 First, we're going to hear from Shirish Patel. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me put to you an analogy. I think this is useful because it's a cryptic form of communicating a number of ideas. Imagine that we have a national health service, that all of medical practice is privatized, and that the government runs the health service, as it did for many years in the UK. Now imagine that the government decides it doesn't need doctors. After all, the pharmaceutical companies know what drugs are good for what disease. So let the pharmaceutical companies prescribe medicines for different ailments. And the whole thing can be run by government, directly. The parallel is that we have no planners in the city anymore. The government has systematically dismantled planning. So in the last 20 years, parallel to a situation where you would have no doctors, we have no planners. We have instead a set of development control regulations emanating from government. You could have a similar set of health control regulations emanating from government, and if you have this and that symptom, this is the medicine to take. And everything runs very smoothly because the government regulations prescribe what is to be done in what case. And in the case of planning, the developers decide what's to be done. There's no need for planners anymore. Mr. Mukesh Mehta, by his own admission, is a planner from New York. He knows what's to be done about Dharavi. There's no need for any planning of any kind. There are no detailed plans, and nobody sees the need for them. I heard two numbers this morning. Mr. Kshatriya said that, or earlier this afternoon, sorry, he said there were 70,000 families to be rehoused. And in one of his slides, Mr. Mukesh Mehta showed that the area of Dharavi is 236 hectares. So 70,000 families with a family size averaging five is three and a half lakh people. Three and a half lakh people on 2.2 square kilometers is about 150,000 persons per square kilometer. Now Bhuleshwar Kalbadevi is about 100,000 per square kilometer. It's the densest locality in the world. It's 70% more crowded than its next competitor, which is in Shanghai, which has 55,000. Bhuleshwar has 95,000 or 100,000. And these numbers suggest that we are planning 150,000. That's just the people in Dharavi. In addition, we are expecting to put new construction there, which people will buy, in order to finance the free housing for slum dwellers. I don't see how this can work. Now, on one very interesting question that you raised about government acquiring land around the city. The new Mumbai project in 1970, when it was launched, was started with the government acquiring 345 square kilometers of land on the mainland across the harbor. This was all acquired and made government property. What's happening now is that we are selling that land to private owners to establish SEZs. SEZs are zones where they establish economic activities plus housing. So government is actually surrendering the rights to develop this land which was acquired. And we are moving from the South American model to the North American model. On the issue you raised of land supply, I think it's being kept deliberately short. There are many things government can do to increase the land supply and they are not being done. And I think this is part of an unstated deliberate policy. The salt pan lands could be acquired. The port trust lands could be, part of them certainly could be reused. That's not being done. Railways of surplus lands. The Urban Land Sealing Act locks up large tracts of land. The intention originally was that government would acquire this land and use it for housing. Government has taken no steps in that direction. And it locks it up so that the owner can't do anything either. It's just locked up. So I think land is being kept deliberately in short supply. And as regards this FSI 4, this is my last point. You have to look at FSI in the context of the amount of built up floor space consumed per person. In Mumbai's slum rehousing it is 5 square meters per capita. In New York it is 65 square meters per capita. That is 13 times as much. If you have an FSI of 4 in Mumbai, that corresponds to an FSI of 13 times that. That is 52 in New York. I think even New York would book at an FSI of 52. Thank you. Thank you Sherif. We next are going to hear from our last participant who is P.K. Das who is with the slum dwellers organization Navarra Hock. But I also want to acknowledge that you were part of the Bander Waterfront Center, which is one of the winners of the Urban Age Award for your project, Opening Up the City to the Sea, which is a very ambitious and exciting project. So congratulations to you for that. Please. Thank you, Darren. I have probably just about five minutes or less than that. I'll just make about, okay, three minutes. So I have five points I thought I'd make in five minutes, but I cut that down. Just quick summary of key issues that I derive from the various speakers. And I relate to, from my experiences in Mumbai, very broadly two points. One is, I think these are two aspects that we haven't really dealt with or mentioned much. The second we have, the first we haven't. In a city like Mumbai, it's the housing as a real estate agenda is something that we've really not discussed. We know that the politics of the city, the making of the city, has been historically been influenced by the real estate interest. And this is something that we need to really understand in the context, particularly in the context of social housing or mass housing, and how the two are opposite to each other in terms of their fundamental interests. And we have been in this process championing since 1991, which is really a very critical turning point for the city of Mumbai. In fact, for the nation, because in 1991, we pledged our support to liberalism, to privatization, and we pursued since then neoliberal policies. And the government put its hands up to say, we are not going to develop, we are going to facilitate development, so it backed out. But what it means by this, and what we see from it happening, is that it's actually