 I'm Darren Walker, I'm Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and I'm delighted to co-chair this afternoon's session. I've been looking forward to this because as a New Yorker, the opportunity to come to Mumbai is quite extraordinary for me, because as a New Yorker I feel a kinship with Mumbai. There is a kinetic energy about this city and what Jane Jacobs called the sort of messy organic-ness, the order within the disorder that I feel very at home with here. And so even though I am from New York and have a sort of an American sensibility, I'm really here to learn from you. And I think all of us who come from America see this as an opportunity to learn, and I'm just delighted to have the opportunity to hear from people I've known and respected for a number of years this afternoon. I do want to just say very briefly that this idea of globalization that many of us have embraced, I think today we've really highlighted some of the downsides, the sort of reductionist approach that globalization seems to always drive us to a value chain analysis, and now we're trying to figure out where we are on the value chain. And there's something about that that actually is not good for a society. And when we talk about inequality, as Richard Sinet does so eloquently, and I reflect on several references already today of the greatness and the wonder of New York's Central Park, I also have to reflect on the fact that what you could not see in any of the visuals was what has happened at the north end of Central Park, the Harlem end of Central Park that was populated for many, many years by poor African Americans who now are being displaced because Central Park has become such an important piece of real estate. And there are so many lessons for those of us who believe that public space has to be owned by all the citizenry of the experience of Central Park and while as a New Yorker I'm immensely proud of that park and what it represents, I'm also immensely troubled by the current circumstance. So we're going to talk about housing this afternoon and we all know that housing is really the platform for access and opportunity. And in Mumbai there's a lot to learn about housing both good and bad and we're very lucky to have a group of panelists who are going to share some, I think, important perspectives and learnings. The process is we will have a two part session. The first part is going to feature a series of presentations first by SS Shritriya who is the principal secretary of the housing department of the government of Maharashtra. We'll then hear about Dharavi which is a community I have been obsessed with since my days of working in Harlem and meeting the amazing Jhakan Apurtham who I had the pleasure of befriending a number of years ago and who has been a learning partner for me. And Jhakan and Sheila Patel have been two people I have relied on for intelligence and information and I'm so looking forward to this presentation. We'll also hear from Mukesh Mata who is the chairman of MM Project Consultants. And finally we'll have an opportunity to have some reflections by a distinguished panel of international urbanists. And at the top of that list of course is Enrique Pinalosa, the amazing former mayor of Bogota, Colombia. Jose Castillo who is a professor and I know you're in Mexico but we'd like to at the University of Pennsylvania also claim you to Jose. And finally Matias Enjanovi who is a researcher at the University of Tokyo. But before we begin our presentations I wanted to turn it over to my co-chair Nasa Manje from the Development Credit Bank for a few remarks. It's supposed to be here and it's a great pleasure to be here. The last thing I was expecting is to be chairing a session but here I am. Just a few remarks. I thought I'd just make a few remarks on the context of the city, the context of housing in the city and housing finance. I think these are the three major issues I think which we'll probably creep up in the discussions that we're going to have. When I was the president of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce a few years ago I had a small survey of CEOs and asked them a very simple question. Are you upsizing or downsizing in Bombay? And give me the reasons why you're doing what you're doing. About 80% of CEOs said they were downsizing in Bombay and the reason was, the first, top most reason was the cost of doing business. Two was the labor market, the difficulty of attracting people to the city from outside. So you had to rely on the local labor market. The problems of social infrastructure, getting into clubs, getting kids into schools and the physical infrastructure and the traffic and all the other associated problems. And we have seen since then, of course, the situation getting worse. And we have seen the rise of other cities, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, a whole range of cities that are really looking at the back offices of a lot of the companies that still headquartered in Bombay. So there is this context. The housing context really is being a major issue and we go back, Joakim, for how many years, 25, 30 years, in the 70s the whole debate was housing