Step One: Retain and legitimise vote banks by ‘regularising’ all shanties. (More slums, more business)

Step Two: Oil the machinery. While builders do the dirty work of bullying, intimidating and even forcibly evicting slum dwellers, government officials pitch in by endorsing fudged lists of eligible candidates, and winking conveniently when the ‘beneficiaries’ are ‘rehabilitated’ without the stipulated seventy per cent consensus. (Incidentally, this is no cakewalk: hundreds of cases have been filed by irate slum dwellers against the ‘builder-politician-underworld nexus.’ And only this month, dalit groups rioted to protest the mysterious death of a Buddhist monk who had refused to budge.) But the official assistance obviously comes at a price: kickbacks to Slum Rehabilitation Authority officials from builders are rumoured to run into crores of rupees, (Didn’t we say it was business?)

Step Three: Remove every obstacle. Last year Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh — who is fortuitously in charge of three crucial departments — Housing, Law and Slum Rehabilitation — shot down a proposal by the Anti Corruption Bureau to appoint a special prosecutor for SRA violations. (“Who will foot the bill?” he demanded, irrefutably). And this week, he sacked SRA CEO T. Chandrashekhar, coincidentally after the latter suggested that the government — not the builders’ mafia — should provide low cost housing.

Step Four: Keep everyone happy. Disgruntled ‘beneficiaries’ have been offered a more viable alternative : ‘sell’ their free homes for Rs 5 lakh to 10 lakh to the obliging builder, who will, in turn, ‘resell’ them to middle-class buyers for twice the amount (minus legal papers or transfer rights, naturally). Meanwhile, the ‘rehabilitated’ can ‘relocate’ to another slum, on the city outskirts, with a handsome ‘compensation.’

... contd.