Mumbai's land is being auctioned, and its workers were never invited to bid

In Mumbai, the word 'encroachment' almost always lands on the poor. It is the slum dweller who encroaches, the hawker who encroaches, the family on the pavement that must be cleared. This week, The Hindu's editorial page turned the word around: converting public land for private luxury residences, it argued, 'prioritises the luxury of a few over the lives of millions.' The real encroachers, it suggested, wear suits and sign development agreements. Consider Kandivali West. The state leased 27 acres and 34 gunthas there to the Cloth Market and Shops Board for 90 years — for a single stated purpose: housing for Mathadi workers, the head-loaders who carry this city's commerce on their backs. A cooperative housing society built homes on 20 acres. Then, according to the suburban collector's order reported by Loksatta, the society entered into a development rights agreement with a developer covering an additional 6.75 acres — without the state government's permission. Mumbai Suburban Collector Saurabh Katiyar has now ordered that parcel resumed by the government. Note the mechanics of the thing. Nobody stole this land in the night. It moved in daylight, on paper, through agreements signed and permissions not sought. This is how Mumbai's land changes hands now: not by force but by paperwork — public purpose quietly renegotiated into private profit while the intended beneficiaries watch from the pavement. And who were the intended beneficiaries? The Mathadi worker is among the most precarious labourers in the city — and among the most organised, with a welfare board won through decades of struggle. Land reserved for their housing becoming someone else's balance-sheet asset is not an administrative lapse. It is a verdict on whose welfare this city actually protects. Periyar asked the simplest of questions: whom does the land serve? Land is not first a commodity; it is the common ground of the people who work it. A city that treats workers' housing land as a development opportunity has answered the question. It serves capital. The collector's order is welcome. But it is a reversal, not a reform. The 6.75 acres return to the state — yet the pressure that produced the deal has not gone anywhere. Every square foot of this island city is worth a fortune, and the poor hold their share of it only on paper, only until someone with better lawyers comes along. Mumbai's skyline is a ledger. Every tower that rises on land meant for workers is an entry in it — a record of whom the city was built for, and who was merely allowed to build it. The encroachment this city should fear is not the hut on the pavement. It is the signature on the development agreement.