskirts of the city and this area, contiguous to many mills, be used for such a terminal, with mill land providing back-up facilities like bus depots, etc. of mill and other that the redevelopment The opportunities derelict industrial land offer in Mumbai, the metropolitan region of which will soon become the world's second most populous urban agglomeration are too great to be treated in the present piecemeal manner. There are lessons to be derived for cities throughout the world, if the authorities intervene in the process and ensure that land is made available for public as well as private purposes. Ultimately, a city is a living, breathing organism which is made up of many different classes of people. Unless a city attends to the diverse needs of all its citizens, the fortunate as well as the deprived, it will atrophy.

Index 289

Hong Kong 13, 16, 26, 28, 31, 4950, 70, 74, 80, 123, 166, 191, 26768 housing and homelessness 253-4, 257-58, 263, 266 H o u s i n g Development a n d Finance Corporation (HDFC) 56-7, 132, 143, 150 Ibrahim, Dawood 155-6 India Property Research 51 India United Mills 73, 116, 186, 189-92, 198-9 Indian Heritage Society 206, 246 Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) 125, 193 Indira (Alexandra) Docks 235-6, 246-7 Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) 24, 67,161,181,184 Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) 24, 67, 102, 161, 175, 177, 179,,184 Industrial Disputes Act 113, 185 industrial location 107, 135, 137 Industrial Revolution 213, 215, 217, 222, 233 inner city 249, 253, 258, 260 international convention centre 191-2 island city 20-1, 233 Isle of Dogs 254-5 Isvalkar, Datta 3-6, 136, 267 Jacobs, Jane 213-5, 223 Japan 25, 43, 50, 63, 70, 76, 217, 275 Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) 240 Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) 237-40, 242 job loss 6, 16, 34, 35, 37, 41-2 jobs 136-37, 228, 258, 269

Joseph D.T 45, 124-6 Joshi, Manohar 167-8, 179 Joshi, Pankaj 233, 248-9 Jupiter Mills 138, 205 jute mills 115, 225, 233 Kale, Sharad 237, 245-7 Kamla Raheja School of Architecture 128-9, 132, 212-13, 216 Kanoria, Anurag 11 Kanoria, Kanti 8-10, 180 Kanpur 17, 115, 166 Kantawala, Achyut 135, 139 Kerkar Committee 39, 59, 62 Khatau Mills 2, 15, 73, 153-5, 158, 183 Khatau, Panna 160-3 Khatau, Sunit 15, 152, 154-6, 159, 170 Kohinoor Mills 1, 132, 199, 201-3 Lancashire 16, 70, 74, 97-8, 21618, 221 land 15, 30, 48, 105, 117-9, 142, 151, 155, 157, 189, 201 Leadbeater, S.R.B. 72, 78 Liverpool 211, 249 Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana 1, 120, 134, 186 London Docklands Development Council (LDDC) 28, 51, 251-63 London Docklands 232, 249-51, 257, 259 London First 27 London 27, 42, 48, 50, 52, 123, 130, 133, 250-3, 255-9 Lowell 222-4 Mafatlal Mills 184, 207, 221 Mafatlal 90, 269 Mago, Arun K. 241 Maharashtra Housing and Area Agency .Development (MHADA) 121, 124, 130, 137, 140, 144, 146-7, 182, 190-1, 205

