MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court (HC) on Tuesday held that slum dwellers cannot be denied basic sanitation facilities and directed the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to provide and maintain toilets in all the slums of Mumbai. A division bench of justices G S Kulkarni and Aarti Sathe observed in their order, “The municipal commissioner and officers below him cannot neglect and/ or breach such basic rights of citizens, who are living in unhygienic conditions, that too in the slums that proliferated on municipal and government lands.”
The court directed the BMC commissioner to not only provide toilet blocks but also maintain them daily, stating that the task should be undertaken by the concerned assistant municipal commissioner “who should keep vigil and maintain a record of the hygiene as also of the appropriate state of repairs of the toilet blocks situated in the slum areas in Mumbai”. A breach of the basic obligation of municipal duty, the court said, would violate the constitutional rights to equality and life.
It also observed that there were no rules by the state or civic body that put the onus of building community toilets on encroached public land on slum dwellers. “If there is no such policy, in our opinion, it becomes a matter of serious concern on the part of the state government and the municipal authorities, when encroachments are permitted on public land, without a corresponding obligation on the encroachers to create toilet blocks along with such encroachments,” said the court.
The court was hearing a petition by Chetan Samajik Pratishthan (CSP), a Chembur-based NGO, that had moved court over a dilapidated community toilet with 60 seats used by 4,270 residents of a slum in Govandi spread over 183,000 square meters of municipal land. The toilet was built by using MP funds.
CSP’s lawyers Pradeep Thorat and Ashish Gatagat contended that the toilets provided for the slum dwellers were in a dismal condition and no repairs had been undertaken by the BMC. The court also said that 60 toilets for over 4,000 slum dwellers was “totally insufficient”. It asked the BMC to identify open spaces in the slum and construct more toilets.
The judges said that the corporation neglects its own land when it allows the formation of a slum which itself was a serious matter “as such land is gone forever, from the pool of public lands”. The court further said, “It can never be conceived that municipal officers do not safeguard the municipal land, and permit encroachment leading to the formation of a slum.”
The judges, however, also said that the policy of the state government (Slum Rehabilitation Act) entitles ‘encroachers on public land’ – subject to the applicable cut off dates – to free permanent alternative accommodation or subsidised tenements “rewarding such encroachments”. As a consequence of the in-situ rehabilitation, the land is permanently lost to the public, the court said. Under the slum rehabilitation scheme, the land is commercially exploited for profit by developers.
“All this occurs at the cost of the public exchequer and results in monumental and irreversible loss of public land, which otherwise could have been utilised for larger public purposes or benefits such as gardens, playgrounds, public amenities, government buildings etc. This is true in respect of large tracts of public lands…within the city of Mumbai,” the court said. It added there was no clarity on any measures adopted to prevent such encroachments, or if a separate record of lands lost from the pool of public lands was maintained by the state government or the municipal corporation.