The Colaba slums' illegal and unrecognized status

The Colaba slums' illegal and unrecognized status is not simply a matter of where the settlement stood on a municipal map. The community grew from a legally planned workers’ compound beside the World Trade Centre construction site, then spread beyond its perimeter as housing, commerce, and social ties drew more people in. Authorities continued to distinguish the sanctioned settlement from the squatters’ expansion, but everyday life repeatedly made that distinction difficult to maintain. The result was a crowded, connected community whose existence was materially clear and socially established, yet remained politically precarious.

Origins in the construction project

The settlement began as housing for the tradespeople, artisans, and labourers building the two thirty-five-storey World Trade Centre towers on the shore of Colaba Back Bay. At the time, companies planning and constructing large buildings were required to provide land for workers’ housing. Many workers travelled from other states to follow available work; others who were native to Bombay had no home apart from the shelter their employment could provide. For some, accepting dangerous construction work was inseparable from the prospect of obtaining one of the huts.

The planned compound was laid out in more than three hundred hut-sized plots. As workers signed on, each received a plot and money to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Families and friends helped build the houses. Underground wells supplied water, and rough lanes were made across the site. A tall barbed-wire fence was erected around the compound to keep squatters out. In this first phase, the settlement’s legal status was tied to a specific purpose: housing the workforce needed to build the towers.

That arrangement also suited the companies. Workers living beside the site did not need to travel to work, and the relatives who lived with them could be hired as additional labour at short notice. The close-knit compound encouraged loyalty and made a large workforce easier to influence. Housing therefore functioned not only as a response to workers’ need for shelter but as part of the construction project’s labour system.

Expansion beyond the fence

The wages spent by the workers and the compound’s reliable supply of fresh water attracted people who had no place in the planned housing. Chai shops and grocery stores first appeared along the fence, followed by vegetable and tailor shops, small restaurants, gambling dens, and places selling alcohol or charras. Workers ducked through gaps in the wire to shop, while squatters used openings to enter the compound for water. As the fence line filled with businesses, the settlement spread out into the surrounding land toward the sea.

This growth had no comparable master plan. The workers’ compound had its assigned plots and more orderly lanes; the squatters’ settlement developed according to immediate need. Homeless people arrived in increasing numbers and marked out places for huts. Openings in the fence multiplied as people on both sides relied on one another for water, purchases, and contact. Eventually, the distinction between the planned and unplanned areas became harder to see amid the density of the combined settlement. There were eight squatters for every person in the workers’ compound, and the population exceeded twenty-five thousand.

The figures show how far the settlement had moved beyond its original scale. The broader slum occupied about ten acres and contained roughly seven thousand small huts, while the towers beside it represented a very different kind of urban development. The physical contrast was stark: the World Trade Centre offered shops, air-conditioning, display lighting, and fountains; the slum had no electricity, running water, or toilets. Its inhabitants also faced the possibility that authorities might clear the settlement. The boundary between legal and illegal housing was therefore more than a line around plots: it marked unequal access to infrastructure and unequal security of residence.

Official boundaries and lived community

The Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal part of the settlement, while construction-company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters. Yet residents did not organize their lives according to the official separation. Workers whose permitted household was limited to their immediate family invited relatives to settle beyond the fence. Children on both sides became friends, and marriages, whether by choice or arrangement, joined residents across the boundary. Celebrations were attended by people from both areas.

Shared vulnerability made cooperation practical as well as social. Fires, floods, and epidemics did not stop at the fence, so an emergency in one part of the settlement called for help from elsewhere. The company boundary might divide housing into recognized and condemned areas, but it could not isolate families, friendships, work, or risk. The legal compound and the squatters’ settlement became parts of one community in residents’ understanding, even while official descriptions continued to separate them.

Recognition, services, and uncertainty

The struggle for a primary school made the consequences of non-recognition especially plain. The settlement had about eight hundred school-age children, while schools in the surrounding area were full. Residents organized teachers and found a suitable place, but the authorities resisted. A school would imply that the slum had a recognized standing, although in official terms it was illegal and did not exist. The eventual compromise allowed a temporary school nearby, with another expected to follow; both would have to be dismantled when construction ended.

That compromise offered a service without settling the question of whether the community itself would be accepted. The future of the settlement remained uncertain because its continued presence was linked to work on the towers. At the time the school was discussed, construction had already lasted five years and might continue for about three more, perhaps longer. Once it finished, the slum was, at least in theory, to be cleared. The end of the construction project thus threatened not only workers’ housing but also the homes and institutions that had grown around it.

Daily life beside the towers

The towers and the settlement were bound together by more than proximity. The workers’ housing had been created to support construction, and the expanding community supplied shops, labour, and relationships that crossed the fence. On the site, women carried dishes of gravel and other materials through the work areas, including the unfinished upper floors. Their labour was part of the building process, while the nearby settlement remained deprived of basic services and unsure of its future. The contrast between the monumental buildings and the fragile huts did not represent two unrelated worlds; the project had helped produce the conditions in which both stood side by side.

Residents also built practical forms of care within the settlement. Lin treated children’s minor injuries and rat bites, and workers who feared being stood down for small construction-site injuries sometimes went to his free clinic rather than to the company’s first-aid officer. This service followed the community’s everyday needs across the formal division between employer and resident. The existence of such informal support did not remove the settlement’s insecure status, but it shows how residents responded to needs that official recognition and company provision did not adequately meet.

The slum’s history therefore makes legality and belonging diverge. Its original compound was deliberately planned, fenced, and connected to a major construction project; its outward growth was not authorized, but it followed the same necessities of work, water, shelter, and social life. By the time authorities debated whether children could attend a school, thousands of people already lived in a community whose networks had outgrown the official categories used to describe it. Its precarious status lay in that contradiction: the city could deny the settlement’s legitimacy, but the lives organized within and across its boundaries made its existence impossible to ignore.