288 Index Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) 277 Chandravarkar, Rajnarayan 72, 74 chawls 2, 6, 75, 133, 186, 270 Chesterton, Meghraj 31, 51-3 Chimbulkar, Sanjiv 180, 186 China 74, 77, 104, 191, 240, 268 City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) 39, 108 City of London 27, 241, 259, 262 Coimbatore 94, 101, 223 Contractor, Hafeez 207 Correa, Charles 15, 16, 39, 122, 126, 128, 131, 135-38, 142-7, 150, 187, 190, 193, 198-9, 204-6, 207, 213, 229-30, 281, 284 cotton textiles 70, 79 cotton 65, 69, 86, 97 D'Monte, Darry 1 17, 25, 32, 237 Dagdi Chawl 156, 171-2 dark Satanic mills 226 Das, P.K.148-9, 210 de Tocqueville, Alexis 212 Dean Clough 214 220 deindustrialization 35-7, 44, 99, 110-11, 215 Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM) 101, 188 Delhi, 22, 26 dereliction (and decay) 247-8, 282 Deshpande, Sudha & Lalit 35, 59, 79 deskilling 227, 251, 260 Development Control (DC) rules 9, 110, 124, 139-40, 146-7, 14951, 179, 182, 207, Development Plan for Greater Mumbai 1964, 107, 109 Dewan, Ritu 33, 57 Dharavi 60, 75 Dilawari, Vikas 193, 197 Draft Development plan for Greater Mumbai 1981-2001, 109 Dundee 222, 225

economic liberalization 14, 18, 26, 35-6, 46-9, 54, 101, 172, 189, 225, 269, 272, 274 Edwards, Brian 250-1, 255-6, 262 Elphinstone Mills 199, 204 employment 14, 33, 270 Engels, Friedrich 214-23 exit policy 113-14 Feilden, Bernard 187, 209 financial centre 22-31, 48, 251, 258-9 financial services 14, 272 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) 273 five-star hotels 190, 256, 201 Floor Space Index (FSI)10, 40, 45, 111,129-31, 142-3, 149-51, 176, 181-2, 184, 190 Fort 21, 29, 204 Frankfurt 51, 255 Gandhi, Rajiv 102, 120 garment manufacture 227 Gawli, Arun 6, 153-8, 169, 171-72 gentrification 132, 208, 215, 220, 226-7 Girangaon 13, 113, 132, 136, 139, 252, 257 Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) 3, 5, 162-3, 174-7, 1801 Glasgow 146-7, 211 globalization 12, 47, 272, 275-6 Golden Triangle 140, 147, 208, 285 Goswami, Omkar 66, 89-90, 11516, 118-9, 183 Greater Mumbai 20, 30, 38 Grover, Karan 122-3, 132, 202 handlooms 96, 102 Harris, Nigel 54, 80 heritage 138, 194, 204, 209-10, 217 Heseltine, Michael 232, 251, 259

Index 291

recycling land 189, 202-3, 208, 225 redevelopment 15, 207, 224, 251 Reliance Industries 47, 120, 130, 179, 207-8 ' restructuring 112, 239, 251, 261, 269, 271, 278 revivalization 111-112, 203, 207, 241, 246-7, 249, 252-3, 259, 26,1 Rifkin, Jeremy 272 Rossendale 218-19 Rotterdam 246, 249 Roy, Tirthankar 69, 91-3, 95, 100101 Ruias 133-5, 269

Surat, 92, 233 Tamhane, V.Y 44, 91, 230 Tata, Jamshedji. N. 72-3, 269 textile museum 138, 197, 223-4 textile policy 86, 94-104 Thackeray, Bal 23, 45, 167-8, 170 Thakkar, Vallabhbhai 169-71 Thane-Belapur 20, 35 Thatcher, Margaret 250-1, 252, 254 Tirupur 101-2, 223 Tokyo 27, 28, 43, 49-50, 142, 149, 151, 182 Transport Corporation of India (TCI) 184-86

Sakshi Art Gallery 180, 220 Samant, Datta 2, 4, 6, 81,145, 153, 155, 158-9, 163-9, 173, 184, 267 Samant, P.N. (Dada) 6-8, 15, 35, 166, 169 Sassen, Saskia 27, 43 Sassoon Docks 184, 245, 256 Sassoon family 73, 189, 199, 2345 Sawant, Sandhya 193-4, 198 Senapati Bapat 128, 130, 132, 138, 140, 205 Seoul 44 Sewri 48, 75, 235, 245, 250 Shambu Prasad, C. 97-8 Shanghai 28-9, 31, 74 Shiv Sena 45, 166-7, 170, 268 Shree Ram Mills 174, 177-9, 220, 228 Sick Industrial Companies Act (SICA) 67-8, 116 sickness 112, 116, 118 Singapore 13, 16, 25, 26, 28, 31, 501, 55, 191, 236-7, 240, 267 Singh, Manmohan 68, 113 slums 13, 58-63 Srinivasulu, K. 96, 102 strike (1982-3) 1-2, 10, 15, 74, 801, 93, 164 Suez Canal, 234-5