facilitating private agencies in depleting public assets. And that's a huge problem right now, because if a representative government, if a state lacks resources, which it could actually hold for social development programs and mass housing, and it's sort of popularized, the state is popularized. So therefore, I think it's these two contexts which are extremely important to understand. And we've come to firmly believe as housing activists, that the production and supply of affordable housing for the urban poor can only happen through state intervention, through active role of the state government, or the national government, and not through private agencies. We've experienced from 1991 to now, which is over 26 years, in spite of the private sector taking over dominant role, we have not supplied any housing stock to the market, which is affordable for the urban poor. In fact, the government, which through its agencies was producing some amount of housing for the poor, has stopped producing. Why are slums proliferating? Because poor do not have access to housing stock in the city. How to produce this housing stock? And in this process, we have some terrible experiences, as speaking from the experience of the slum dwellers and the housing struggles in the city. A, we are slumming our city. We're legitimizing the depletion of public assets. We are deliberately marginalizing large sections of the population, frighteningly legitimizing through policies, plans and programs. And this is what is terrible. If you look at the SRA policy, I consider nothing but a displacement policy. Believe me, it undermines democracy and democratic institutions. In the 70s, we used to take protests of slum dwellers to the secretariat, to the government offices, because they are our elected governments through democratic means. Today, you know what we're fighting, and with whom are we fighting in our slums, and communities are waging struggles against private builders, against private corporate companies. That's not democracy. These are the agents. We've completely de-linked our communication relations between the government and the people. And this is frightening to me. And this is perpetuating social violence. This is perpetuating social unrest in the slums. We, instead of grappling with housing solutions, we are grappling with negotiations and peace in the slums. That's how productive time is utilized by housing activists and movements. So in short, coming back to the last point I'm making, just the last point about what is the solution. We firmly believe, A, that the state government has to intervene, has to play an active role in promoting. A, B, that the state government has to forge partnership with communities. Not partnership with private companies, but with communities, with societies. And in turn, the government and the communities may choose an investor, and the investor could have their benefits through investment into that project, as contractors, etc. So there are many other ways of how capital investments into the housing sector can be benefited through bonds, or concessions, or tax, etc. So I think this in nutshell is the solution that we're looking at. We need to recognize the enormous human resources, potential that the slum dwellers possess, the skills in redeveloping their properties, and mind you, if you develop the lands on which slums exist, which is for your information, it's just about 8% of the land mass of the city, in which over 60% of our people live, you can actually rehabilitate, re-house, in decent housing, planned housing, which we are all for, we're against slums, we're against slumming, that we can actually accommodate all the slum dwellers extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please Ricky Bardette. The two issues you end on are very important. One is some form of state intervention, second a form of partnership. You're an architect, you won the prize yesterday with a team. You don't mention space. Is it irrelevant? Yes, I will. It's the detail. One of the details. No, let me explain this. Well, one of the things, the weaknesses of the policy, I'm happy you brought this point up, you see the development policy of the state government does not consider social infrastructure provision, including open spaces. It only talks in terms of numbers of houses, and if you saw some of the examples in the morning, I think in your slide and presentation, Ricky, housing at Monkwood is stacked together just 10 feet apart, 10 feet, 10 storied buildings. Now, we have been trying to suggest to the government that where the program has to begin is social infrastructure because development or underdevelopment is really assessed through social development, including open spaces. And open spaces and slums is a huge resource to community development work. I think that's important. Thank you. Why don't we move on to Suresh Sharma? Thank you. Oh, don't touch it, okay. It has been for me a very instructive experience, and I know in the five minutes that I have, I would not be able to do justice to the range and richness of what I had. May I therefore begin with some propositions stated as a paradox about the city, city as a human form, and inequality. If I may reverse the phrase of Saskia Sason about the territorial movement, I was struck because the momentariness being associated with territory is a remarkable shift, because territory is generally in human language the kind of final locus. But it does tell a certain story about the movement in modern civilization and modern cognition. So I want to talk about the cognitive movement, the present cognitive movement in terms of from which we are looking at the housing for poor. And in that I wish to underscore one fact that I think possibly for the first time in the last two, three hundred years the word change in the context of climate change is used with a degree of acute apprehension. And this is something remarkable because if one looks at utterances, if one looks at discourse in the last two hundred years, change is a word valorized in almost all contexts. And the fact that now in the