Mumbai Development Plan-2034: Is It The Right Vision For Maximum City?

Mumbai’s Development Plan-2034 or DP-2034, was passed by the General Body of Brihanamumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), also known as Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), in August 2017, almost three years past its 2014 deadline. The ‘what is in’ and ‘what is out’ will be known only after the state government approves the proposed plan, which will take another six months.

DP-2034, however, is contested by experts for its prognosis and the proposals it has sought to deliver, to make the ‘maximum city’ livable. As this article reviews the process by which the plan was drawn up and few of its key proposals, the efforts at rationalising Mumbai’s complexities and undermining various layers through which it operates become clear.

First Draft – Belated, With Errors And Mistakes

The first draft of the Development Plan-2034, which was published in February 2015, failed the scrutiny, both for accuracy as well as its proposals. The draft plan invited a flood of complaints for factual errors in mapping key land uses; notably heritage structures and eco-sensitive areas. Apart from that, the mapping of indigenous communities such as Adivasi padas and Goathans was also absent in the draft plan.

Although most of the discrepancies were addressed in the revised drafts, the deliberations to shape DP-2034 shifted towards the accuracy of its content, with the purpose of drawing up a comprehensive growth direction for the city lost in the larger pandemonium.

Contested Proposals – Higher FSI, No Development Zone, Salt Pans and Aarey Milk Colony

Some of the issues which soon become emblematic for DP-2034 include ‘provisions for higher floor space index (FSI)’ to accommodate housing shortage and opening up the prescribed ‘No Development Zones (NDZ) in the previous plans, such as ‘Aarey Milk Colony’, which acts as a green lung of the city. The anomalies of the plan such as land use mapping errors along with sticky issues like provisions for higher FSI, proposed amenities in NDZ could have seriously impaired the image of the year-old Devendra Fadnavis government. This led to the scrapping of the draft in April 2015 and the government instructed to prepare a new development plan.

The Revised Development Plan (or RDP-2034) was put in public domain in May 2016, almost a year after the original one was scrapped. However, it contained startling provisions for encroachment upon NDZ, Salt Panes and Port Trust lands. Apart from this, there was a proposal to increase FSI in order to incentivise new household construction.

Development Proposals Lack Ingenuity

Proposals for higher FSI looked at affordability through the narrow prism of only supply, thus aggravating the situation. Suggesting an increase in FSI, in the belief that more FSI means more ‘buildability’ and high rise growth, in turn leading to affordability, is totally misplaced.

Apart from factors such as location parameters and the kind of supporting infrastructure that should guide the generation of new housing stock, evidence across cities, explicitly bats for dense, compact and low to mid-rise development.

The construction and services cost of going vertical add to the cost of dwelling unit and impairs the affordability of the unit severely. What presumably results are tiny floor plates offering minimum dwelling size, which are most likely to be abandoned or sub-let by its inhabitants, and risk turning to brownfields. Besides, the liveability is impaired in affordable housing units by going vertical. This has been well documented and reported in case of Mumbai’s ‘Slum Rehabilitation Authority’s (SRA)’ vertical high rises built for slum dwellers, now deemed unliveable. In a starved (high demand) and so called free markets, high FSIs will only abet speculation, and the key beneficiaries would be the builders and developers. In the absence of any safeguards to prevent the housing stock felling prey to insatiable appetite for global/domestic investment housing funds and greedy speculators, the affordability will remain a pipe dream and mere talk.

In the success of affordable housing in Singapore or Hong Kong, which are more like city states, the contributing factors include; dovetailing housing policy with economic policy (jobs and housing stock), state as prime generator of affordable housing and predictability in assessing the housing demand because of their small country size.

As wider roads offer no solution to traffic growth, high FSIs will be the least contributor for securing affordable housing.

NDZ and Salt Pans

The green cover for Mumbai has already diminished, and therefore the proposal to encroach upon the leftover greens and salt pans is disputable. It disturbs the complex eco-system of land-sea interface. In fact, the salt pans are of immense ‘ornithological importance’; rich in nutrients. During the summer seasons, these are resting place for migratory birds. True to the fact, Mumbai salt pans have recorded the arrival of migratory birds often. Also, most of the salt pans fall in wetlands category and are protected by Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules.

Maximum City But Minimum Understanding

Mumbai works in small clusters of SME’s (small and medium enterprises – textile, leather, plastics etc) with nondescript infrastructure or any formal capital support. The informal clusters operate outside the structured institutionalised set-ups. Enterprises largely work through networked “Fordian” communities, each community adding value to the finished product successively, along the supply chain. Communities through generations specialise in skills ranging from embroidery, dyeing, metal works to finishing. Development plan-2034 hardly has any proposals for strengthening such networks.

The “Shanghaisation” of Mumbai, as noted urbanist Rahul Mehrotra quips, through million plus affordable units principally though the instrument of FSI, reflects a lack of understanding of the link between Mumbai’s spatial structure, social networks and competitiveness.

Affordable housing is the principal infrastructure that the city lacks and accommodating it in the revised DP-2034 serves as panacea to the city’s ills. Worthwhile to mention here is work of Rohini Pande, professor at Harvard Kennedy School. In her seminal piece “For a house to become a home”, the empirical study has suggested that the poor often spurn government housing programmes, because they do not want to risk losing their social networks.

To conclude, Development Plan-2034 was unable to create any long term perspective, which can then be broken into smaller action points. An opportunity to ‘reset’ and ‘readjust’ Mumbai’s urban future and possibly social order was lost in rationalisation of its complexities.