Mumbai: A sudden commotion broke out at the entrance gate of the Knowledge Centre school in Wadala in central Mumbai on August 10. Over 250 children and their parents found themselves locked out of the school. A few teachers and other school staff were also among those stranded. The only information about the sudden lock-out was scribbled on a small white paper and flimsily pasted at the gate. It read: “The gate to the school shall be kept shut, henceforth”, and it was signed by an “authority” from the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT).

After waiting for over an hour, some parents forced open the gate and made their way into the school, but it didn’t help much. Over two hours later, only when the Wadala police stepped in and pressurised the MbPT, a small passage was opened up for the students. Since then, the students and school staff have been using a narrow passage to enter the school. Parents expressed shock and concern over the MbPT officials’ move, but the school administration said they had seen this coming for a while.

Built over a 2.5 acre plot belonging to the MbPT, the Bhartiya Gramin Punarrachana Sanstha trust has been running the school and other professional courses on these premises since December 2003. MbPT officials say they had to lock up the gates owing to complaints from the residents around the school about trespassing and theft. “There have been complaints of theft in the MbPT colony adjacent to the school,” says MbPT chairman Sanjay Bhatia in a conversation with The Wire. The school administration claimed no such complaints were brought to their notice and the lock up was “arbitrary and inconsiderate towards hundreds of students studying here”.

The school had been given the plot on a 30-year lease, which ends in 2033, but the school management alleges that MbPT has been sending them feelers to move out for a while. “It started a couple of years ago, but the pressure has mounted recently. Not allowing us to take care of the upkeep of the space, looking for the smallest flaws in our work are a few ways that the MbPT has been trying to cancel our leases. And now the locking of the gate,” says J.K. Jadhav, the founder trustee of the school.

The concerns raised by the school management resonate among the roughly 2,500 lessees and their over tenants (and sub-let tenants), estimated to be between 2-2.5 lakhs, which include steel traders and warehouses owners, some of whom first moved in as long as 100 years ago. Hotels like the Taj Mahal, posh properties in south Mumbai, and small businesses are all tenants of the MbPT, said to be one of the biggest landowners in the city. Of its total land bank – 1,800 acres of land along the 28-km sinuous eastern coastline from Colaba to Wadala (some which is non-contiguous) on Mumbai’s eastern sea front – the MbPT now wants to convert a large chunk to other use; hence the urgency to get it back from old lessees.

The commercial establishments were all connected with the thriving port that fed Mumbai and the rest of the country ever since it came into existence. Once the biggest ports in the country, from the 1990s onwards it started losing its pre-eminence to the more modern Jawaharlal Nehru Port across the harbour, and business dwindled and ran into losses. The MbPT authorities then woke up to the realisation that they were sitting on land, a veritable gold mine in a city like Mumbai. The hitch was that the land was occupied by a multitude of tenants, many of whose leases had run out but were still in occupation. Large slum colonies had also sprung up on land lying vacant.

Allegations of arbitrary eviction

Over the past few years, the MbPT has made efforts to vacate those lessees whose leases have expired or those who have allegedly failed to pay their dues on time. Given the fact that most of them have occupied the spaces on leases ranging anything between one month to 100 years, the relationship between MbPT and its lessees is complex, to say the least. Several lessees have sublet the spaces to other tenants, making it difficult both for the MbPT and the occupants to follow the port trust’s rules. In some cases, the heirs of the original lessees are untraceable or leases have changed hands – it is a Gordian knot, complicated by the vast number of court cases filed by one side or the other.

MbPT claims legal processes were duly followed in every case of eviction and notices are issued after going through the records meticulously. The occupants tell another story. The case of the Gokulesh Premises Cooperative Society, which was sealed in March this year, is illustrative. The occupants, mostly running back offices for iron and steel business in the area, complain that they were not given time to even collect their belongings when they were evicted from the place they have been working in over several decades. “All our belongings were left behind when we were chucked out. Since it was a back-end office, the balance sheets and other financial papers were inside. We had to move the court and pray for a few days to be given to us to take our valuables out,” says one of the occupants. In all, 93 tenants were forcefully evicted from the building and now they have moved to nearby locations. Another occupant said that MbPT had not issued bills all these years and then suddenly bills worth a crore of rupees was sent with very little time to raise the required funds.

MbPT officials refute the allegations of arbitrary eviction. According to official sources The Wire spoke to, the MbPT took over possession in March this year after the residential society did not pay outstanding dues of Rs 1.02 crore. Notices were issued, but the residents failed to respond to the notices, MbPT claimed. Action has been taken under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1981.

Rajeev Khandelwal, one of the occupants of Gokulesh Society, says the eviction has left the community of merchants in the area uprooted. “It had caused huge distress to people and also impacted their ongoing businesses. We incurred losses worth several lakhs due to MbPT’s sudden decision to evict us from the property,” says Khandelwal. Ashok Kumar Garg, a member of the Darukhana Iron Steel and Scrap Merchants Association pointed to the hearing carried out by the MbPT itself on the complaints filed by the tenants. Garg says, “These procedures are arbitrary and are not carried out in the interest of the tenants. And worse, there is no appellate authority which we could approach against the orders issued by the MbPT officials hearing our grievances.”