context of climate change it is used as a kind of a disturbance which has to be coped with, I think has significant implications. City, it was said by many participants is an escape, is a movement towards freedom. But this movement towards freedom is increasingly happening in a situation where inequalities are mounting. And this escalation of the proportion of inequality and the chairman quest to escape certain kind of control, certain kind of sensible thing in any western quarter. We were repeatedly told that to begin the project of modernization hard, large, bold decisions needed to be taken and there were other examples who have not fallen out from the pages of history. I say this because I think the pathos which moved the national leadership in India to not only choose democracy but to keep to it under very difficult condition was not perhaps the recreation of a modern world. Not to say that they were anti-modern, but the moving pathos was not to be able to replicate no matter how modernity here at any cost. And this I think is important. This perhaps has something to do widely by what Mr. Chairman who spoke of as this vivid organicity and the capacity to retain, the capacity to nurture this organicity which manifests for example in movements or breakdown when Bombay was flooded and the state was nowhere in evidence has something to do with the possibility of dignified inclusion. It may not be absolute equality. I'm not talking about absolute equality. Can I take two more? Thank you very much. It's very helpful Therese. I thought I would say two more. Rahul, please. Can you give me one sentence? Just one sentence. Of course. One sentence. I'll yield to you for one more sentence. And the sentence is that I think one of our great failings is that we often believe it is enough to say the right thing and we have often failed to do the right thing even when we know what is the right thing to do. So the role of the state in India as a regulator, as a custodian of the law, as a force which can see that the different players including the corporate players do not transgress the law has to remain at the very center of things. Rahul, please. I'll just... Listening to Professor Suresh Sharma was a pleasure. I've read some very... Extremely, I would say, subtle and insightful books which he's written and I'm going to actually refer to a very interesting episode and one of his stories on tribal identity in India. This sounds completely out of context over here but it may not be so. He talks about a particular community in central India which were traditional iron smiths and with the coming of the railways in the late 19th century, these traditional tribal communities which worked with iron simply loved the idea of the railways. It responded very positively. They could understand the idea of modernity very well, translated through the idiom of iron. And, of course, the colonial government dismissed this entire experience altogether and, in fact, their own traditional occupation was banned. Now, this is, I think, a very, very interesting anecdote and it's very sort of something which I just thought of right now because I heard Professor Sharma and it reminds me of what's happening in Dharavi right now. That there is an entire wealth of experience as far as building is concerned which is already embodied in Dharavi. The residents themselves for the last 40 to 50 years have sharpened the skill and right now we are just replaying the colonial gaze by simply saying it's not important at all. And it's very easy to use a language of modernity right now and simply evacuate the space much in the way we have done in the last 200 years and I think it's very, very important to, you know, sort of maybe we could, that's why I was asking Professor Sharma could really speak for a longer time because I think that a very important, a very important, I would say, myths hidden in what is happening right now in Bombay. And for me, there's nothing more to say besides what we already said in the presentation which Mathias made about the idea of form, the idea of the city, the idea of planning. I just want to respond to Shiddish just by saying one more thing that while it is true that the language of planning is something which has been completely taken away from planners, it's also important to know that there's a whole history of the way in which planners have taken away the act of planning from the people themselves and if there is a certain negotiation which has to be done, it has to be done both ways. The planners have to come in between the people who are also planners and then, of course, negotiate with the state. That's all. Thank you. I guess coming from the other big democracy from the other side of the world, I would say that I'm... This conversation to me feels so relevant and so typical. And what I mean by that is there is this undercurrent of what we call colloquially in America, hemming and hawing and wringing our hands about government. And that is to say, government is just not doing what it's supposed to do. Real estate developers are bad evil people and they come and just take horrible, horrible pursuit of poor people. Is it that simple? Have we degraded government so much in our two big democracies? Has privatization become the buzzword, the diriguer approach, and have we in the process found ourselves in a situation where democracy itself has lost control? That the normative idea behind both, I think, of the democracy of the United States and India was this notion that government was owned by the people and that through the brilliance of participatory democracy we would perfect this notion that more people would be included, that opportunity would be broader and more equitable. And today I think both of our democracies found ourselves challenged by that aspiration and I think some of the conversation today manifests that challenge. So I don't think it's as simple as saying that government is incompetent and inept and that private developers are simply trying to exploit the poor. I think it's more complicated and far more nuanced than that. But I could be wrong.