‘Win their trust, then encroached land’

MUMBAI: For a man who had been stripped off the responsibility of the municipal commissioner of Ulhasnagar, RK Sonawane looks remarkably in control.

Constantly on his cell, sitting amongst sheaves of paper mentioning project deadlines, and intuitively taking notes of slum-dwellers rehabilitated, Mr Sonawane seems obsessed. He should be. Mr Sonawane, now chief resettlement & rehabilitation officer, Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), is doing something that he couldn’t in Ulhasnagar.

Create a “city without slums”. But moving 6 million people from tiny hutments to concrete flats isn’t child’s play. MMRDA, whose competence is in developing infrastructure, is actually in a bit of a no man’s land here. Resettling slums is not something its officers were trained to do. And they have learnt on the job. “People listen and are willing to co-operate if convinced properly. One needs to win their trust first and then the encroached land, it’s never the other way round,” he says.

This winning over of the trust stretches over months and sometimes even years. Mr Sonawane has figured out a few ways to tackle the combative slum-dwellers. “I personally talk to all the people, taking local corporators and social organisations into confidence,” says Mr Sonawane.

He recounts his experience in Gujnagar, “This was a troublesome area and our people were finding it difficult to enter this place without police protection. On 2nd of January I met Rajwant Singh, the local corporator and convinced him. By 10th of October, almost everyone had vacated. Surprisingly, people moved even on the day of Id.”

But the struggles over relocation don’t always end in an amicable manner. The transit camps are a pitiable sight, and people are often forced to stay here for two-three years, and sometimes even more. For Mr Sonawane this is inevitable. “Long-term benefits always have short-term problems,” he says.

NGOs working with people affected by the resettlement do not agree. Says Arputham Jockin, the Magsaysay award winner and president of National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), “The R&R policy has a lot of shortcomings, like water crisis, ill maintenance, buildings below standard and no management of the rehabilitation sites.”

As a solution, Mr Jockin has been advocating the need for an ‘estate management agency’ that could look into the issues and be accountable for it. “Presently, this task of management has been entrusted with the builders, who are elusive and have no accountability,” added Mr Jockin.

An argument against the MMRDA is that it simply doesn’t do enough. A circular of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), the Medha Patkar-backed organisation reads, “There are no augmentation of services like water, sanitation, health, education and food security, making the policy incomplete.”

But TM Chandra Shekhar, metropolitan commissioner, MMRDA, does not agree. “Our job is to provide houses and not build schools and hospitals. All our townships are well-connected with added facilities, but one cannot always deliver everything to suit everyone’s needs.” But, says Mr Jockin, “MMRDA cannot wash its hands off so easily and play with the lives of a million people.”

But even Mr Jockin agrees that MMRDA has a tough job at hand. “This is the largest R&R policy to have been undertaken in India, and MMRDA is doing quite a good job,” he says.

Unfortunately for MMRDA, the task of resettlement doesn’t end either at convincing or moving people, the greater challenge is in making them stick to their new found dwellings. With the cases of people renting out their apartments and returning to the streets growing, MMRDA’s effort might go for a toss. Says Mr Sonawane, “We are getting a few complaints.

But we have already started working on, and will soon put in place a policy regulation that will take care of this problem.” These are brave words, but sceptics say that controlling the backflow is going to be a more challenging task than resettling.