VISIT TO MAHUL – REPORT

Over the past seven years, the Brihanmumbai municipal corporation (BMC) has shifted over
30,000 of the city’s poorest citizens to Mahul from illegal settlements in Powai, Ghatkopar,
Chembur, Vakola, Andheri and Bandra (East). Most of the residents of these localities were
forced to move in the past year and a half, when the BMC demolished their homes in
accordance with a 2009 Bombay high court order mandating a 10m secure corridor along the
length of the water pipeline running through the city.

Our interaction with Mr. Bilal Khan, the convenor of housing rights movement Ghar Bachao
Ghar Banao Andolan, which has been working closely with the residents of Mahul for the past
year, before the visit helped us gain a deeper insight about the situation. The entire process of
eviction and rehabilitation took place without the consent or even the prior knowledge of the
residents of the slums. Without providing any notice the BMC brought bulldozers and in
minutes, uprooted the lives of countless poor.

Despite this they came to Mahul expecting their new lives in a modern apartment complex, to
be much better than the slums and settlements in which they were living. Instead, just like most
of Mumbai’s slum resettlement projects, they found themselves trapped in crumbling
buildings, miles away from their workplaces, with not a municipal school or government
hospital in sight.

To add to their problems, Mahul is home to oil refineries, chemical plants and other hazardous
industrial units that contribute to dangerously high levels of air and water pollution. Hundreds
of residents suffer from a wide range of health issues, and activists claim that over 100 people
have died since June 2017. Even for a city where slum rehabilitation buildings seem to be
“designed for death”—a study conducted by IIT, Bombay and NGO Doctors For You found
that poor access to sunlight and ventilation in MMRDA buildings were behind abnormally high
rates of tuberculosis mortality in three similar colonies in Govandi and Mankhurd—the
situation in Mahul is particularly dire.

The MMRDA colony in Mahul is a cluster of 72 seven-storey buildings packed so tight that
many of the flats never see direct sunlight. Sewage leaks from overhead drainage pipes and
fills the narrow alleyways between the buildings, often seeping into the underwater tanks that
supply drinking water. An acrid chemical stench surrounds the neighbourhood, and broad
plumes of white smoke from the BPCL and Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd (HPCL) refineries
dominate the skyline. The Trombay Thermal Power Station is just down the road, as is a
Rashtriya Chemical and Fertilizers plant.

The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board i.e. MPCB’s Comprehensive Environment Pollution
Index categorizes Mahul as “severely polluted”. A 2013 survey by the Environment Pollution
Research Center (EPRC) of King Edward Memorial hospital found that 67% of the residents
in Mahul complained of breathlessness more than three times a month, 86.6% suffered from
eye irritation and 84.5% reported a choking sensation due to bad air quality. National Green
Tribunal (NGT) stated Mahul was “unfit for human habitation”, and criticized planning
authorities for “a failure... to plan and maintain a minimum buffer area between the industrial
and residential areas”. The BMC has shifted thousands of the city’s most vulnerable to Mahul,
when the municipal body should have been fully aware of the potential health risks.