Mukesh
Ambani To Build $1 Billion “Home” Amidst Mumbai’s
Multimillion Slum-Dwellers
By Parwini Zora
06 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
richest man in India, Mukesh Ambani, is reportedly building a 27-storey
skyscraper mansion in the heart of the country’s commercial capital,
Mumbai (Bombay). The total cost of the project is expected to be US$1
billion, roughly the average annual income of 1.5 million Indians.
Ambani is erecting his lavish
“home” in a city that has 7 million slum dwellers. Several
million more of Mumbai’s 12 million-plus residents live in substandard
housing. Such is the price of real estate in Mumbai that even well-paid
middle-class professionals cannot afford a decent dwelling. In what
is clearly an unintended irony, Ambani has named his mansion “Antilia,”
after a mythical island.
Due to a sustained real estate
bubble in Mumbai, Ambani’s unbuilt house and the 4,532-square-metre
plot on which it is being erected are already estimated to be worth
more than US$1.2 billion.
Mukesh Ambani and his brother
Anil are the inheritors of their late father’s Reliance Group,
India’s largest private company. Mukesh Ambani’s portion
of Reliance Group includes the huge petrochemical division and textile-manufacturing
plants. According to the Forbes’ 2007 list of the world’s
richest people, the 50-year-old Mukesh Ambani is the 14th-richest person
in the world, with a net worth of US$20.1 billion.
Ambani’s architect
has said the first six floors of the skyscraper mansion will be reserved
for parking. Immediately above will be lodgings for 600 servants and
their families. Eight floors have been reserved for “entertainment,”
including a mini-theatre and a number of swimming pools, and several
more floors will house a health club and rooms for guests.
Mukesh Ambani, his wife,
three children, and mother will occupy the top four, non-service, floors,
giving them a panoramic view of both Mumbai’s Arabian Sea coastline
and the city’s skyline as well as easy access to three helipads
on the skyscraper’s roof.
Ambani and various aides
and sycophants are reported to consider the proposed mansion as “comparable
to those owned by his friends such as Lakshmi Mittal,” the UK-based
Indian steel tycoon who last year bought the most expensive house in
London for 60 million pounds.
Speaking to (India) timesonline,
a Mumbai-based architect commented, “Our wealthiest citizens used
to hide their money...they would not drive their Mercedes, they lived
in small apartments. Even Mr. Ambani’s father lived in a small
block of flats. They were afraid of the taxman. But that attitude has
gone; Mukesh has made his money and good for him if he wants to flaunt
it.”
While India’s rich
now shamelessly flaunt their wealth, fully three quarters of India’s
population of 1.1 billion live in abysmal poverty, with tens of millions
regularly receiving insufficient nourishment.
According to official government
estimates, the number of people living in substandard, slumlike dwellings
has more than doubled in the past two decades, rising from 27.9 million
in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001.
The social misery and economic
insecurity of the vast majority of urban and rural Indians have become
especially acute since 1991, when the Indian elite abandoned a national
economic-development strategy in favor of fully integrating India into
the world capitalist economy and making India a cheap-labour producer
for the world market. Even while the country’s economy has grown
dramatically, many hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor have
become further impoverished.
The agricultural sector,
which provides more than 60 percent of all Indians with their livelihood,
has been devastated by the diversion of funds from agriculture to the
infrastructure projects favoured by Indian and international capital,
the reduction in agricultural price supports, and other pro-investor
policies.
The state of Maharashtra,
whose capital is Mumbai, has witnessed the emergence of a new, abhorrent
social phenomenon—suicides of indebted farmers. This year alone,
416 debt-ridden, cotton-growing farmers in the state’s Vidarbha
region have taken their own lives.
Meanwhile, millions of small-scale
peasants and landless agricultural labourers have been forced to migrate
to cities in search of work, greatly expanding the slums in the cities.
“The rise in slums
is due to the lack of affordable housing provided by the government,”
said Maju Varghese, a representative of the Yuva Urban, a non-governmental
organisation (NGO) that works with Mumbai’s urban poor. “The
Government has withdrawn from the whole area of housing and land prices
have gone to such heights that people can’t afford proper housing.
Slums are here to stay. The government has completely ignored this problem.”
Mumbai, which has India’s
largest slum population, also has the dubious honour of containing Asia’s
largest single slum, Dharavi.
The slum, which is home to
more than a million people, is considered by Mumbai’s political
and economic elite to be a blight on the city. A blight it wants to
eliminate by a “slum clearance” campaign that will render—as
such campaigns have repeatedly done in cities across India—the
slum-dwellers homeless.
Recently, the government
put the 223-hectare slum up for sale to international property developers,
with advertisements splashed in newspapers all over the world, including
the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. The advertisements
proclaim the sale as “the opportunity of the millennium,”
offering a “perennial source of income” to the successful
bidders.
As part of the state and
municipal governments’ plan to convert Mumbai into a “world-class
city,” Dharavi’s slum dwellings are to be replaced by seven-storey
apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, gardens, jogging tracks and even
a golf-driving range for an estimated cost of about US$2.3 billion.
Arputham Jockin, the president
of the National Slum Dwellers Federation, recently told the press, “selling
this land to the global market and giving it over for commercial use—how
will that improve our lives? Ninety per cent of the people here want
a stake in their future and a say in how it is transformed. It has to
work from the bottom up. Not top down.” He warned that a ruthless
land-acquisition plan on the part of the state government could well
result in a “bloodbath.”
Opponents of the slum’s
demolition have already hung black flags over their homes. Most of those
who will be “relocated” are not only threatened with homelessness
but also with the loss of their livelihood. According to unofficial
estimates, Dharavi accounts for US$1 billion in annual economic activity
driven by various cottage industries such as potteries, tanneries, bakeries,
metal workshops and, prominently, garbage recycling.
So scarce and expensive is
housing in Mumbai that even a small 8x10-foot hut in Dharavi is valued
at between Rs. 150,000 and 300,000 (US$3,600 and US$7,200). As a result,
an estimated 42 percent of the Mumbai’s slum dwellers are forced
to live on less than 10 square metres (about 108 square feet) of land
with every 800 or so people forced to share a single toilet.
Sixty-year-old Razman, living
in Dharvi for the last 10 years, showed his “house” to BBC
reporters by stretching its walls with his outstretched hands. This
small dwelling is home to five members of his family including two small
children. Said Razman, “We want change and for conditions to improve
for the people who live here. There is nowhere for my grandchildren
to play, but I cannot afford to move from here.”
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