unemployment (and joblessness) 13, 33, 36, 81, 135, 254, 258, 266, 269-70, 272-3 United Nations Council on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 278-9 Urban Development Research Institute (UDRI) 129, 210 Urban Land (Ceiling a n d Regulation) Act 116, 161/ 180 Victoria Dock 232, 251 Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) 7, 10, 68, 89, 113, 136, 151-2, 163, 168, 174, 75-7, 241 van Wersch, H. 74r 76, 81-2, 95 Wall Street on water 254 warehouses 254 West India Dock 252-3 World Bank 279 World Commission on Environment and Development 271 world finance centre 251, 253 Worli east 208 York 209 Yorkshire 16, 216, 219-20

Accession

Number

s $ £2.

290 Index Maharashtra 22-5, 34, 44, 110, 146, 188 Manchester 12, 14, 16, 70-1, 21216, 221, 233 manufacturing 14, 16, 30, 32, 41, 271 Marsh, Geoff 51-2, 264 Marx, Karl 213 Matulya Mills 6, 140, 206 McKinsey 26 Mehrotra, Rahul 129-0, 208, 220 Mill Owners' Association (MO A) 44, 74, 77, 81, 91, 105, 119, 158, 230, 261, 277 mills 11, 14, 21, 116, 140, 201, 203, 215, 282 Modern Mills 4, 6, 182 modernization 74,102, 175-6 Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices 115 Mukesh Mills 181, 184-5, 189, 191, 245, 256 Mumbai Metroplitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) Plan (1973) 120 M u m b a i M e t r o p l i t a n Region Development Authority (MMRDA) 29, 33, 120, 150, 247 Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) Draft Plan (1996-2011) 22, 33, 46, 82,111, 138, 168, 227 Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) 20, 109 Mumbai 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 18, 22, 23, 27, 49, 71, 81, 241, 251, 255, 268, 282 Murder of the Mills 120, 122-4, 131, 144 Naik, Amar 156, 172 Nariman Point 29, 47, 49-50, 52, 54, 72, 123, 130, 139, 264 National Commission on Urbanisatior

N a t i o n a l Textile C o r p o r a t i o n (NTC) 1, 16, 67, 73, 87-9, 113,. 116-18, 122, 126, 128, 137, 142, 144, 146, 148, 166, 168, 186, 188-92, 197, 200-1, 206, 230, 248 New Great Eastern Mills 12, 179 New Mumbai 29, 39, 47, 188 New York 16, 27, 30, 43, 51, 130, 187, 220, 271 Nhava Sheva port 237, 247, 250 Olympia and York 254, 258 Operating Agency (OA) 175 Parel 22, 24, 75, 106, 113, 128-9, 131, 133-4, 144-5, 151, 164, 172, 174, 204, 210, 211, 220, 251 Paris, 51 Phoenix Mall, 135 Phoenix Mills 3, 132-3, 220 Phoenix Towers 129-30, 132, 134, 137, 206, 227 port 14, 32, 48, 232, 238-9 post-industrial decline 13, 33, 35, 79, 81, 87-93, 98-9, 104, 203, 260 poverty 57-63 powerlooms 90, 95, 117 Prabhu, Chandrasekhar 121, 132, 190 Pradhan, Shalaka 233, 245, 247 Premier Automobiles Ltd. (PAL) 172 privatization 238, 261 Raghuvanshi Mills 15, 169-71 Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS) 2, 5, 80, 91, 154-5, 1589, 160, 163, 165, 169, 172, 176, 201, 267 real estate price crash 55-7 real estate 8,14, 48, 144, 154, 1823, 186, 207, 229, 259

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