Nitin Gadkari’s dream port city

Many tenants link the sudden enthusiasm for eviction to initiatives of the Narendra Modi government. In June 2014, the Union minister of shipping announced that the decrepit but valuable port land would be converted into a destination for high-end infrastructure that would include a marina, entertainment complexes, sea front promenades and a tower taller than Al-Burj. Soon after, Nitin Gadkari had formed a committee under the MbPT’s then chairperson Rani Jadhav to outline the future of the port lands and promised to release its report in three months. The report still hasn’t been made public officially, but is widely available on the internet. This report recommended, along with public housing, at least three marinas to dock luxury liners, a cruise terminal, several helipads, aquaria, water sports and floating restaurants. Whether the recommendations were accepted or rejected remains unclear. But when Bhatia took over, he worked out a new plan, more or less along the lines of Jadhav’s recommendations.

Things moved swiftly from there and the MbPT went into overdrive, appointing consultants to study various projects and also clear the land with every legal measure possible. The plans are grandiose – reports are not publicly available but indicate that the authorities want to completely revamp the area and make it into a glittering stretch, most of which will face the sea.

The MbPT is one the biggest landholders in the city and is sitting on 1800 acres of prime land. One estimate of its value can be found in a paper presented at the 2013 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, which pegged the value of even a third of the port trust land at a staggering Rs 1.25 lakh crore.

While speaking to The Wire, MbPT chairperson Sanjay Bhatia point blank refuted the connection between these evictions and Gadkari’s dream port city, but residents here allege a clear pattern has been emerging in the way evictions are carried out.

Thousands of our readers believe that free and independent news can be a public-funded endeavour. Support The Wire and join them.

Preeti Shenoy, one of the residents of Madhav Bhavan at Darukhana, an area full of ship-breaking yards, small offices and slums, and also an early recipient of an eviction notice, pointed out that not all structures around the area were issued notices. “If all of us have overstayed, why have all residents and business outlets not received the eviction notices?” she asks. The Shenoys, who have lived here for over 60 years, are at the forefront of petitioning against the MbPT and seeking proper rehabilitation for the occupants of these spaces. Soon after Madhav Bhavan tenants were served notices for eviction and clearance of past due in 2015, they moved the Bombay high court. The pending court case has kept the families here on a tenterhooks and most tenants are unsure if they should pay the dues or wait for the court to decide their fate, Shenoy says. “The state has a proper rehabilitation schemes for those residing in slums – they will be shifted and given other accommodation. But nothing is available for us, even though we and our families have lived here for decades, some even for nearly 100 years in the same place,” Preeti’s husband Shridhar points out.

The Shenoys and Garg were a part of a 21-member delegation which had met Union minister Nitin Gadkari in 2016 and again in 2017 against the eviction. This meeting, Shridhar says, was held at Nationalist Congress Party chairman Sharad Pawar’s bungalow in New Delhi. “We had met Pawar and he agreed to help us meet Gadkari. We had expressed our concerns and explained to him the wrong done to us. Gadkari even agreed to look into the matter. But nothing happened,” Shridhar told The Wire.

Fighting against eviction

The eviction notices continue to be sent out – a fresh set were issued from August 10 onwards to several commercial and a few residential buildings, such as prominent tenants like Hindustan Lever and Britannia, which once had their factories on the land. Bhatia says the eviction work is being carried out purely on the basis of the lease agreements that were signed and it is only yet another effort made by the MbPT to recover rents from over 2,500 establishments – commercial, industrial, residential and government – that use 275 hectares of port trust land. However, there is no clarity on whether if the rents were paid up, the MbPT would withdraw the notices. According to official sources, if market rates were applied, over Rs 500 crore should be received in the form of rent from these establishments, but MbPT managed to recover only Rs 200 crore.

“Most rents are paltry, yet they have not bothered to pay up. We have issued notices to the defaulters to pay the money along with additional interest and other taxes now. Most of them have dragged us to the court,” Bhatia claimed.

The residents also allege that the dues claimed by MbPT are unjustified. “We have been trying to make sense of the calculations done by the port trust. The dues are not standard and in some cases the fines are much higher than what others are paying,” Garg said, showing a stack of papers he has received from several tenants around him. Most tenants have moved the MbPT or the court against these dues.

As the MbPT started issuing eviction notices in early 2016, over 25 associations came together to form an action committee. They claim they are not against the development plans. “But it can’t happen at the cost of the shelter and livelihood of people residing here,” said Parvez Cooper, who used to run his office from Nazir building in Ballard Estate, until over 60 occupants of the building were evicted overnight in 2015. “Ours was the first building that was affected. We did not oppose MbPT’s plans of development, we only wanted that they ensure proper accommodation and a rehabilitation plan was worked out. Where do people go if they are not provided alternatives?” Cooper asked. Bhatia said for leases that are continuing, if the land is required in the course of new planning, rehabilitation schemes have already been already worked out

It is not just leased land but also access to vacant land that has been limited by the MbPT over the years. Over 23 hectares of port land, which is vacant and scattered all across the city, used to be easily accessible to residents of the area, mostly from slums. Siddhart Ugade, a land rights activist and a resident of Korba Mithaghar slum, recalls his childhood and the easy access that children his age and younger had to the open stretch in the MbPT area nearby. “Children would flock to these free spaces at night, sit under lamp posts and study here. That is no more allowed here and children from the slums scrounge for peaceful spaces to study,” said Ugade, who after acquiring a masters degree from the Tata Institute of Social Science began working with an international child rights organisation in the city.

At present, the process of building the “world’s largest park” is underway at Haji Bunder near Sewri in central Mumbai. This park, spread over 300 acres of land, is touted to be even bigger than the Hyde Park in London. The work has begun in some parts, albeit slowly; the pending cases are preventing the launch of full-scale operations. Bhatia said as long a they are following the law, they have nothing to worry about. And the residents, who are losing faith in any political help, are pinning their hopes on the court for appropriate rehabilitation and justice.