rights. I mean, just fighting for the people for the right to live in slums, I mean to live in informal settlements, because the bulldozers were very prevalent in those days. And that battle was won after a decade of, I think, a very vigorous debate as well as activism. Now, of course, the issue is how do we house them? I don't think anybody is talking about bulldozing the poor. I think that the improvements of infrastructure in Bombay are really creating this whole issue of project affected people. You know, you have to make room for infrastructure, you've got to widen roads, you have to build bridges, and obviously any infrastructure you put in is going to displace people. So in a sense, a lot of the discussion took place about five years ago on how we are going to re-house people in project affected areas. And I think that triggered a lot of thinking about how we can actually broaden that scope to beyond the project affected people. So you're seeing that emerge. To my mind, there are two or three very basic issues, and I think they will crop up in the discussion, is that the biggest issue for housing the poor is going to be the issue of land. The land supply curve in Bombay is extremely steep. It's very elastic. So a small change in shift in demand means a huge increase in prices and rather small response on quantity on the ground. And we are seeing that today. I mean, you're seeing at the high end, $1,000 a square foot is what our residential premise costs you, and those costs, of course, go down right through the market. But if you thought of conditions more favorable to having slums and informal settlements and a lack of improvement, you could not think of a more favorable circumstance that Bombay has today. In a sense, we need a revolution in terms of the context of which housing gets done. I think a lot of solutions are found within the constraints that we ourselves have set. So if you start opening up those boundaries, you can get much more done, much more quickly. We have an act which was mentioned, the Urban Land Sealing Act, which this state is the last to remove. Almost every state has removed the Urban Land Sealing Act. For some reason, Maharashtra will hang on to the ULCA. And I suspect it has a lot to do with Bombay. The second is the rent act. We have a very, very draconian rent act, which actually limits the rental housing that's available. You have a planning process which requires 65 permissions to even start moving, and it takes you two and a half years to get projects off the ground. That has been crashed a little, but it's still a very tortuous process. So all of this makes the supply curve extremely inelastic. So any change in demand will be price-driven rather than supply-driven on the ground. And finally, let me just come to housing finance. I was involved in a tradition on the board with me, but I've been involved with the Housing Finance Company, which we have set up for the last 30 years. And we've got the experience of now it's become a hugely successful conglomerate of financial institutions. But even 30 years down the road, if you look at the profile and portfolio of HDFC's customers, they are salaried, organized people. There are very few people who finance the self-employed. And the self-employed are the ones who live in informal settlements. It's not that they don't have money, it's not that they don't have cash flows. It's just that we don't have a system that would take those risks with those cash flows. I was with my bank reviewing some of the delinquency issues only yesterday, and we looked at the whole banking system, and we saw that at the end of the day, the delinquency ratios that the banks are finding of loans above 200,000 and with incomes, household incomes of less than 20,000 rupees a month is extremely high. So what you're going to have is a lot of institutions falling out of the space. And that's going to really affect the demand side for people to enter the housing market. So if they cannot get housing financed, they can't enter the market. And on the supply side, you have an extremely elastic supply curve, which is not creating the sort of housing that we need. So you have a double whammy here, which is going to affect housing for the poor. In a sense, Kirtisha, who did a lot of the fighting on housing rights about 20 years ago, I love the statement he made at an international conference. He says, you know, India has two major institutions for housing. HATCO and HDFC. HATCO is the Housing and Urban Development Corporation sits in Delhi, and HDFC was the housing finance institution that I was involved with. And he says, the trouble is that one understands nothing about housing, which is supposed to be HDFC, and one understands nothing about finance, which is HATCO. So you know, you have this dilemma that you have an institutional structure, but I guess I think what India, I'm going to stop in one second, India has an emerging first world financial sector, and you have third world problems, very much like South Africa. So I think that is going to be the issue, how do you bridge this gap? Thank you very much. I'm sorry if I've taken a little longer. Thank you, Nasser. So...