Housing insecurity among Mumbai slum residents

Housing insecurity among Mumbai slum residents is presented through life in the Cuffe Parade Slum, where shelter was both essential and precarious: homes grew around a construction project, yet authorities could repeatedly destroy them, and residents had little protection from inadequate services or disease. The threat was not only the loss of a hut, but the continual uncertainty of whether a home and the community around it would be allowed to remain.

Origins and Unequal Ground

The settlement stood beside the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site, where the contrast between commercial development and slum life was stark. The slum covered about ten acres and held seven thousand small huts and roughly twenty-five thousand people. While the neighboring trade complex had shops and elaborate displays, the slum had no electricity, running water, or toilets, and residents could not be sure that the authorities would not clear it. Its position beside a prestigious building project made visible how sharply the city’s resources and security were divided.

The first huts were built for construction workers. In those years, companies undertaking large projects were required to provide adjacent land for worker housing. Workers were assigned plots and money for bamboo poles, reed matting, rope, and scrap timber, and built houses with help from family and friends. The arrangement offered workers shelter near their jobs, including people who had migrated from other states or otherwise had no home of their own. For employers, the nearby community also supplied a workforce that was easier to organize and whose family members could be hired as needed. Housing thus served both as a practical necessity for workers and as part of the labor system supporting construction.

The planned worker settlement had more than three hundred plots, water from underground wells, and rudimentary lanes, with a barbed-wire fence around its edge. But the fence could not contain the need for shelter. Shops appeared along its outside, followed by other businesses and growing numbers of squatters, who extended the settlement into nearby land. Over time there were eight squatters for every resident in the workers’ compound, and the boundary between the legal and illegal portions became difficult to distinguish. The Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal settlement, but residents’ lives crossed the boundary: they formed friendships and families, attended one another’s celebrations, and cooperated when fires, floods, or epidemics threatened both sides.

Precarious Services and Everyday Exposure

The physical conditions that made housing insecure also made daily life hazardous. A broad open area near the slum served as a latrine for women, children, and older residents; after months without rain it was dusty and bare. At night, people used the track into the settlement as a latrine because they feared rats or snakes in the open field, although residents informally maintained a narrow clean path for others to follow. These details show how sanitation and safety depended less on reliable public facilities than on residents’ navigation of shared, inadequate spaces.

Medical care offered another measure of how poverty narrowed residents’ options. Lin, working at a small free clinic, described seeing about fifty people a day and referring cases he could not identify to St. George Hospital. Many returned without seeing a doctor or nurse. The hospital was overwhelmed, handling six hundred patients on a typical day and sometimes as many as a thousand, while residents could not afford the licensed doctor whose referral might help them move ahead in the queue. The clinic could offer help, but it could not compensate for a housing environment with poor services or remove the financial barriers to formal treatment.

During the monsoon, cholera exposed the consequences of those conditions. The outbreak escalated from ten serious cases by nightfall to sixty advanced cases by the following dawn, with as many as a hundred people showing symptoms by noon; Radha, a neighbor, was the first to die. A health official reported other outbreaks across the region, overcrowded hospitals, and the hope of limiting the spread to fifteen or twenty infection sites. The disease was not simply an individual misfortune in this account: contaminated water and accumulated rainwater put the settlement’s many households at risk, while the public system was already stretched.

Demolition and Rebuilding

The threat of eviction took visible form in periodic demolition operations. Police trucks arrived at an open area near the main street, and police officers formed two lines while council workers used ropes and grappling hooks to pull down huts. Residents had time to gather only essentials such as babies, money, and papers. Household goods—including stoves, cooking pots, bedding, clothes, and children’s toys—were swept into the wreckage. Some people were stopped by police, and several young men were taken away in the waiting trucks.

In one operation, about sixty houses were destroyed across a strip one hundred metres long and ten metres wide, displacing at least two hundred people. The demolition took less than twenty minutes. Although the homes in the legal workers’ settlement were not targeted that day, workers stopped construction in sympathy: they understood that once the building was finished, their own homes could also be lost, and that the cleared land was expected to become a car park for limousines. Their response connected the immediate destruction of squatters’ homes to the larger uncertainty facing the entire settlement.

The destruction did not end the need for shelter. Lin explains that huts would largely be rebuilt by the following day, only to be knocked down again later, sometimes in another part of the slum. Rebuilding required residents to replace bamboo and mats, while those arrested might not return for months. The ability to reconstruct did not make the losses minor; it made insecurity repetitive, charging residents for the same necessities again and again. After the operation, people began sorting through the rubble, while temporary shelters were erected for older people, babies, and young children.

Mutual Support and the Meaning of Home

The community’s shared response to cholera shows how residents tried to make a fragile settlement more livable when formal assistance was limited. Qasim Ali Hussein turned his home into a command centre, where residents planned water purification, disinfectant trenches, safe waste disposal, soap distribution, and communal kitchens for boiled food. He provided money for Johnny Cigar to buy purification tablets and medicines, while Lin supervised oral rehydration treatment. The plans reached from shared water tanks to the pots and buckets in each of the seven thousand huts, making the household scale of the crisis clear.

This cooperation did not erase the structural causes of insecurity or guarantee protection from demolition, disease, or arrest. It did, however, reveal a form of security residents could create together: practical networks of care across a settlement whose official boundaries failed to reflect its intertwined lives. The huts might be pulled down and rebuilt, but the community’s shared work persisted. In the account, housing insecurity is therefore both a material condition and a political one: people depend on shelter that authorities may destroy, while their survival rests on relationships and collective effort that the same boundaries cannot neatly contain.