With power, water & prayer till the next landslide comesMumbai: The plastic roofs lashed in the wind and almost flew away as Mohammed Khan and his 14-year-son tried to tie it down to the pole perched on the hill-top. Five years ago, one portion of this hill at Saki Naka had collapsed and 73 people had died. A shocked Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, after visiting the site, had directed that the encroachments be removed and the families be rehabilitated. But today, not only have hundreds of new hutments come up on the hills, the new shacks even have all basic amenities like power and water. “They will collapse in a heavy downpour. Some of them just have have plastic sheets as roofs,’’ an official said. At Sonia Gandhi Nagar at Ghatkopar, the scene is similar. Here 78 people died in a landslide but new hutments have come up precariously on the hill top. “There has been talk that we will be rehabilitated. But no one has approached us,” says Raju Kiran, a hutment dweller. The Sakinaka-Ghatkopar hilly belt, which is very close the airport, has over 3,000 hutments in a precarious condition. “These hills used to be verdant green but today they have been chopped down; open drains and filth flow down the hill,” says Kurla resident Anil Galgali. Social activists who work in this area said the state has failed in providing affordable housing to the poor and that is why people are forced to stay on these hills. “In a city where land is scarce the poor are ready to stay wherever they can,” says Simpreet Singh of the National Alliance For People Movement. He said while it is important to shift these people from landslide-prone areas, the state should have a plan to rehabilitate them. “This is both an environmental and a sociological problem,’’ Singh said. Mumbai Slum Board officials said the shacks are controlled by local slumlords. “They do not have right over the land as it is the collector’s land. Yet they have made lakhs of rupees from rent over the years,’’ an official said. 
More slums have sprung up
at Ghatkopar (above) where 78 people died in a landslide in
2000; It’s a similar story at Saki Naka slums (top)
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