Berkley Center

From a ferry in the middle of Mumbai harbor, I couldn’t help but be enthralled by the paradox that is the Mumbai skyline. This global metropolis, home to 13 million people, from this angle looks like a mouth full of broken teeth. The stunted skyline illustrates the deep and corrosive corruption that exists throughout India, but which is on particular display in Mumbai. The wealth and holdings of politicians and the politically active are so unchecked that in a city where people live on 30 Rs. ($.50) a day, flats fetch New York prices. On the surface, there is little evidence of serious social effort working against this corruption, but one particularly powerful movement lies right in the city’s heart, under the nose and yet somehow out of reach of the very politicians they protest. Welcome to Dharavi.

Dharavi is most famous for being Asia’s largest slum, but in the time I spent there, I felt something much more important in its paradoxical existence. Dharavi is the natural outcome of the particular corruption that exists in Mumbai relating to property ownership and politics.

It all begins with the FSI, the Floor Space Index, the law that regulates how much floor space a building can have relative to the property size. Mumbai’s FSI is very low, meaning that buildings are prohibited by law from having high square footage relative to property. This means that buildings are relatively short, small, and occupy more land as compared to other major cities. Mumbai’s politicians work hard to keep the FSI low because they own a significant amount of property and real estate, both in the city and around the perimeter. That means as long as the FSI is low and buildings are small, rent in their city buildings stays extraordinarily high and the price of their property on the outskirts of the city goes up as people look to the suburbs for living and working space.

Just as the unchecked power and wealth of the politicians seems most insurmountable, there is Dharavi. This slum could prove to be the Achilles heel of the political elite of Mumbai. The wealth and power of politicians are interconnected; much of their wealth comes from their ability to manipulate policy to their advantage (i.e FSI), but their power is linked to elections. When 54 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in Dharavi, occupying only 6 percent of the land (though prime real estate in the city center), they are a force to be reckoned with.

We saw some of the schemes the government has attempted to implement in order to relocate people, and I was intrigued to hear that people who were offered free housing in a government building would rent out their tenement and move back to the slum. This makes a powerful statement, and one that needs to be made. People live in slums, often in terrible conditions but with the advantage of proximity to jobs and services, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. This is both because of the work they do and because formal housing is so outrageously expensive. Formal housing is outrageously expensive because politicians artificially keep buildings small so that prices stay high. Politicians and the business elite want to use the land where Dharavi currently stands, but they can’t evict the people without threatening their voting base and thus their political power.

In a culture that loves to flex its political muscles, I found the subtle protest of Dharavi’s very existence to be a very unique movement against the deeply engrained corruption that the people of Mumbai have little choice other than to accept. The lack of overt political action against this corruption, which initially made me uncomfortable, seemed almost natural when I understand that the very lives of people in Dharavi, how they live, work, and move around, is an implicit protest. It’s one of the few ways that 6.25 million people can say, without wealth or power, that they will not be tricked, that if politicians write the rules to benefit themselves instead of to spread equality, then they aren’t going to follow those rules.

Then where do we go from here? The root of the problem seems very obviously to be corruption, but how do you prevent politicians from pursuing private interests over the interests of the people they serve? If these questions had a simple answer, the skyline I saw from the harbor that day would look much different.